His voice grew tight. He was describing things that had happened more than thirty years ago, but the memory still made him angry. “At that point I realized, here I was, knocking myself out to make the money to make my way back to school, and it’s the middle of the Montana winter. I am willing to hitchhike into town every day, do whatever I had to do, just to get into school and back, and they are unwilling to do anything for me. So bananas. And that was the point I decided I could do without the higher-education system. Even if I couldn’t do without it, it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn’t do it anymore. So I dropped out of college, simple as that.”
Chris Langan’s experiences at Reed and Montana State represented a turning point in his life. As a child, he had dreamt of becoming an academic. He
should
have gotten a PhD; universities are institutions structured, in large part, for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity. “Once he got into the university environment, I thought he would prosper, I really did,” his brother Mark says. “I thought he would somehow find a niche. It made absolutely no sense to me when he left that.”
Without a degree, Langan floundered. He worked in construction. One frigid winter he worked on a clam boat on Long Island. He took factory jobs and minor civil service positions and eventually became a bouncer in a bar on Long Island, which was his principal occupation for much of his adult years. Through it all, he continued to read deeply in philosophy, mathematics, and physics as he worked on a sprawling treatise he calls the “CTMU”—the “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.” But without academic credentials, he despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal.
“I am a guy who has a year and a half of college,” he says, with a shrug. “And at some point this will come to the attention of the editor, as he is going to take the paper and send it off to the referees, and these referees are going to try and look me up, and they are not going to find me. And they are going to say, This guy has a year and a half of college. How can he know what he’s talking about?”
It is a heartbreaking story. At one point I asked Langan—hypothetically—whether he would take a job at Harvard University were it offered to him. “Well, that’s a difficult question,” he replied. “Obviously, as a full professor at Harvard I would count. My ideas would have weight and I could use my position, my affiliation at Harvard, to promote my ideas. An institution like that is a great source of intellectual energy, and if I were at a place like that, I could absorb the vibration in the air.” It was suddenly clear how lonely his life has been. Here he was, a man with an insatiable appetite for learning, forced for most of his adult life to live in intellectual isolation. “I even noticed that kind of intellectual energy in the year and a half I was in college,” he said, almost wistfully. “Ideas are in the air constantly. It’s such a stimulating place to be.
“On the other hand,” he went on, “Harvard is basically a glorified corporation, operating with a profit incentive. That’s what makes it tick. It has an endowment in the billions of dollars. The people running it are not necessarily searching for truth and knowledge. They want to be big shots, and when you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. When you’re there, they got a thumb right on you. They are out to make sure you don’t step out of line.”
2.
What does the story of Chris Langan tell us? His explanations, as heartbreaking as they are, are also a little strange. His mother forgets to sign his financial aid form and—just like that—no scholarship. He tries to move from a morning to an afternoon class, something students do every day, and gets stopped cold. And why were Langan’s teachers at Reed and Montana State so indifferent to his plight? Teachers typically delight in minds as brilliant as his. Langan talks about dealing with Reed and Montana State as if they were some kind of vast and unyielding government bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. Making allowances in the name of helping someone stay in school is what professors do all the time.
Even in his discussion of Harvard, it’s as if Langan has no conception of the culture and particulars of the institution he’s talking about.
When you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck.
What? One of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.
When Langan told me his life story, I couldn’t help thinking of the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who famously headed the American effort to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II. Oppenheimer, by all accounts, was a child with a mind very much like Chris Langan’s. His parents considered him a genius. One of his teachers recalled that “he received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” He was doing lab experiments by the third grade and studying physics and chemistry by the fifth grade. When he was nine, he once told one of his cousins, “Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.”
Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then on to Cambridge University to pursue a doctorate in physics. There, Oppenheimer, who struggled with depression his entire life, grew despondent. His gift was for theoretical physics, and his tutor, a man named Patrick Blackett (who would win a Nobel Prize in 1948), was forcing him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable, and then, in an act so strange that to this day no one has properly made sense of it, Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor.
Blackett, luckily, found out that something was amiss. The university was informed. Oppenheimer was called on the carpet. And what happened next is every bit as unbelievable as the crime itself. Here is how the incident is described in
American Prometheus,
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography of Oppenheimer: “After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London.”
On probation?
Here we have two very brilliant young students, each of whom runs into a problem that imperils his college career. Langan’s mother has missed a deadline for his financial aid. Oppenheimer has tried to poison his tutor. To continue on, they are required to plead their cases to authority. And what happens? Langan gets his scholarship taken away, and Oppenheimer gets sent to a psychiatrist. Oppenheimer and Langan might both be geniuses, but in other ways, they could not be more different.
The story of Oppenheimer’s appointment to be scientific director of the Manhattan Project twenty years later is perhaps an even better example of this difference. The general in charge of the Manhattan Project was Leslie Groves, and he scoured the country, trying to find the right person to lead the atomic-bomb effort. Oppenheimer, by rights, was a long shot. He was just thirty-eight, and junior to many of the people whom he would have to manage. He was a theorist, and this was a job that called for experimenters and engineers. His political affiliations were dodgy: he had all kinds of friends who were Communists. Perhaps more striking, he had never had any administrative experience. “He was a very impractical fellow,” one of Oppenheimer’s friends later said. “He walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat, and, more important, he didn’t know anything about equipment.” As one Berkeley scientist put it, more succinctly: “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand.”
Oh, and by the way, in graduate school
he tried to kill his tutor
. This was the résumé of the man who was trying out for what might be said to be—without exaggeration—one of the most important jobs of the twentieth century. And what happened? The same thing that happened twenty years earlier at Cambridge: he got the rest of the world to see things his way.
Here are Bird and Sherwin again: “Oppenheimer understood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project, and he therefore turned on all his charm and brilliance. It was an irresistible performance.” Groves was smitten. “‘He’s a genius,’ Groves later told a reporter. ‘A real genius.’” Groves was an engineer by training with a graduate degree from MIT, and Oppenheimer’s great insight was to appeal to that side of Groves. Bird and Sherwin go on: “Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour [of potential candidates] who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems....[Groves] found himself nodding in agreement when Oppenheimer pitched the notion of a central laboratory devoted to this purpose, where, as he later testified, ‘we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration.’”
Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that’s not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It’s because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.
“They required that everyone take introductory calculus,” Langan said of his brief stay at Montana State. “And I happened to get a guy who taught it in a very dry, very trivial way. I didn’t understand why he was teaching it this way. So I asked him questions. I actually had to chase him down to his office. I asked him, ‘Why are you teaching this way? Why do you consider this practice to be relevant to calculus?’ And this guy, this tall, lanky guy, always had sweat stains under his arms, he turned and looked at me and said, ‘You know, there is something you should probably get straight. Some people just don’t have the intellectual firepower to be mathematicians.’”
There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what the prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact—and this is the most heartbreaking part of all—he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.
3.
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence.” To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing
how
to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, or—as in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer—you can have lots of both.
So where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in part, that’s in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught himself to read at three years of age. He was
born
smart. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.
*
But social savvy is
knowledge
. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.
Perhaps the best explanation we have of this process comes from the sociologist Annette Lareau, who a few years ago conducted a fascinating study of a group of third graders. She picked both blacks and whites and children from both wealthy homes and poor homes, zeroing in, ultimately, on twelve families. Lareau and her team visited each family at least twenty times, for hours at a stretch. She and her assistants told their subjects to treat them like “the family dog,” and they followed them to church and to soccer games and to doctor’s appointments, with a tape recorder in one hand and a notebook in the other.
You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.
The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.
That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: