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[mycrazyhair]

...brightness is nothing; it is in the heart that the values lie. I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches, and riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

- Mark Twain, "Eve's Diary"

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[crunchywitch]

I alternate between thinking this is beautiful, and disagreeing with it, and wondering whether Twain was maintaining the gender constructs deliberately, in his representation of the woman as the one who didn't value intellect, and wishing there was some way of having it all three ways at once.

[mycrazyhair]

Well, the whole story is quite sexist. The part that I like about this quote is the idea that kindness is something you strive for and achieve, while intellect is something you inherit, so there's more merit in being kind than being smart.

The quote, by the way, comes up in the context of Eve thinking herself smarter than Adam, and thinking he's upset by that. She's trying to console him. However, I'm not sure whether Twain meant either of those two perceptions to be objectively true, particularly when you read the story in the context of the excerpts from Adam's diary, published separately.

[crunchywitch]

Sounds like two fascinating texts! It seeems to me, though, that we can learn both kindness and intelligence, really, and strive to be better at both - that both may be at leaat partially a product of environment.

But I think I'm responding more to my perception of anti-intellectualism in the world today than I am to Twain. You've added new titles to my "when-I-have-time-to-read-for-fun" list.

[mycrazyhair]

Hmm. I wonder if you and I are using different definitions of intelligence. I always thought of intelligence as your innate capacity to learn and reason.

How does a person learn to be more intelligent? You can learn knowledge, certainly. You can learn certain logic tricks that make it easier to deduce some things. The things your parents do for and to you in your early years may affect how your genes express themselves in terms of your brightness. But aside from that, I've always assumed that intelligence is something you're pretty much born and stuck with.

[crunchywitch]

We might be - and I did, too. But I heard a piece on CBC radio a year or so ago about intellect (mostly about how we measure it, but also how we think about it), and one of the throwaway lines by a researcher was that our criteria for intelligence has changed so much in the past century - and how we teach things such as critical skills has changed so much as well - that some people whose IQ tests once defined them as brilliant would now be considered marginally intelligent. And Malcolm Gladwell talks in Outliers about talent as something that is much less innate than we used to think. And then CBC talked about this book, which is linked to this blog by David Shenk. And I wonder why "kind" is assumed to be not innate, but "smart" is. Is there reason to think that kindness is definitely not expressed in our genes, or that there might not be evolutionary purpose for it?
Oh, I haven't had nearly enough caffeine to explain this usefully. I'm not sure I disagree with you: just not sure I agree, either - I wonder if there's a benefit