I remember hearing something funny: when somebody says: “I’m not book-smart, I’m street-smart,” all they’re really saying is, “I’m not real smart, I’m imaginary smart.”
I recall last year standing around one evening with a group of friends when one of them, a gym trainer, rap music enthusiast and high-school dropout, made that same self-assured announcement to all us bookish types, “I’ve got street smarts,” to which I delightedly repeated the quote with equal smugness, drawing a collective response of snickering and nodding. What an ass I was. Looking down from my intellectual high-horse, I was convinced that this guy, who had never heard of Dostoevsky but could recite every lyric from MC Hammer and who couldn’t differentiate between ‘their’ and ‘there’ when composing a simple text message was, at best, an adorable buffoon, unable to excel very far in life and incapable of enjoying its highest pleasures. In my despicably inflated head, only those that read and laughed out loud reading Voltaire or listened and sobbed through a piece by Mahler were destined for the purest of joys and the sturdiest of lifelong achievements. In my youthful hyper-romanticism and pretentious narrow-mindedness I still believe the former to be true, but in terms of the latter, and as demonstrated by my swank, beloved ghetto friend who now owns two successful gyms and lives in a plush apartment close to the city, the aggressively ambitious, rap-wisdom maxim of ‘get rich or die trying’ (and others of the sort) may prove to be no less rewarding.
Street wisdom is practical wisdom, common sense, something gained from observation and real experience and not from the second-hand kind found in the pages of dusty books. Street acumen is the ability to understand people and their behaviours, to know when to seize an opportunity and when to exercise caution, to question things, to follow the instincts, and to adapt quickly to a set environment. It is usually associated with the primal, the ruthless and the lower socio-economic groups, but this sort of intelligence deserves far more attention than what is often given.
Karl H. Pribram, professor of psychology and psychiatry, gave a funny scenario in one of his studies concerning different types of intelligence. A boy, in an effort to publicly ridicule a slower classmate, would offer him two coins, a nickel and a dime, and ask him in front of all his friends to take whichever one he wanted. The boy would select the larger sized nickel to the snickering delight of his classmates, and one day, a sympathetic onlooker explained to him that although the nickel was larger, the dime was actually worth more. The boy shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I know, but if I pick the dime, he’ll never ask me again. This way he’ll do so over and over again and so far I’ve made a dollar out of him, and all I had to do was choose the nickel!”
How embarrassingly ironic it is for me to now draw upon a beloved philosopher I learnt about directly and entirely from a book, but change is gradual so here it goes anyway. Henri Bergson argued that immediate experience and intuition are more important to one’s understanding of reality than rationalism and science, a philosophy that he and many of his contemporaries claimed as being the true empiricism. The idea of intuition being deeper than the intellect manifests strongly in proponents of street-wisdom, though of course, they’d never say it. As for me, though I’ll never renounce my treasured paperbacks or my admiration for dry and stuffy deceased intellects, I will renounce my idiotic attitude that I am any smarter than somebody who happens to know all the words to Every Gangsta, Every Hood.
