Humanity’s highest creative and intellectual achievements can be divided into two categories: those of the arts and those of the sciences. The more profoundly one explores either realm, the closer the two become to one another, until ultimately they merge in what can only be termed philosophy.
     Yet the common attitude of the public differentiates drastically between the two realms. Art is perceived as entertainment or frill; science is seen as central to human progress. Art creates an imaginary world; science deals with the real. Art is accessible to Everyman; science is the exclusive province of the specialist.
     The common attitude of the public would be of no particular interest, were it not for the discouraging fact that in the area of the arts, though not of the sciences, it is public taste—or lack of it—that decrees what is available to all.
     “There is no democracy in taste,” wrote Walt Sheldon in “Mensalogue” (June, 1979, page 6). “Good taste rests in the cultivated sensibilities of those few . . . who concern themselves with it.”
     Precisely because good taste is an attribute of the few—an aesthetic aristocracy, if you will—it is mediocre or poor taste that dominates virtually every area of our lives. The concept of democracy is bred into us. Embracing the ideal of equality, even if in truth we do not always live up to it, we permit the wisdom of our political principles to encroach upon the domain of the arts, where rule belongs rightfully to the aristocracy. The value of a human being, his unalienable right to equality with others before the law, does not imply equality in any personal trait, whether it be beauty, physical prowess, intelligence, dexterity, humor, or any other. Just as it is reasonable to select athletes and warriors on the basis of strength and endurance, so it is logical to defer to those best qualified to judge artistic merit. Yet, absurdly, we set science free of the very restraints with which we shackle our artists.
     Our bondage to public taste is represented in virtually every area of our lives, reinforced by our system of commercial enterprise. The power of numbers decides what brands we find on our supermarket shelves, what styles of clothing are available for purchase, and even what sexual practices are liable to censure and persecution. The arts, by their very nature meant for public display, are subject to the same laws of supply and demand. The media are in the business of “audience delivery” to advertisers, and advertisers’ profit depends on rendering a product or service appealing to the largest possible consumership and then reaching that consumership with their message. Thus Intellectual Digest ceases publication and The Paper Chase is canceled by CBS, while confession, skin, and fan magazines thrive and the Fred Silverman school of television programming pervades the commercial networks. The majority rules, voting at the box office, the cashier’s register, and the Nielsen ratings. As H. L. Mencken is said to have put it, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.”
     One is tempted to wonder what might have become of the artistic giants of the past, those immortals in whom all of Western culture takes pride, had their survival been controlled by the will of the majority. Largely independent of public approval, many an artist owed his career to a wealthy and cultivated patron. Among many such beneficiaries of royal, aristocratic, or even ecclesiastical favor were Rubens, Goya, and Raphael, painters; Handel, Wagner, Scarlatti, Liszt, and three Bachs, all musicians and composers; and Spenser, Voltaire, and Goethe, writers and poets. Protegés of the Medici family of Florence, renowned for its patronage of the arts, included Botticelli and Michelangelo. No doubt some genius whom the world might have revered is lost in obscurity through failure to please the royal fancy. What might the loss have been had the sole arbiter been the taste of the masses, expressing their choice in the coin of the realm?
     In our culture, it is the scientist who enjoys the support and protection of the public-endorsed powers that be, while in the arts popular taste favors the likes of Woolworth prints of clowns on black velvet and “beautiful music”or rock stations on radio. Technology is autonomous, its word absolute. While scientists themselves may constantly question what is known or accepted and strive to illuminate the unknown, before the public the scientist is God, dealing in mysteries beyond the comprehension of the common man. The citizen abjectly acknowledges the authority of science and does not presume to question the word of the initiate. “The experts agree” and “the computer says” are the ultimate credentials, and only heretics dare to point out that the experts do not agree, and may not even be experts, and that a computer can, with very little trouble, be made to say anything someone wants it to say.
     How is it that, of the two classes of highest human endeavor, one should enjoy supreme respect, while the other may expect apathy at best? The mystique of the computer inspires terror and humble obedience in the heart of the average person, but everyone is an art critic. The man who believes that if he can hold a brush he can paint would not dream of inventing his own microprocessor and installing it in his automobile. The woman who imagines that because she has a voice she can sing would never think of purchasing the proper chemicals and creating her own aspirin. Even in the present mood of public skepticism toward scientific authorities, whether promoting nuclear power or promoting better living through chemistry, we continue to authorize the expenditure of millions of dollars for “scientific research” and let the arts go begging. Somehow we find it easy to recognize our technological ignorance, yet an inability to perceive the aesthetic elements of form and design, rhythm and harmony, focus and balance, or cadence and flow can be dismissed with “I don't know art, but I know what I like.”
     In science, expertise is everything, and one does not dabble in medicine or quantum physics. It is unthinkable that we should employ a sort of technological Nielsen system and control advances in science according to public judgment. It is agreed that the experts must have the authority to govern their own domain. Yet no such elite corps is permitted to reign in the world of art—and even the true scientist, closest kin of the true artist, may fail to recognize this inequity. There is reason to suspect that members of the scientific community share in the common public view of both the sciences and the arts.
     In a personal letter, Lee Jolliffe made this observation:

I must have been too smug and self-confident as a child or too deeply immersed in my own interests. At least, I do not recall having plagued my parents with questions about the physical world. (It is entirely possible that their recollections differ from mine.) I remember having made liberal use of the encyclopedia and the many other books in the house, and I did inquire into the meanings of unfamiliar words and the reasons why people did certain things. But I don’t think I asked much about why devices work or how things occur in nature. Even throughout school, I gave my attention pretty exclusively to the arts and the humanities.
     I married a man who shares my love of literature and music. As it happens, however, Dick’s youthful interests were very unlike mine. He experimented with batteries and electricity and amused himself building model airplanes and constructing radio receivers. Before switching his college major to creative writing, he had nearly completed a degree in electrical engineering. The number of things he understands that are utterly foreign to me, in addition to being quite at home in my field of knowledge, is staggering.
     Thus I find myself belatedly asking the questions I should have asked as a youngster— questions I classify under the label “Daddy, how high is up?”—and taking genuine, wondering delight in the answers.
     Here are some of the questions I have asked Dick over the past three years:

I was twenty-four years old when I attended my first Mensa meeting.
     I had just received a letter from New York giving me the names of the “local secretary” and the editor of my local group, Boston Mensa. I called up the latter, a chap by the name of Art Weber, and said, in effect, “Here I am. What am I supposed to do now?”
     He replied: “Attend an event. Contribute something to our newsletter, the BOMB. Write a letter to the editor of the Bulletin. Send a letter to Victor Serebriakoff congratulating him on the fifteenth anniversary of Mensa. And any Thursday night, come on down to Cronin’s Restaurant in Harvard Square. We meet informally every week in the back room behind the bar.”

Caution to the Winds

In due course I did all the above and more, from painstakingly crafting a congratulatory letter to Victor in calligraphy using silver ink (and no, he never replied) to starting a Young Mensa group in Boston, eventually becoming editor of the BOMB (Boston and Outskirts Mensa Bulletin, which I renamed Beacon) and later of the national Bulletin. But on that first night at Cronin’s I was an anxious newcomer awaiting my first look at the odd cerebral creatures who actually had a club for themselves so they could—what, get together with others like themselves? It was a sure bet that wouldn't be me, but I was too curious to resist the urge to find out. With a real “here goes nothing” abandon, I presented myself for inspection at Cronin’s, in the back room behind the bar. Not knowing Mensa as well as I do now, I thought that was a strange location for a group of serious intellectuals to convene in and discuss esoteric subjects in language that would undoubtedly be much too lofty for me.
     As I adjusted to the shock of the boisterous and high-spirited crowd of beer and Coke drinkers who talked vociferously, argued loudly, laughed a lot, and seemed otherwise to have nothing at all in common, it struck me suddenly that I was the only person present who was under forty.

Nobody Under Forty

I recall a momentary sense of dismay, and then it passed. What, after all, did age matter when it was only one of a dozen or maybe a thousand things I didn’t have in common with these folks? Even the commonalities just described weren’t really true. There were wine drinkers and hard liquor drinkers and water drinkers, and one or two who stared morosely down at their drinks and didn't talk to anybody, and some who drank nothing and sat and read a book. Some came to have fun, and some came spoiling for a fight and by amazing good luck met up with others who could be baited on any subject from World War II weaponry to extraterrestrial intelligence and who went at it with such fervor that other members routinely ordered them to shut up. As a matter of fact, there were only two things I knew of that we did have in common: we had all qualified for Mensa, and we lived close enough to Harvard Square to come down to Cronin’s on a Thursday night and hang out. Before long, I was caught up in a spirited conversation with a man of at least eighty, and I think that is the last time I worried about age differences in Mensa.
     That was more than half my lifetime ago, and now my husband Dick and I are among the senior members ourselves, with two teenage members in our household. What I sensed intuitively then has become a matter of deep conviction about Mensa: one of its great strengths is its arbitrariness. Admission is based upon evidence of a personal trait that no one can seek, select, or control. It does not represent a commonality of interest or occupation or locality or belief or age or any other thing that tends to orient people in a certain way. Its single criterion for membership leaves all other criteria wide open.
     What this means is that it cuts across barriers of every kind. In Mensa we find ourselves thrown together with people whom we would never meet in any other context, or, if we met them, might never associate with by choice and might never attempt to know. In Mensa those very mismatches make for intriguing acquaintances, bizarre pairings, and unique friendships that take us right across those boundaries by which we might otherwise exclude one another—leading to a broadening of our minds, an enrichment of our lives, and sometimes a much-needed stretching of our tolerance and understanding.
     Mensa is a young person’s group. Mensa is an old person’s group. Mensa is anyone’s group as long as the person is a Mensan. No matter what the active crowd looks like, there are many more inactive, including some like yourself, who can be drawn out by the right attraction if only someone will make the effort to plan it. And hence we say (a favorite Mensa cliché), “Mensa is what you make it.”

Opportunity for Young People

Mensa activity does, however, present a special opportunity to younger members. As a volunteer-run organization, Mensa needs members to perform every kind of function, from very small and just now-and-then tasks to very major, long-term professional-level management responsibilities. For nearly all of these jobs, there is someone who can train or coach or provide backup support, and there is latitude within the job to make more or less of it, as you choose. A person can try out ideas, spread his or her wings, gain experience, and learn professional skills while helping out in a volunteer capacity for a grateful organization that can't function any other way. Many of us who are now the old-timers became active in our twenties, editing our first newsletters, planning our first events, coordinating our first SIGs, chairing our first business meetings. And now it would be a joy to see more of the younger members taking the reins. I have never seen a Mensa prejudice against a young person's assuming a responsible role, and I for one would gladly work with any young member who would like to learn what I can teach.
     During the planned short tenure of the Amyx family as coeditors pro tem of Intelligencer, we would like to encourage the participation of younger members. We would love to publish their writings and art work. We hope to see them schedule events in the calendar and write up announcements about them as items for the newsletter. And we would especially invite them to find ways of bringing their energy, their vigor, and their twenty-first-century perspective to the formal structure of the organization by volunteering for jobs large or small and thus helping to shape the present and future course of Mensa.