Chasing Hurricanes

It is a popular prejudice in every era to believe that contemporary culture is degenerate. Grumpy and fuzzy-eared Romans bemoaned the decline in the quality of their own writing, as did the Victorians and as do we. The dumbing down of the MTV generation, the shrinking attention span of our sped-up and less literate minds are worries that gnaw alongside peak oil and climate change and the improbable pace of the housing market: climb into the hand basket and get ready for the heat.

But embracing that idea is only the most efficient way of communicating to the world the fact of one’s own senescence. The evolutions of thought grow more lively, not less. Average IQ scores of Americans have grown 13.8 points in the last 46 years—the Flynn effect—and need to be recalibrated to reflect the steady rise in average ability at whatever it is they test. The origins of the phenomenon are debated: video games, refreshingly, might contribute to it, and the steadily more complex...