Stupdiity - A Vice

 I never thought of stupidity as a vice. Stupidity just was. That is, until this gloomy New Year's Day, I came upon Psyche's Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid.

Some high points:

Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.

This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Okay, that makes sense to me. Whether it makes sense of me, I refrain from saying so.

Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Indeed, in at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation: when Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, took Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, through the tricks underlying the seances in which Conan Doyle devoutly believed, the author’s reaction was to concoct a ludicrously elaborate counter-explanation as to why it was precisely the true mediums who would appear to be frauds.

Not having the conceptual tools for confronting reality could, I think, also lead to a breakdown of cognition. That, also, does not feel like stupidity, but might be interpreted by another as stupidity.  To me, the following explains the difference:

While I have introduced it via ‘conceptual obsolescence’, stupidity is also compatible with a kind of misguided innovation. Consider a country that excitedly imports new conceptual tools not from a past time but from a very different place. Global debates over social justice, for example, are now dominated by a set of ideas and terms taken from the United States, a nation marked by an incredibly specific historical and cultural trajectory. Simply transferring that framework to other countries, such as those in which class is less starkly racialised (for example, states reliant on exploiting white migrant labour from eastern Europe), or in which it is racialised in much more complex ways (for example, states such as South Africa) is conceptually and socially risky.

Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous when compared with other vices. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Suppose the problem with Haig had been laziness: there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him. But if Haig worked himself to the bone within the intellectual prison of the 19th-century military tradition, then solving the difficulty becomes harder: you will need to introduce a new conceptual framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalising new concepts is tough work. 

Second, stupidity begets more stupidity due to a profound ambiguity in its nature. If stupidity is a matter of the wrong tools for the job, whether an action is stupid will depend on what the job is; just as a hammer is perfect for some tasks and wrong for others. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. It is vital to separate this point from familiar and condescending claims about how dumb or uneducated the ‘other side’ are: stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level.

Okay, it is cultural, not individual, in origin. Which raises questions about education - does an educational system not bake in stupidity? Not an educational system that allows for dissent on the cultural level. The same for a political system. Seems to me, this problem of stupidity is why the writers of American constitutions allowed for free speech and freedom of conscience. I do not think it has ever been raised in these terms, but protection from stupidity might be the true basis for Madison's Federalist Number 10 wherein he argued the federal system of distributed government would protect against factions. We see it in American abolitionists, who still retained racist views for all their hatred of slavery. I cannot think of a better argument against authoritarian governments, which our Founders knew much about, than they being hidebound progenitors of stupidity. The absolutist French king could not correct course against the French Revolution, Hitler decides to invade the U.S.S.R., and Putin invades Ukraine. 

I found the following in The Hedgehog Review's The First Authoritarian Popper’s Plato:

Today, The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps best remembered for two things: Karl Popper’s coinage of the terms “open society” and “closed society,” and his scorched-earth attack on Plato as the original architect of the latter. For Popper, Plato was the first and the most influential authoritarian thinker. (Popper’s analogous charges against Aristotle, Marx, and Hegel have not proven as memorable.)

Popper conceived of the difference between open and closed societies as a difference in their respective cultures of knowledge. Open societies were distinguished by their democratic culture of criticism, which made commonly held beliefs available for critique and revision, and in so doing, embraced innovation. Closed societies, by contrast, lacked this “critical attitude.” They were instead sustained by the “dogmatic” power of myths, which preserved existing power structures and stifled social change.

Closed societies seem to me to fit the original article's definition of stupidity. Autocracy is a closed system; democracy is not.

Consider A Speculative Endeavor Education has become an investment. But what are its returns? from Lapham's Quarterly, and this passage:

In the context of social struggles, an education is more like a bonfire on a winter night than a table lamp in a hallway. It illuminates society’s haunted and austere structures, the precious life within. It draws people together. It does not ensure comfort. By the mid-1960s universities provided a critical gathering place for activists as the nation plunged into a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam, and legacies of racist and sexist inequalities unleashed new currents of social-movement organizing. Colleges and universities incubated the Black power movement, women’s liberation organizing, the free speech movement, and antiwar mobilization. Students were not content simply to learn about the structures of the world; they fought to transform them. Many of these movements pushed back against the “knowledge society” that planned militaristic, capitalist endpoints for education. If education had become the means to build a new society, it could also be the means to dismantle a dysfunctional one.

It was precisely the liberatory capacity of education that quickly drove conservative policy makers and pundits to oppose publicly funded, free higher education. The radical potential of public higher education had proved dangerous because it could be harnessed to social movements capable of challenging the systems of oppression that support the status quo. To fulfill the promise of education as human capital, education had to be chained to its economic role and divorced from its revolutionary possibilities. A key leader of this effort was economist Milton Friedman. In response to protests by “intolerant radicals” at the University of Chicago, Friedman wrote in 1969, “We must do some drastic rethinking if we are to preserve the university as the home of reason, persuasion, and free discussion.”

Conservatism wants stupidity - needs it? - for its self-preservation.

Aligning stupidity with stubbornness makes sense to me. I have been highly stubborn most of my life, I have been very stupid when most stubborn. The two vices seem not to dovetail, but entangle one another.

So stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least one part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.

 It seems to me, allowing a plural universe rather than a Manichean one would alleviate some stupidity (we cannot escape all stupidity - people will buy Pet Rocks or vote for Donald J. Trump). However, when stupidity becomes so pernicious as to endanger life and liberty, then we must take arms against the idiots who would destroy us and our liberty. That assumes we are not also to be numbered among the stupid. Therein lies the need for the virtue of humility.

sch 1/1/23