Intelligent and modern, but nonsense all the same.

She sat at the head of the table, serene, with an amused, indulgent smile on her lips as she listened to their scatter–brained nonsense; it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same.

W. Somerset Maugham – A Woman of Fifty (1946)

Stories from the Golden Age of detective fiction often describe the Scotland Yard detective as having an intelligent face. Even an apparently bovine and unintelligent face was often betrayed by the keen glances he flashed into every nook and cranny of the murder scene.

The idea of intelligence is still used of course, in spite of being a somewhat slippery notion, but modern life seems to have made it less useful and even more slippery than it was in the comparatively recent past.

Intelligence was never more than a somewhat fallible idea anyway, because supposedly intelligent people have always been capable of stupidity. Yet it could be used as an ideal, as a contrast with stupidity, but like an old Polaroid photo the contrast has faded.

Intelligence is still a usable idea, but not particularly usable when it comes to abstractions and political entanglements. It fails to capture the prevalence of so much misinformation, distortion, exaggeration and simple falsehood.

To take a topical example, there seems to be little point in describing Net Zero as an unintelligent policy. It certainly is unintelligent, but to say so doesn’t capture the nature of the beast, the political nature of it, the creepy tentacles reaching into every corner of life. If anything, the idea of intelligent and unintelligent actions has a decided tendency to evade the problem, particularly the magnitude of it.