For nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy nonsense of cliché and conventional wisdom; One of Flaubert's characters says that in mass society “the germs of stupidity… are transmitted from person to person,” and we end up becoming lemmings, followers of leaders, trends and fads. (This “modern stupidity,” Jeffries explains, “is accelerated by urbanization: the denser the population in one sense, the denser it is in another.”) And the twentieth and twenty-first centuries saw further innovation. We are now aware of the types of stupidity that can manifest through intelligence tests or stupid bureaucracy; we know about “crap job” And “banality of evil” And digital flood. Jeffries examines a light fixture in his bedroom; it has a recessed design that's hard to figure out, so he goes to YouTube to look for videos that can show him how to change a light bulb. Modern, high-tech life is complex. So, yes, in a broad sense, we may well become dumber—not necessarily because we are dumber, but because the ways in which we can be dumb continue to proliferate.
A Brief History of Stupidity does not always address the question of whether the multiplication of stupidity is substantive or rhetorical. When Flaubert writes that people today are drowning in clichés and conventional wisdom, is he right? Is it true that before newspapers people held more diverse and original views? This seems unlikely. The general trend over the last few hundred years has been to increase the level of education for more people. Flaubert may well have encountered more stupid thoughts, but this may have reflected the fact that more thoughts were shared with him.
It could be argued that in protesting the stupidity of the cliché, Flaubert was actually practicing a form of self-abasement—that is, he was asking himself whether he agreed with the cliché, and thus encouraging himself and us to be less stupid. In his satirical “Dictionary of ideas received“, written in the 1870s, Flaubert offered a whole series of definitions embodying the stupid concepts that stupid people are too willing to accept. (Jeffreys likes “Art”: “Leads to the poorhouse. What's the point of it if machines can do everything better and faster?” My wife and I always laugh at “The Bird”: “Wish you were one of them, saying with a sigh: “Oh, for a pair of wings!” It shows that you have a poetic soul.” Such thoughts come naturally to us: “Stupidity is a product of the groups and societies in which we grow up,” Jeffries explains, citing philosopher Sasha Golob.
And yet it seems undeniable that something is wrong in our collective intellectual life. The current political situation makes this “a good time to write about stupidity,” Jeffries writes. When he notes that the main characteristic of stupidity is that it “can be counted on to do one thing specifically designed to achieve the wrong end”—or “a ridiculous disparity of means and ends”—he makes the word “stupidity” an ideal way to characterize our era, in which many people think that the key to making America healthy again is to stop vaccinations. Meanwhile, in a recent issue of the magazine New York magazine – “The Stupid Issue” – journalist Andrew Rice describes an alarming and widespread decline in high school students' ability to perform basic tasks such as calculating tips on a restaurant receipt. This decline occurs even in well-funded school districts and is part of a broader academic pattern in which literacy is declining And standards are falling.
Perhaps we are becoming dumber. However, one of the problems with discourses of stupidity is that they can be perceived as reductive, aggressive, and even insulting. Self-deprecation is still humiliating; when we call each other stupid, we spread humiliation, regardless of whether our accusation is fair or unfair. In recent mail on Substack, philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism is best understood as a rebellion against the “cognitive elite,” that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more consciously about almost everything. According to this theory, the world created by the cognitive elite is one in which you have to listen to experts, keep up with technology, and navigate six pages of online forms to buy a movie ticket; sometimes “requires that a typical person, during a conversation, actively suppress a familiar word that comes first (e.g., “homeless”) and replace, through explicit cognition, a newly coined word that is currently popular (e.g., “homeless”).” The cognitive elite are right when they say that people who think about things intuitively are often wrong; on issues such as crime and immigration, the truth is counterintuitive. (Legal procedures are better than rough justice; immigrants increase both the supply and demand for labor.) But the result was that foolish people banded together and formed an opposition party. What is the way out of this death spiral? Nobody knows.
In 1970, a dead sperm whale washed up on a beach in Florence, Oregon. It was huge, and no one knew what to do with it. Eventually, the State Highway Department, which was in charge of the operation, decided to blow up the corpse with dynamite. They planted half a ton of explosives – that's a lot! – on the leeward side of the whale, trusting that what doesn’t get blown out to sea will break up into pieces small enough for crabs and seagulls to eat. Spectators gathered to watch the explosion. He failed to destroy the whale, but instead created a dangerous hail of rotten whale fragments. “I realized there was grease pouring all around us,” Paul Lynnman, a reporter at the scene. said Popular mechanics magazine. “The fat is so dense that a piece the size of your fingertip can fit through your head. [the] Trail, we heard a second explosion in our direction and saw a fat the size of a coffee table hit a car.” ( video about the incident, which was first popularized by Dave Barry after he wrote about it in 1990, is an Internet treasure and benefits from Lynnman's deadpan narration on television news.)
There can be joy and humor in stupidity—think bad videos, reality TV, and Dumb and Dumber. It doesn't have to be mean-spirited either. The city of Florence now boasts an open space called Exploding Whale Memorial Park; Last year, after a weeklong celebration of Exploding Whale Day, people gathered there in costume. Watching the original video, I sympathize with the engineer who came up with the dynamite plan. I was there. Err is human. Smart people sometimes do stupid things. We all blow up a whale from time to time; The main thing is not to do it again.
And yet stupidity, unfortunately, is not always so simple. This is a concept that requires nuance. To be smart, we need to be aware of our own stupidity—remind ourselves that we still have a lot to learn. At the same time, we don't want to feel so stupid that we give up, become cynical, or become disillusioned with what is considered “smart.” Likewise, to effectively navigate the world requires recognizing the stupidity of others, but living together involves understanding that stupidity is inevitable and depends on context. There is some ideal degree of consciousness of stupidity – some measured value that protects us from arrogance and at the same time pushes us forward. This is not easy to achieve. ♦
