In botany, the "stigma" refers to the part of the flower which receives pollen during fertilization. Pollen is outside information, which a flower combines with its own to reproduce offspring of different genetic constitution. As an instrument of change, the stigma is generally positioned so that self-pollination rarely occurs.

More broadly, a stigma is a mark of disgrace which, while it can be self-inflicted, normally is imposed by others. We refer to Christ's wounds as stigmata, marks inflicted which inspire the path toward salvation. Stigmata, then, are openings where worlds meet, vulnerable positions where regeneration begins. We may not wish to bear these wounds, but only through them can life continue.

My father refused a route which many with his stigma take, detractors of intelligence who, themselves wounded, wish others to incur equivalent suffering. Instead, he highly valued education, encouraging his children to continue on to higher learning—which each of the six of us did. Our isolation from social distractions allowed us to excel at study, and our parents did not impede our efforts as some rural children's did—I once sat a local bar with a man unable to read, who bragged how he'd just punished his son for "sticking his nose in a book."

Foresighted enough to prevent our wounding by ignorance, my father lacked the vision that academic ability too might prove stigmatic. He would not believe that intelligence could be a mark of disgrace, that those of us bearing its brand would refashion ourselves to hide its impression.

But just as a flock of chickens will peck at their wounded to the point of death, so will children—and adults—gnaw at a bearer of stigma until his psyche perishes. The straight "A" report card, an interest in books, a too mannered way of speaking—these mark the bearer for assault just as a lack of diploma once marked my father.

The assault did not come quickly, with fists and blood and pain. Rather, ridicule accrued in tiny increments, so much so that I learned to avoid even praise, fearing its penumbra of scorn and disparagement, for once a test score or teacher marked me for attention, the poor students began their titters and sneers. I tried to hide my mark by limiting my study, taking up swearing and lax grammar and avoiding distinction.

The intellectually unsuccessful often take pleasure upon seeing bright students do poorly once out of academia's protection. Called schadenfreude, literally "harm-joy," such pleasure ensues from leveling disparities of fate. Colin Turnbull detailed such glee in his study of the Ik, a pathetic tribe near starvation, so poor in resource that they derived all their joy from others' suffering. He noted how the "men would…burst into gay and happy laughter as (a child) plunged a skinny hand into the coals."

Most of us would consider Turnbull's evidence a marker of man's inhumanity, but Frans De Waal suggests the behavior might instead be the derivation of "pleasure from an equalization of fate, regardless of whether it is brought about by an uplifting or downward movement." Schadenfreude, for De Waal, is less evidence of man's brutality than a function of a desire to even things out.

The rural bumpkin's opportunities in the 1930's did not equal the city dweller's, nor do they now. Nor does the black's equal the white's, the firstborn's the last's, the poverty stricken that of the rich or the Westerner's that of the Easterner—however you wish to group men as alike their environments still differ, and each man, removed from his surroundings, may lack the intelligence required for success elsewhere.

"Intelligence," writes Harry Frank, who studies wolves and dogs, "is the capacity to change in one's environment. What defines intelligence depends on the environment one is in." Wolves are less able than their canine relatives to learn instructions from man, though they can more easily solve problems of induction set forth in their own environment. A dog, by taking cues from its master, can learn, unlike a wolf, to turn right upon seeing a green light. But a wolf more quickly envisions methods by which to avert a fallen tree in the wild.

Dogs have been selected in an environment that includes humans, and their intelligence now operates best within parameters which include them. Wolves' environment lacks man as a component, so they "think" better without him present, in the natural world within which they've evolved—sans traffic light.

Much as a wolf's mind differs from a dog's, one man's intelligence contrasts with another's according to their environmental disparity. Among those distinctions are the arrangement of space and sensation and their consequent quantities and qualities, and the types of tools present during the learning years. In contact with different information than the rural mind, the urban acquires an intelligence best fitted to its surroundings. Outside, it likely flounders, just as the rural intelligence, in an urban setting, may find itself wholly ignorant.

Information is, according to Gregory Bateson, a difference which makes a difference. The mind sorts out some differences, levels others—the botanist can distinguish between kinds of desert sage while the computer hack, having a different body of knowledge, may not. Each first learns repetitious facts from his environment to create order, then aims toward its distinctions to gather the chaos needed for change. But the differences of a completely alien environment are too numerous for a mind to immediately assimilate.

The flower's stigma acquires such distinctions as pollen, which it combines with its own familiar genetic base to reproduce a new form—a natural example of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Jesus received through his stigmata the enmity of the Romans, an enmity transformed into a tool which would eventually overthrow their empire. And my father's mark generated a prejudice which he would partially overcome, throwing his consequent offspring new stigma with which to generate change.

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