The addition to the General Secretary's Annual Report made verbally at the Annual Gathering, London, 1962.Looking through the back numbers of Mensa journals through the years one question comes up again and again. It reminds me of the story of the boy who hid in the boot of his father's car when he picked up a pretty young lady. Out in the country the boy heard his father say, "What are you going to do--be nice or walk home?" "Walk home," the girl said, getting out of the car. Back at home the little boy got out his scooter and took the nearest little girl for a tandem ride on it. "What are you going to do?" he asked her a few blocks from home. "Be nice or walk home?" "Be nice." He scratched his head. "Blimey, what do I do now?"
[Mensa] has to work in the difficult and unsatisfactory region of unformulated purposes, unsettled aims, struggling wills, contradictory moments and intellectual ferment. This is the question Mensa asks itself again and again. Now we've got it what are we going to do with it?
The stated aims of the Society of promoting social contact, the meeting of rational minds, research on the views and attitudes of able people, are held to be inadequate. Dissatisfaction is expressed with the "arms-folded attitude," the "over-philosophic view," the "uncommitted stance."
I should like to underline the timely reminder of the fundamental difficulties which was brought out so well by Martin Simons. How could Mensa have a purpose? For an organism or organization to have a purpose it must be one head, united. Whatever its differences it must be in complete agreement upon certain teleological minima.
How does an organization acquire a single purpose? Either it agrees to accept the leadership of a person or group and becomes the instrument of his or their purposes or it is simply an assembly of those with a common purpose already.
The first is as inappropriate for Mensa as the second. It is as unlikely as it is undesirable that the Society should accept a central leadership. We have, as Dr. John Clark said, a built-in safety mechanism which will prevent such a thing.
In view of our method of selection it would be a remarkable coincidence if we, the accepted members, should prove to have, in fact, a common purpose already. In recruiting we do not persuade people to think as we do, but we select those who have the ability to think for themselves.
Purposive action involves organisation, and effective organisation always involves a communication channel from one, or a few, to the many. All really effective organisations--the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, the separate nations, large businesses--have this element: a person or at most a small central group having a wide effect through a multiple hierarchic communication system. It is not in the nature of Mensa to be influenced in this way.
I am tempted to suggest the model of the human brain. The region in the mens politica in which Mensa resides is not the effectors region. We are not like a commercial firm or an army or a political party; we are not part of the motor system of mankind. If we have a place at all it is on the afferent side of the control centres. Constance Warshowsky, in a persuasive article, emphasised Mensa's role in bringing about mutual interaction and stimulation. She sees Mensa as a forum where new ideas may be presented and worked upon by small groups in a systematic disciplined intellectual exchange.
Surely the human brain has regions or systems which could be called "pre-purposive": an area where many schemes and plans are considered before one is chosen. It is surely in this region that the entity known as intelligence operates. And does not the analogy hold in society? Is it not in the pre-purposive activity, the plan-formulating, value-fixing activities where we most need the help of those in society who have been lucky enough to be born intelligent? Need anyone feel inferior if engaged in the most important human activity of all, that of formulating purposes?
The active pursuit of aims is stimulating and attractive; it leads to unity, a sense of value, and to the satisfactions associated with positive achievement. Pre-purposive activities give no satisfaction but they are infinitely more important and potentially more valuable. It is in this field that Mensa has its being and from this field that its value will emerge.
Peter Elkan, at the Annual Gathering two years ago, suggested we should try to find the greatest area of common ground. "What," he asked, "are the unformulated purposes which seem to be latent in the Mensa background?" He suggested that the Mensa role was not to advocate but to formulate and I believe he was right.
Eric Hills and I have both said that the most important Mensa function should be the formulation and clarification of objectives rather than their execution. As soon as an aim is properly and clearly formulated and a policy for the realisation of that aim established it ceases to be the function of Mensa as I conceive it to be, and becomes the beginning of a new movement which might well engage the attention of Ms but which will be a separate trend possibly blessed, tolerated, or encouraged by the Society, but not part of it. The School Project is an example.
Mensa is associated with judgements, evaluations, formulations, and clarifications. It can be a watchdog or a political feed-back mechanism. It has to work in the difficult and unsatisfactory region of unformulated persons,* unsettled aims, struggling wills, contradictory moments and intellectual ferment. This is its own climate, this is where it must live. Purposelessness is the right and proper state of the Society, and we should cease once and for all to be surprised at it.
I would hope, however, that some of the important trends, directions and movements of the future will first become apparent in the councils and the discussions, the groups, the conferences, the enquiries and the researches of Mensa. In the search for knowledge, when techniques become established and laws become apparent, a subject ceases to be philosophy and becomes science. In the broad world of intellectual interaction of which Mensa is a microcosm a trend ceases to be an intellectual activity when it becomes sufficiently formulated to develop a policy and a programme. If Mensa ever made the mistake of pursuing a single goal even in the unlikely event that it were able to agree unanimously upon it, it would from that moment cease to be itself; and Mensa would have to be born again.
* "purposes"?
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