Just some thoughts about perspectives on intelligence in Sherlock. I get the feeling this will be a long post, so I’m going to stick it under a Read More so I don’t inflict it on all of you. Still, I think it might be interesting, so….
This.
To which I can add a bit about logic, emotion and detachment. When you’re really smart, and you’re a kid surrounded by other kids who are, well, normal…to you, they seem to act like idiots. You’re maybe years ahead of them, in terms of intellectual development. You can see the mistakes they’re making. The mistakes of reasoning, the mistakes of priority, the false assumptions they act on. And of course they make mistakes, they’re kids, but when you’re a kid too, that particular bit of perspective isn’t really there, because you know that you can see and understand it. So you have to ask, why can’t they?
Which is the start of removing yourself from them. Because your thoughts and feelings and reactions don’t make sense to them, and theirs don’t make sense to you. And when you don’t have people to socialize with, you don’t learn how to socialize.
So there you are. You don’t know how to socialize, and you recognize emotions as unpredictable and senseless (and oh, they are when you’re a kid, especially as a teenager). What does make sense to you is logic. That’s clear as day. So you rely on it. You learn to separate your emotions from your intellect—to emotionally detach. This isn’t sociopathy. You can still love people, you can still be moral, but it’s those shields shuofthewind mentions. You learn not to trust, not to invest, not to let yourself get caught in the distracting minutiae of human interaction.
A lot of really smart kids are diagnosed (often misdiagnosed) with Asperger’s, because that’s what this looks like from the outside. If I’d grown up 10 years later, I’d probably be one of them. Whether Sherlock is…well, I’ll leave that up to somebody else, but I could see it going either way.
But Sherlock does, as an adult, deliberately cultivate that detachment, holding himself above his emotional responses in order to surf on objective logic and do his job. And that’s legitimately useful to him. That ability to separate objective and subjective reactions is a skill that’s valuable to any scientist. Shuofthewind suggests that he still doesn’t know how to cope with emotions. I don’t know if that’s true. He doesn’t seem all that blindsided by them when they do occasionally erupt. He’s presumably somewhere in his 30s, and most people do learn and grow up a bit somewhere between 18 and 30. But whether he figured out how to cope with his emotions or is still hiding from them, he still deliberately holds himself separate from them as much as possible.
Oh god, though, is that bit about being impatient with people ever true. I still have to struggle with that. When you’re very intelligent, there’s a conviction that reasoning and learning are easy. Because they’re so easy for you, things are so obvious, and you figure that the people around you must be able to do this too. They just don’t. You think they don’t want to, or they’re distracted, or they’re letting themselves get tangled up in the voices in their head that tell them they’re stupid. To this day, I still have trouble handling this, because I cannot make myself believe that people aren’t innately smart and that they aren’t just handicapping themselves somehow. When you see Sherlock being impatient with someone, keep that in mind. He’s convinced that everyone can do what he does, if they only put their minds to it—maybe not as well, but that they must have it in them somewhere.