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century, it was presumed that people sought to understand their world and would eventually achieve an accurate and internally consistent picture of its complexities. Rationalists thought that people dealt with reality in an analytical, reasonable manner, with emotions under the direction of cognitive factors. Although there are very few sworn Rationalists left, many students of human behavior are still encumbered by the flattering assumption that people are reasonable and wise—as in Homo "sapiens", meaning wise.
In fact, confusion as to the relationship of wisdom to knowledge impeded our understanding of ourselves for years. Two hundred years ago, Rationalists believed that as we learned more about our world we would become wiser. That belief is no longer tenable. Knowledge accumulates; wisdom does not. For all our vaunted skills in communication, we still learn pretty much as do rats, with little wisdom passed on from one generation to the next and even less developed through education. Worse yet, each generation finds a new way to mess itself up because we do not behave even like knowledgeable rats. As knowledge accumulates, so do misconceptions, superstitions and idiotic ideas and beliefs of all sorts. These do as much to shape our behavior as do immediate circumstances, since it is through our cognitive world that the stimuli we perceive are interpreted. The Rationalists could not comprehend the nature of stupidity, intelligence or humanity because they viewed the universe as an expression of ideals in logical conflict with their opposites—good vs. evil, God vs. the Devil, etc. They did not perceive healthy behavior as a balance or blending of social needs with environmental conditions and group goals. Nor could they appreciate how wasteful it was to divine philosophical systems which were internally consistent but functionally useless because they existed only in splendid isolation. In fact, it was exactly such effete thinking that characterized the unenlightened Germanic revival of the ancient Greek tradition of impractical philosophy in the eighteenth century. In that age, France ruled the land, England ruled the seas, and Germany ruled the air. The Teutonic schemas were beautiful in their logical consistency, but they did not relate to anything real, and although Kant never quite got around to saying so, there are only two valid criticisms of pure reason—one is that it is pure; the other is that it is reasonable. Unfortunately, the scientists in their structured roles and carefully controlled labs have been unable to do any more than the Rationalists to render analysis of the nebulous concepts of human nature and intelligence "Realistic", functionally valuable and intellectually valid. As psychologists have been unable to formulate an operational definition of intelligence, they have had to settle for trying to solve the problem of
 stupidity.net 
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