Intelligence community

“ Rightly judging that the expansion of intelligence is to be acquired only in greater liberty of action, they have admitted them to a freer community and participation in the themes which occupy men's thoughts, and the habits which accompany their moods of reflection. ”

“ But the more remote applications of these rules, the nicer shades of conduct, such as those relating to social intercourse, the choice between clashing duties, the realisation of our obligations to the community at large, require for their appreciation a large amount of intelligence and an accumulated stock of experience which are not to be found in primitive societies. ”

“ It seems evident that there is a very definite relation between human intelligence and community organization. Although no specific studies have been made in this field, they should be included, at least prospectively, in the list of problems for further study. ”

“ A more intelligent state of social affairs, one more informed with knowledge, more directed by intelligence, would not improve original endowments one whit, but it would raise the level upon which the intelligence of all operates. The height of this level is much more important for judgment of public concerns than are differences in intelligence211 quotients. ”

“ The major success in that minimal democratic education has made abundantly clear the need in addition for the universal distribution of critical intelligence, a minimal intellectuality which can distinguish between fact and fiction, between principle and case, between opinion and insight, between propaganda and instruction, between truth and falsity. This degree of intellectual training is absolutely necessary for the highest activities of men in democratic society, namely for both individual and common deliberation and decision in practical affairs. ”

“ The Organization of Intelligence
THESE men, through meetings and correspondence, organize themselves into a “Society for Social Research”; they begin at once to look for an “inspired millionaire” to finance the movement for six months or so; they advertise themselves diligently in the press, and make known their intention to get together the best brains of the country to study the facts and possibilities of the social problem. And then—a difficult point—they face the task of arranging some more or less impersonal method of deciding who are the intelligent people and who not. ”

“ It does not follow that the nation will be wholly destitute of intellectual power. The common business of life, which must necessarily be performed by each individual or family for themselves, will call forth some amount of intelligence and practical ability, within a certain narrow range of ideas. ”

“ What if they were to find in this organization of intelligence a focus for their labor?—what if they should not only themselves undertake the studies which would fit them for membership in the Society, but should also make it their business to stir up in all who might come to them the spirit of the seeker, to incite them to read religiously the reports of the Society, to call on them to spread abroad the good news of truth to be had for the asking? ”

“ The sources of such influence have merely been touched; they are deep; we must find a way to make informed opinion more articulate and powerful. “The most valuable knowledge consists of methods,” said Nietzsche; [302] and the most valuable methods are methods of organization, whether of data or of men. Organization’s the thing. Economic forces are organized; the forces of intelligence are not. To organize intelligence; that is surely one method of approach to the social problem; and what if, indeed, it be the very heart and substance of the social problem? ”

“ Where shall we look for them except in the general diffusion of intelligence among the people? Spread knowledge among the people, and their minds will be awakened to a due sense of the value of our free institutions. They will be quick to detect ambition, aiming under a false pretence of public utility, at private aggrandizement. ”

“ The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and such means for the spread of political information as have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other than political ways. ”

“ In them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and their instruments in the policy they adopt. ”

“ On the other hand, there are various scientific associations which are bent on revising and amplifying our knowledge and are not pledged to keeping alive any belief or method which cannot stand the criticism which comes with further information. The terrible fear of falling into mere rationalizing is gradually extending from the so-called natural sciences to psychology, anthropology, politics, and political economy. ”

“ They thus prepared the way for a revolution in human affairs in the midst of which we now find ourselves. As yet their type of thinking has not been applied on any considerable scale to the solution of social problems. By learning to understand and appreciate the scientific frame of mind as a historical victory won against extraordinary odds, we may be encouraged to cultivate and popularize a similar attitude toward the study of man himself. ”

“ Here are opera basilica again!—for what are we doing, after all, but trying to take Francis Bacon seriously? Of course the difficulty in organizing intelligence is how to know who are intelligent, and how to get enough people to agree with you that you know. If each man’s self-valuation were accepted, our organization would be rather bulky. ”

“ Knowledge.—Knowledge gives the individual power, and provides him with a powerful weapon in the struggle for existence. The dominant classes, for the protection of their own egoistic interests, keep knowledge for themselves, and refuse to provide the lower classes with the means and weapons for their liberation. The State insists upon a minimal quantity of knowledge for every one of its members, because this is to the interest of the community and of the upper classes. ”

“ To this subject we shall need to turn in more detail presently; here all we need is to premise that the stimulation and mobilisation of common thought requires an education which shall equip the citizen with a system of knowledge and ideas which will enable him to respond to the challenge of the problems of common life and approach them with intelligence and sympathy. No one who is familiar with the proceedings of parliaments and congresses will require proof of the existence of this need. ”

“ At this point, we need only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence studies represents things in the part which they play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. ”

“ He believes that sociology has already reached the point at which it can be and ought to be applied, treated as an art, and he urges that 'the State' or Government now has a new, legitimate, and peculiar field for the exercise of intelligence to promote the welfare of men."—New York Times. ”

“ For the individual or for a collectivist state there must be added to these things alertness and imagination in the personal quest and discovery of values and a broad and critical intelligence in making the actual trial of them. Without a commensurate gain in these qualities it will avail little to make technical training and industrial opportunity more free or even to make the rewards of effort more equitable and secure. ”

“ A common set of personnel standards for intelligence can create a group of professionals better able to operate in joint activities,transcending their own service-specific mind-sets. • Divided management of national intelligence capabilities. ”

“ It was held to be a first duty of the Government to afford every possible means for the dissemination of intelligence—general intelligence for the information and education of the people, and more especially political intelligence for the education of the people as citizens of the Republic. They were making, it was their legitimate boast, a tremendous experiment in politics. They were essaying to demonstrate to the world whether a people had the genius to govern itself, whether democracy and the republic were abstract political ideas only, or whether they could be made actual living things. ”

“ There must be some clearing-house of intelligence and of values in this country, some place from which our intelligence may start and to which it may return. The public must have accessible reports of engineers, state or federal, of a sort entitled to confidence. ”

“ Meantime the easy matter-of-course presumption that such a civilization of intelligence justifies itself goes to argue that the current bias which so comes to expression will be the outcome of a secure and protracted experience. What underlies and has brought on this bent in the temper of the civilized peoples is a somewhat intricate question of institutional growth, and can not be gone into here ”

“ For, the "social science" taught in our schools is, it would appear, an orderly presentation of the conventional proprieties, rather than a summons to grapple with the novel and disconcerting facts that surround us on every side. ”

“ If, where a fair share of intelligence might be expected to lead them right, legislators and their officers go so wrong, how terribly will they err where no amount of intelligence would suffice them,—where they must decide among hosts of needs, bodily, intellectual, and moral, which admit of no direct comparisons ”

“ Yes, there is Intelligence. That is as yet an untested hope in its application to the regulation of human relations. It is not discredited because it has not been tried on any large scale outside the realm of natural science. There, everyone will confess, it has produced marvelous results. Employed in regard to stars, rocks, plants, and animals, and in the investigation of mechanical and chemical processes, it has completely revolutionized men's notions of the world in which they live, and of its inhabitants, with the notable exception of man himself. ”

“ Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude, inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer, and responding more and more to literary influences. ”

“ The Council are of opinion that this Society would be omitting a principal means of the advancement of Science—the end for which all such associations exist—if it neglected the question of the Endowment of Research. To maintain a successful investigator in his labours, even though no results of immediate or obvious utility can be shown to spring out of them, is of interest to the community at large. ”

“ I mean by social science our feeble efforts to study man, his natural equipment and impulses, and his relations to his fellows in the light of his origin and the history of the race.
This enterprise has hitherto been opposed by a large number of obstacles essentially more hampering and far more numerous than those which for three hundred years hindered the advance of the natural sciences. Human affairs are in themselves far more intricate and perplexing than molecules and chromosomes. ”

“ The opponents of the demand for a larger measure of popular government forget the growing intelligence of the people. Schools and colleges, books, newspapers and magazines, modern transportation and communication, business intercourse, the trade union, political discussion, the numerous clubs and Chautauqua circles, and the growing density of population which brings mind more frequently in contact with mind, are so many agencies for promoting the general enlightenment. ”

“ The political, economic, and intellectual leaders begin to be selected without any sufficient test of their efficiency. Some sort of a test continues to be required; but the standards which determine it drift into a condition of being narrow, artificial, and lax. Political, intellectual, and social leadership, in order to preserve its vitality needs a feeling of effective responsibility to a body of public opinion as wide, as varied, and as exacting as that of the whole community. ”

“ The ordinary man and the investigator are complementary factors of progress and both essential to democracy.
The Diffusion of Knowledge Necessary to Democracy.—Always in progress is a deflecting tendency, separating the educated class from the uneducated. This is not on account of the aristocracy of learning, but because of group activity, the educated man following a pursuit different from the man of practical affairs. Hence the effort to broadcast knowledge through lectures, university extension, and the radio is essential to the progress of the whole community. ”

“ Those items of human intelligence and initiative that go to make up the pursuit of knowledge, and that are embodied in systematic form in its conclusions, do not lend themselves to quantitative statement, and can not be made to appear on a balance-sheet. Neither can that intellectual initiative and proclivity that goes in as the indispensable motive force in the pursuit of learning be reduced to any known terms of subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction. No scholar or scientist can become an employee in respect of his scholarly or scientific work. ”

“ Popular intelligence, as it is called,—more properly popular education,—may be expected to suffer a further advance; necessarily so, since it is a necessary condition of any effectual advance in the industrial arts,—every appreciable technological advance presumes, as a requisite to its working-out in industry, an augmented state of information and of logical facility in the workmen under whose hands it is to take effect. ”