{"id":3008,"date":"2012-09-30T20:11:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T01:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3008"},"modified":"2012-09-30T20:11:53","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T01:11:53","slug":"zen-and-the-flynn-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=3008","title":{"rendered":"Zen and the Flynn Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just found out about the Flynn Effect<\/a>. The Flynn Effect is all about “psychometrics”, i.e. the measurement of human intelligence. About 28 years ago, a New Zealand sociology researcher who specializes in intelligence issues (whose last name is Flynn, not surprisingly) noticed that IQ scores have been rising steadily since at least the late 1940s, possibly since 1932. This effect has been taking place for both the highest and lowest scoring groups, as well as the middle. In effect, every new generation seems to be smarter than the one preceding it. That effect goes on today. I got out of college in 1975, so the class of 2012 has me and my peers beat by quite a bit — around 12 points (the effect is about 1\/3 IQ point per year). <\/p>\n

According to a recent Scientific American<\/a> article (which brought me up to speed on this issue), the Flynn effect has been driven by one specific component of the IQ tests. It is not the component for arithmetic skills, nor the component for vocabulary skills; these scores have only gone up a bit over the past 60-odd years. The big jump is in “similarities”, the measurements of “fluid intelligence”. These are the tricky questions that attempt to gage a person’s “abstract intelligence”, the ability to see patterns (according to someone’s judgment about what patterns are important to see). I.e., which of the following animals is least like the others: orangutan, anteater, skunk and zebra; or BOOM is to 4267 as ZOOK is to (choose one): 3902, 54892, 3319 . . . or Mary is 16 years older than her brother, and is four times her sister’s age; if her sister was born two years before her brother, then . . . (these are not real IQ questions, of course).<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the Sci Am article points out that Dr. Flynn and others feel that the Flynn Effect reflects changes in what society expects from us, both in the workplace and at home. I.e., our world is steadily becoming more and more high-tech. Once upon a time, many people subsisted by growing crops or hunting animals. Then came the industrial revolution, and you had to know how to work with increasingly complicated machines. Then came electrically powered things, including the telegraph and then the telephone — forerunners of the information revolution! In the past 25 years, information technology has blossomed and you now have to know how to use and manipulate information and the many devices that provide it and thrive on it, in order to have a decent life. As such, there is an increasing need by our society for the skills and abilities behind what the “abstract intelligence” questions test for. As the Sci Am article states, “the Flynn effect shows how modern our minds have become”. <\/p>\n

So, we now think a bit differently than our great grandparents thought — because of “the system”, i.e. the way that the world is. We live in a high-tech world, they lived closer to the earth. They thought in ways that their world required, we think in ways that our world requires. So, we may not be all that much more intelligent than they were, not nearly as much as the nominal IQ scores would indicate (although better education systems, nutrition and health probably have brought average raw-intelligence levels up slightly over time). <\/p>\n

I can’t help but wonder how this squares with what I hear and read in my Zen practice. The sensei (“teacher”) at my zendo continually emphasizes the value of “this moment”; he says that Zen warns against reliance upon abstraction, or “placing another head on top of your head”. The great zen koans and stories emphasize the value of the “real”, on things just as they are in their inherent “suchness”, on avoiding classifications. E.g., Chao-chou, teaching the assembly, said, \u201cThe Ultimate Path is without difficulty; just avoid the discriminating mind.” The Zen teachers often admonish that tomorrow doesn’t exist and yesterday is gone; only right now is important. <\/p>\n

And yet, yesterday and tomorrow are very important in our info-tech \/ time-sensitive world. The present is largely an irrelevant blip on a master time line or PERT chart<\/a>. There is more need for classification and discrimination than ever. The “real” is just fine while on vacation, but on the job, you had better find the correct underlying patterns and themes in order to keep advancing (or sometimes just to stay in place). E.g., the patterns in the housing market, in the economy, in politics, in global warming, in food prices, in technology . . . and also in the human communities where you either get ahead or get run over by. You better have a feel for who is saying what about you in your family, among your friends, and especially by your co-workers, clients, bosses and leaders. The Flynn effect testifies to what survival in 2012 America requires. A tradition that emerged in Japan and China from the 5th to 15th Centuries may not be in tune with what modern society demand from us.<\/p>\n

And yet — many modern people seem to think that Zen and its close cousin, Buddhism, are much more in synch with science and modern civilization than Christianity or any other major religious system. That’s mainly because of Buddhism’s agnosticism on the question of God. Many modern “teachers” twist that a bit to ally Buddhism with their atheistic viewpoints. Then they create a Zen world fashioned around modern psychology. For now, I will just say that from what I’ve heard from some of these “teachers”, they are twisting and re-casting the ancient teachings in new ways, squeezing them to fit into a techno-narcissistic world lacking the God we once knew. They present their views as “faithful translations of the ancient teachings, updated for the modern (Flynn-effected) mind”. But in my book, the ancient teachings stand for themselves. And they do NOT agree with a lot of the notions that we take for granted in 2012 American life.<\/p>\n

FWIW, I think that the Zen community should just admit that classic Zen, along with its language and teachings, doesn’t fit into our modern world. It doesn’t address many of the problems we face — its cryptic messages may challenge the modern souped-up mind and its Flynn-effect abilities to ponder abstractions. But those cryptic messages addressed a different time with different problems; they seem profound, but they don’t really help to figure out how to keep a good marriage, a good job and a good investment account going today. And yet, the Zen world shouldn’t totally dissolve itself within our hyper-abstract mindset; it does offer a useful and well-needed critique on what is really important in life. If Zen would say that people should get their faces out of their I-Phones and turn them to enjoy the warm sunshine, it would say something useful! The need to close your eyes, find a secluded spot and meditate from time to time is not a bad prescription in a hyper-connected, overly extroverted, super-networked society. <\/p>\n

But the Flynn effect, and the world that is driving it, will not go away. Zen can continue to support itself with a “faux-hip” panache appreciated by an enlightened few, or it can get real and start addressing the masses about real-life issues and the problems of a world that is moving and changing too quickly. It needs to do that in modern terms, not with fanciful stories of robed monks making pilgrimages among temples along the snowy mountain ridges of Japan (romantic as those stories may be). <\/p>\n

Zen needs to question whether the complexities of the teachings of Dogen and the other great masters have real value or are simply admired today for their obscure and convoluted nature (i.e., the “sounds profound, whatever he is saying there” effect). In many cases, no doubt, real value will be seen; but there is a lot of chaf amidst the wheat, a lot of stuff that fuels the never-ending psycho-babble of modern Jungian therapists. (In the 1950s, President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex; today, that warning should address the “psychology-information technology complex”). If Zen really means to help out in a land where the Flynn effect reigns, it had better start sorting out that chaf, or forever remain just an interesting and fashionable side-show in our politically divided 21st Century techno-info-society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just found out about the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is all about “psychometrics”, i.e. the measurement of human intelligence. About 28 years ago, a New Zealand sociology researcher who specializes in intelligence issues (whose last name is Flynn, not surprisingly) noticed that IQ scores have been rising steadily since at least the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,22,29,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3008"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3010,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3008\/revisions\/3010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}