If you have ever pondered the number of brain cells destroyed by one martini, then you may imagine the condition I was in. I had returned from a joyous excursion to Paris, taking the splendid new train that makes the run under the Channel and that reminds the French (by terminating at Waterloo) that some of us still have our pride, thank you very much. I had lunched well at the Paris end and dined unwisely at the London one, and consoled myself in the club car in between. It was late, and I was tired and whiffled. My hostess had gone to bed. It was the wrong time to ring anybody up. There was no one with whom I could have an argument, pointful or otherwise.
And then my eye fell on a newspaper that lay on the kitchen table. There was an advertisement for Mensa, offering a cerebral challenge. If I could solve the conundrum it set out, I could win a certificate of merit. Ha, I thought savagely, if I can do this in my current state of neural carnage, then at least I can have a free laugh at the expense of the eggheads.
Well, I completed the competition in less time than it takes to write about it, and in the morning had to ask someone else to lick the stamp. (Odd, this dryness of the mouth that sometimes comes over me.) A few weeks later, after I’d returned home, my hostess telephoned. “Hitch, there’s a letter here for you. It says it’s from Mensa. Have you lost your mind?” And now I have a piece of paper. Headed MENSA CERTIFICATE, it reads as follows: “This is to certify that Christopher Hitchens took up the Mensa Challenge and has been awarded this certificate of merit as a result.” I don’t feel like framing it, and in any case I have had to surrender it to an unbelieving fact-checking department.
A leader of the Teamsters Union, asked during a congressional inquiry if he would describe his organization as powerful in the trucking industry, is said to have replied, “Lissen, Senator. Bein’ powerful is a little like bein’ lady-like. If you got to say you are, you prob’ly ain’t.” This simple aperçu has been slow to occur to the self-proclaimed cognitive elite, whose motto might well be “In Search of Excellence Since 1946.” Fifty years ago, a pair of intellectual lonely-hearts came together on a train in suburban England and decided not just that the top 2 percent of brainpower was the percentile to be in but that they were already in it. Their names were Lancelot Ware and Roland Berrill, and if you have never heard of them that’s because they’ve never done anything else.
The standing joke about Mensa people is that if you didn’t know they were so all-get-out brilliant you would never guess. Many of them have trouble remembering to put the curtain inside the tub before turning on the shower. Ware and Berrill—or Lancelot and Roland, as I shall always think of them—were of this type. They experienced painful difficulty coming up with a name for the outfit. At first it was to be called Mens, which is the Latin for “mind,” but was also the title of a then notorious skin magazine. Back to the drawing board they went, to re-emerge with Mensa, which is the Latin for “table.” Go figure. Additional problems arose with the logo. The notion was for a large italic capital M in the shape of two pointed hats. It was supposed to be emblazoned on a tile in the home of each brilliant member, but it looked too much like a small gathering of Klansmen and was, in its turn, given the heave-ho.
Semi-farcical episodes of this kind have plagued Mensa ever since, but the concept of an exclusive club for the ultra-brainy is a very tenacious one. Even people who scoff at the idea of I.Q. are prone to think of themselves as being on the right end, or at any rate the right side, of any bell curves that may be on offer. Indeed, I myself looked slightly askance at the intelligence test that slid out of the envelope after the merit certificate. But there seemed no point in not taking it.
“In each line below underline the ONE WORD that does not belong there.” A helpful example was provided, pointing out that in the lineup “apple, orange, potato, plum, cherry,” “potato” was the only vegetable. So—“house, school, dog, cinema, church.” Obviously it’s “church,” since all the others perform some useful function. This is easy. “Walk, run, trot, gallop, rest.” I’d say “gallop,” since it’s the only one of these things I can’t do. “Carrot, cabbage, turnip, orange, potato”—didn’t we just do that one? Then things got harder. You had to underline two words that didn’t belong. “Malice, jealousy, greed, kindness, envy, stupidity.” On mature reflection, I decided that “kindness” really stuck out there. After further pencil sucking I resolved that “stupidity” did, too.
Having completed the test, which ended with some irksome stuff about a water tank with the tap on and the plug out, I was invited to send my form off to be “marked” for the low, low price of £10, or about $15. Then there was the enticing prospect of full membership and fresh payments. (Mensa exists in part to separate the supposedly intelligent from their money.) The enclosed leaflet informed me that Mensa “has no affiliation to any political or religious creed and is constitutionally designed to have no collective opinion on anything whatever.” This, if true, is a comedown from the aspirations of Lancelot and Roland, who dreamed of a brain trust at the service of government, solving the world’s problems by the sheer application of synapses.
“Mensa members,” the leaflet continued, “do an awful lot together, they party, fall in love, argue, invent, debate, learn, teach, find jobs, start businesses, write books, make (and break) records, produce TV programs, broadcast, compute, tour, dance, play music, climb mountains, run marathons, cry on each others [sic] shoulders, laugh.” Yes, I think I get the picture. A singles club for nerds. Or, as a recent issue of the Mensa newsletter so carefully phrased it: “Where eggheads go to get laid.”
Founded in Oxford—long known as “the home of lost causes”—in August 1946, Mensa now claims more than 100,000 adherents worldwide, with 38,000 of them living in Britain and 55,000 in the United States. Sixty-five percent are male. American Mensa has given us the SIG, or special-interest group, which subdivides members by hobbies or obsessions such as Star Trek, feudal Japan, or Dungeons and Dragons. Actually, it appears to be a club where eggheads go to get laid—and then don’t. What other explanation can there be for the recent announcement of a Mensa sperm bank? Sporting the grand title “Repository for Germinal Choice,” this scheme is based in California and sponsored by—of course, it had to be—an 89-year-old businessman named Robert Graham. The plan, which must count as the latest version of one of the oldest and stupidest ideas of all time, is to ask Nobel Prize winners and others to jerk off while thinking about, of all things, the future.
Opinion within Mensa was divided on this crackpot conceit. The dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view, that the opposite is also true.) But the chairman of British Mensa kicked in with a strong if ludicrous endorsement. “If women want to have particular sperm,” he said, “that’s not a bad way to get it. After all, they are manipulating the gene pool when they choose husbands.” This was Sir Clive Sinclair, whose name, complete with the knighthood, appeared on my certificate of merit. Sir Clive, as I now think of him, is known as an “inventor.” And such inventions! An electric car that’s too small and a power pack to make bicycles go uphill: the very stuff of a lonely boyhood and too much time spent inhaling the glue of model airplanes. Perhaps, too, an excess of manipulation. “Particular sperm,” forsooth. It put me in mind of the Woody Allen short story “The Whore of Mensa,” in which a hooker charges her johns for high-level intellectual chat. Another transaction, I fear, fraught with the possibility of intense mutual disappointment.
California’s Mensa cohort was also the petri dish for another recent flap, this one not so much potentially stupid and nasty as actually so. In 1994, the group’s newsletter published a number of essays calling for the killing of the homeless and the impaired. One Jon Evans wrote that the chronically homeless “should be humanely done away with, like abandoned kittens.” Demonstrating the same aptitude for metaphor, he went on to say: “A piece of meat in the shape of a man but without a mind is not a human being, whether the body be deathly ill, damaged by accident, mentally blank because of brain deficiency or criminally insane.”
Jason Brent, another contributor, urged that those “who are so mentally defective that they cannot live in society should, as soon as they are identified as defective, be humanely dispatched.” You notice the tic-like use of the word “humane.” Jason, a thoughtful type on the slender evidence of his prose, mused about Adolf Hitler and said—sounding a note of evident regret—that “his actions prevent a rational discussion of the creation of the master race.” Don’t you hate it when that happens?
The editor of the newsletter was eventually replaced, but this sort of thing keeps leaping up like a jack-in-the-box in the turgid outpourings of the I.Q.-obsessed. In January of this year, an article in Mensa magazine proposed that when children attained the age of 16 they should all “leave home and move into barracks . . . separated from the influence of dopepeddlers and other no-hopers.” The editor this time was Simon Clark, a rather dingy figure from the farther shores of what was once called Thatcherism.
It’s not as if an I.Q. of 148 is all that high, or all that mighty. And until 1994, if you scored better than 1,250 out of 1,600 on your combined English and math S.A.T., and could prove it, you didn’t need to pass the Mensa entrance exam. So that when Sir Clive Sinclair beamingly admits that, yes, well, we are a bit “elitist and exclusive,” he is uttering a wish rather than a fact. The most famous member of Mensa worldwide is probably Geena Davis, and she doesn’t attend meetings. Those who do are “prone to brood on the arguability of their own superiority,” as one ex-member friend of mine put it. (It comes back to me that the first Mensa type I met was a boy at school with the name of Coffin. He was forever tearing open his wallet and accidentally displaying his membership card.)
Perhaps as a result of this kind of insecurity, Mensa gatherings are noted for two recurrent themes—the making of puns and the forming of viciously opposed factions. Mensa members “love puns,” said Gabriel Werba, a former director of development for Mensa America, “and I happen to believe the worse a pun the better it is. Outside of Mensa you don’t have that appreciation.”
Puns are the lowest form of verbal facility. That one about “eggheads” and “laid” was coined by Mensa’s international secretary, a man named Victor Serebriakoff. (I’d rather be called Coffin any day.) Serebriakoff also spoke more truly than perhaps he intended when he said that “eggheads, like eggs, need care in handling, otherwise they get cracked and smell.” Well, indeed; see local notes from California, above. These are the hidden dangers of the pun.
As for factionalism, Mensa has lately been roiled by a farrago of financial and management scandals, all tending to materialize the suspicion of a sort of micro-megalomania among the elect. Harold Gale, for 19 years the executive director, was fired to the accompaniment of a bizarre litigation. It was alleged that he was using the Mensa name to peddle his own line of goods, not that anybody in the office had the wit to notice it. His special magazine was called Mind Games. He has now set up his own rival brain trust, with the promising title of Psicorp. His two pledges are a lower annual membership fee and an entry test that concentrates more on common sense. Loads of luck. Further venomous infighting is promised, between those who want to keep Mensa a limited company and those who wish to make it into an “association.” Still another get-a-life debate has ignited, between those who believe that the millennium begins on January 1, 2000, and those who insist on 2001. Wake me when it’s over.
I took a last peek at a Mensa mini-test offered by the American HQ. Here’s one for you. “Only one other word can be made from the letters in the word ‘insatiable.’ What is it?” The answer, as any fool can tell you, is “banalities.” Some-where between the insatiable and the banal, between the haggard sperm donor or the raging Fascist and the lonely dork or awkward jerk, lies the table. To annex the punning style, one might say that it’s not just the elite—it’s the stupidity.
