How you can be too clever

It is hard to imagine that there could be any such thing as excessive intelligence.

After all, most of the problems of the world and of individual lives clearly come down to a shortfall in cleverness – and a surfeit of impulsiveness, self-righteousness and cruelty.

Yet it seems that there could still be a way of using our intelligence that cuts us off from necessary encounters with simple truths about us: with humdrum facts, with down-to-earth ideas and appetites, with unglamorous impulses and naive yet profound speculations.