Intelligence Is Not Generational

No individual person is intelligent because of the technological, sociological, or scientific climate of the day.  Even if most people in a given generation or society were truly intelligent, something that may have never been the case, their technological and educational context is irrelevant, and the intelligence of others around them does not reflect their own intelligence one way or another.  People do not become "more intelligent" by virtue of living in a certain generation at a specific time in human history.  They do not become more intelligent by virtue of being surrounded by technology that would baffle most people from a previous generation.  They do not become more intelligent by being connected with others and exchanging their experiences.  Intelligence is rationality, and rationality is a person's grasp of how to understand and use reason.

A man or woman born in 4,000 BC or earlier could have deeply contemplated the nature of reason, their own consciousness, their sensory perceptions, and epistemology as a whole and could have come to true, verifiable conclusions about them--all while engaging in daily tasks of practicality aimed at survival.  Their intelligence may have gone unnoticed.  Perhaps they were not particularly apt at communicating their thoughts, or perhaps apathy about some practical matter was mistaken for unintelligence by others who ironically were too unintelligent to understand almost anything about rationalistic philosophy on their own.  Still, their era, their culture, and the broader state of human civilizations with regard to lack of anything resembling modern technology had nothing to do with their intelligence, which they could look to and develop by themselves.

In contrast, many modern Westerners exhibit little to no independent thinking about anything more than how they will personally react to mainstream ideas put forth by others (which leaves out a great number of vital philosophical issues and truths) about science or their own community politics.  How many people of the present day show any signs of thinking about matters of pure reason, of phenomenology, of ultimate metaphysics, or of airtight epistemology?  Not many at all!  If anyone doubts the philosophical initiative and consistency of the general population around them, they need only to begin probing people about their worldviews to see that they quickly reveal assumptions, errors, inconsistencies, or sheer stupidity that they themselves may not even recognize as such when it is held up in front of them!

Even when it comes to the more mainstream aspects of science, conversations and educational materials reveal a lack of consistency in the basic conceptual understanding of science in communities that supposedly hinge on it.  Many people treat chemistry as if it is different than physics even though the subject of chemistry is nothing but a particular subset of physics.  Many people confuse their preferred scientists with science itself.  Many people treat scientific education as if it is synonymous with intelligence, which manifested in its purest form when used to reason out philosophical facts that are more foundational and transcendent than scientific facts could ever be.

Modern people generally fall into the same traps the historical record suggests most people of other times have: they seek ideological conformity with most other people around them (even if only on a selective basis), are more concerned with matters of trivial practicality and subjective preference than with matters of ultimate reality, and are reluctant to give up false, inconsistent, or assumed ideas even when the illogical nature of their worldview is called out.  Even if none of this was the case, intelligence is not a generational or geographical quality, but a quality of individual minds, marked by the extent someone understands how to utilize the laws of logic.  Any contrary idea is accepted only by those who lack depth of intelligence.