Getting dumber: the reverse Flynn effect and the politics of denial

This cannot be genetic; evolution doesn't move that fast. It must be environmental, cultural, and educational, which is to say, self-inflicted.

Explaining the reversal

You might think the reverse Flynn Effect would be headline news, an entire civilisation losing cognitive ability. Instead, it's been greeted with the usual political soundbites. The right blames woke teachers, while the left insists that intelligence is a social construct, and probably 'biased' besides. Schools and universities maintain a discrete silence lest the blame be put on their teaching.

When the thermometer shows a fever, the modern response is to accuse it of bias. So the IQ decline is being rebranded. We are told humanity is not getting less intelligent, just 'differently' intelligent. IQ tests no longer measure what matters in modern life. Mathematics? We have calculators. Spelling? Spell-checkers. Thinking? AI. Intelligence has become as unfashionable as Latin.

The original Flynn Effect boosted our collective self-esteem. It confirmed that progress works: give people education, nutrition, opportunity, and they'll get smarter. The reverse Flynn Effect does the opposite. It suggests that people are reasoning less well than before. That's awkward. It undercuts every political campaign slogan about the 'knowledge economy'. It suggests that modern life, multitasking, social media, and the eternal Instagram scroll may be eroding the very intellectual capacities that once made progress possible. And since no one wants to admit that we are getting dumber, we change the subject.

But IQ tests are not meaningless. IQ correlates strongly with almost everything societies value: learning, problem-solving, innovation, and self-control. That makes falling IQs politically radioactive. If intelligence can rise or fall, then culture matters, and culture can fail.

When The Bell Curve appeared in 1994, suggesting that intelligence was partly heritable and increasingly stratified, it caused a moral panic. The easiest way to avoid similar unpleasantness over the reverse Flynn effect is to pretend that the whole concept of intelligence is passé, a relic of the industrial age, like slide rules and grammar. Thus, today, we no longer speak of intelligence; we speak of skills, creativity, and emotional literacy. Everyone's a genius now, in their own way.

Unfortunately, the world still runs on logic, mathematics, and the ability to tell cause from coincidence. When those atrophy, societies don't become kinder; they become credulous. Flynn himself suspected the gains he discovered could evaporate. He worried that modern culture might stop rewarding abstract thought, that the skills built by reading, conversation, and reasoned argument might decay in a world of screens and slogans.

He was right to worry.

Children now read less, move less, and spend more time in environments designed to distract them. Schools teach 'critical thinking' as a mantra, not a method. It is neither critical nor thinking. Universities reward indignation over argument.

Why reason, when you can simply react?

We used to read books about why humans behave irrationally. Now we behave irrationally and read tweets about it. Even nutrition and sleep, quiet allies of cognition, have worsened. The average teenager today gets less rest than a 1950s factory worker. Add to this the cult of self-esteem, which prizes 'feeling smart' over being smart, and you have a recipe for comfortable mediocrity. We are raising a generation of citizens who feel intensely but think feebly.

Our ancestors sharpened their minds on scarcity; now abundance has made us careless. We skim where they once read deeply. Humanity, having spent a century teaching itself to think, may be teaching itself not to bother.