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IN AMERICA YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO BE STUPID
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently informed a German audience that: “In America you have a right to be stupid - if you want to be.” (Reuters 26.2.2013). This was in defence of freedom of speech. The audience laughed at this self-deprecating humor. (Also, they understood English.) This inspired a thought to Google “Stupidity” and various politicians.
This is the score card:
Barack Obama 10,800,000
Donald Trump 4,480,000
Hilary Clinton 3,200,000
David Cameron 3,010,000
Ted Cruz 1,630,000
Justin Trudeau 68,000
Seriously, none of them are actually stupid, and the hits include funny faces and their allegations of other people’s stupidity; plus the high scores are indices not only of how long they have been targets but also of a certain considerable disrespect and contempt for politicians and politics. Still, some of the comments by these individuals are worrying, as is the hatred towards them. Trudeau is just beginning, but the attacks have begun already.
Synchronicity being what it is, there is more. David Graeber teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics and is one of the founders of the Occupy Movement, and apparently coined the phrase “We are the 99%.” His new book “The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” (2016) is a storied analysis of the stupidity of bureaucracy, despite its having been hailed by Max Weber as the rise of rationality and meritocracy, replacing nepotism and wealth as criteria for advancement. Seemingly we (or they) have replaced responsibility with irresponsibility in bureaucracy. The buck does not stop here, it does not stop anywhere: it just keeps rolling along, downhill all the way.
A third theme is the book “Stupid Wars” (Strosser and Prince, 2008). Stupid or not, many people were killed in these wars, and usually not those who instigated them, but the young men who were sent to fight them, on both sides. Some wars are, or were, justified, I think. But all have horrible consequences, and there will always be disagreements about which were justified and which were stupid. This book is an excellent and sad continuation of the debate. Two stupid campaigns were Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and then Hitler’s, (well, also WW2 itself) were not included here, but there have been more than enough wars to suggest that one should be concerned about the term Homo sapiens. The book echoes Barbara Tuchman’s well-known “The March of Folly” (1984).
Another book on stupidity, “The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said” (Petras and Petras, 2001) does include some really funny Freudian slips, mangled sentences, mixed metaphors, Spoonerisns, mostly American, and often from tired politicians. Yogi Berra features prominently, not that he was stupid, but he did have a way with words.
Stupidity, or perhaps more correctly, erroneous thinking is now emerging as a field of research, Error Studies, as some say, or Wrongology as Kathryn Schulz says in her book “Being Wrong. Adventures in the Margin of Error” (2010/2011). To err is human. Indeed, as she explains, it pretty much defines humanity. It is normal to be wrong. Schulz capsizes the traditional view of error as, largely, stupidity. She starts with Benjamin Franklin’s insight that: ”Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.” And she follows Augustine: “Fallor, ergo sum.” I err, therefore I am. So different from Descartes and Sartre. This is a bit of a paradigm shift, and she explains that: “…we are wrong about what it means to be wrong” (p.5), and she lists the scientific theories later proved to be wrong: “the flat earth, the geocentric universe “etc (p.9). She adds that “… the goal of this book is to urge us to rethink our relationship to wrongness… our mistakes are part and parcel of our brilliance…What makes us right is what makes us wrong.’ (pp.121-3). We are not entirely rational: “We are quasi-rational actors, in whom reason is forever sharing the stage with ego and hope and stubbornness and loathing and loyalty.” (p.195). Schulz also analyzes mistakes in the criminal justice system, the medical system, and errors of judgement in love, with King Lear and Othello as classic impersonal examples. (Some of these issues were discussed in an earlier post, but Schulz is more detailed and in depth.) It’s not that stupidity is great. On the contrary, it can kill us and others, as in “Stupid Wars”; but being wrong is not necessarily stupid. We can learn.
This continuing re-evaluation of humans is particularly evident in the work of the Nobel Prize winning author, Daniel Kahneman. His book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) is not so much about the above, but our “cognitive mechanisms” and especially about the difference between “intuitive” or fast thinking and “rational” or slow thinking, between (using his examples) interpreting a photograph of a very angry woman and calculating 17x24. So many things can go wrong, both with sensory perception (as Descartes had already discussed) but simply with how we think, our “systemic errors” based partly on laziness (“Laziness is built deep into our nature.”p.35) and partly on personality, fast or slow thinking (p.45.) He does not say much about stupidity, it is not in the index, but he says much about types of errors and their causes. These include the Moses illusion, the framing affect, priming, base-rate neglect, the mere exposure effect (repetition), the affect heuristic, and, as they say, so much more. This is an extremely important and useful work on thinking badly and being wrong.
There are more facets and dimensions to human stupidity than I had originally expected. (Think Erasmus’ satirical and critical “The Praise of Folly” (1511) on doctors, lawyers, theologians, princes and popes etc.) Consider religion. Extremist believers have believed for centuries that non-believers, of whatever faiths were (and are) not only stupid but also evil and worthy of death. On the other hand, atheists tend to believe that all believers are wrong and stupid. Marx famously described religion as “the opium of the people,” a drug. Feuerbach argued that Christianity, and by extension, all religions are projections of human needs and desires: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man…made God in his.” Nietzsche insisted in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” that “God is dead” (p. 114), endorsed “the will to power” rather than to love thy neighbour (p. 138), despized ”the herd” in favour of the Superman and then, in “Ecce Homo”, he proclaimed: “I am… the Anti-Christ” (p. 72), in an attempt to capsize Christian values and replace them with, in his view, more realistic, secular values.
Freud had yet another angle on religion. In “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) he was somewhat positive, suggesting that religion was useful: “Religion has clearly performed great services for human civilization. It has contributed much to the taming of the asocial instincts. But not enough” (p.219). In the end he dismissed religious beliefs as an illusion, wish-fulfillment, an infantile projection and a “displacement of man’s will on to God” (pp. 193, 217, 197, 225). He insisted that “religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior forces of nature” (p. 201). Agnostics, on still another hand, don’t know; they refuse to commit. They just have to wait and see.
Then again, consider politics. I’m guessing that Republicans and Democrats probably agree on only one thing: that the others are stupid. The same is surely true for members of other parties in other countries. Unfortunately, such an agreement probably does not provide a stable base for a viable political platform.
And so much of politics is about economics: Keynes vs Friedman, higher or lower taxes, balancing the budget or running a deficit, more government or less, and the Panama papers are about tax avoidance or tax evasion, and the Occupy movement was about the 1% vs the 99% (as Graeber noted).
So stupidity (and error, not the same, but often related) cover a lot of ground: hatred (#1), bureaucracy, wars, wrongology and laziness (Kahneman), not to mention religion (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche), politics and economics. But we get it right too, sometimes.
Bibliography
Erasmus, 1511. The Praise of Folly.
Freud, Sigmund 1985 [1927]. The Future of an Illusion. In Pelican Freud Library Vol 12
Graeber, David, 2016. The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: First Melville House.
Kahneman, Daniel 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Toronto: Anchor.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1985 [1885] Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Classics.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1985 [1888]. Ecce Homo. Penguin Classics.
Petras, Ross and Kathryn, 2001. The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said. New York: Broadway Books.
Schulz, Kathryn 2010 hb/ 2011 pb. Being Wrong. Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: Ecco.
Strosser, Ed and Michael Prince, 2008. Stupid Wars. New York: Collins.
Tuchman, Barbara 1984. The March of Folly.
