Indeed, this is precisely the kind of test which would need to be included in measures of mentalistic IQ. However, we have a distorted picture of true intelligence because our current measures of IQ are limited to just one dimension, are severely deficient in measuring mentalism, and omit many important measures of mechanistic IQ—like mechanical comprehension/folk physics thanks to the desire to hide sex differences as explained in an earlier post. This produces the illusion that we are more intelligent overall than our ancestors and Africans—which is obvious nonsense (not to mention intellectual arrogance)!

Nevertheless, this way of looking at things does imply that our mechanistic IQ is higher than that of our ancestors and of Africans for reasons which I mentioned in the previous post, and the same insight can explain the apparent link between liberalism and intelligence. The implication is that liberals are only seemingly more intelligent because their mechanistic IQ is higher and that, like Africans and our ancestors, the mentalistic intelligence of conservatives—barely measured by current tests—is higher. Indeed, few sub-Saharan African societies are liberal welfare states, and our great-grandparents would be conservative to the point of seeming racist, sexist, and homophobic by modern standards!

In an earlier post I argued that Victorians were more realistic about cognitive, behavioral, and psychological sex differences than we are, and to that extent you could say that they had higher mentalistic IQ. To put it another way, Victorian folk psychology was more objective than is the PC folk psychology of the kind you would expect of liberals—but not necessarily of conservatives. So whereas liberals might tick a box indicating that there is no real difference between male and female minds in a test of mentalistic intelligence, conservatives—like the Victorians—would be more likely to tick the box indicating that there is a difference. And of course that would be the right answer, whatever liberal ideology may say to the contrary, as I pointed out. Indeed, you could see liberal prudery about psychological sex differences as an example of the “clever silliness” of liberal intellectuals discussed in a parallel post to this one.

So, before liberal politicians do a second U-turn on IQ, they should reflect for a moment. (The first about-face was a generation ago, when IQ testing went from being every liberals’ great hope of educational opportunity for all to being every liberals’ stigma of inequality.) The implication is that rising mechanistic intelligence is all very well but goes with declining mentalistic intelligence which—as is so clearly evidenced in autism—carries serious social costs. Conservatives, in other words, may score lower on adaptation to a modern technological style of intelligence, but may score higher on traditional social intelligence whose loss we may well live to regret.