Stupidity Revisited

It’s been a while since this blog has visited Bush, the POTUS. Here’s Bill Maher psychologically analysing Bush at Crooksandliers.com. It is hard to comprehend the mentality of a population which voted for a stupid person like Bush not once but twice. Words defy me. Oh that reminds me, here’s a google video titled Words Defy Me by the incomparable Jon Stewart.

And talking of stupid people and their stupidity, read the Story of Stupidity at whereelse but stupidity.com. To get a quick feel for the book, I would recommend you read the last chapter, the Age of Arrogance. For the record, I quote the epilogue of the book here.

The overwhelming conclusion of this work must be that people are human. This profound insight is based not only on the fact that we err but that we do so stupidly because our schemas define the way we perceive and interact with our environment while interfering with the way we learn about it and ourselves. At best, stupidity is a necessary evil since we do need guiding schemas to help us order our lives, even if these systems of thought come to shape and dominate our conscious world by structuring our perceptions, values and beliefs.

This review of the history of stupidity indicates that perhaps we overrated words as defining elements of schemas. For example, Galileo was entranced by neither the Italian nor Latin word for “Circle” but by the image of the circle as the perfect form. Thus, while words may shape our beliefs and thoughts to some extent, they may also be simply masking labels we attach to images and ideas we already hold. In a more general sense, language does not seem to dictate our behavior directly as much as it shapes it indirectly by the way we evaluate, think and talk about it.

More important, this work indicates how our sense of morality interacts with our propensity for learning. One of the human universals is a standard for judging what we do and what we learn. The specific standards vary, of course, from culture to culture, but every group and every individual has some subjective standard for making such judgments. In the absence of knowledge of absolute ultimates, Western culture uses its material success as the measure of all things. However, even in the context of materialism, it is time we recognize the long-term negative impact our technological self-centeredness imposes on the environment as we pursue our own short-term interests and goals. Likewise, we must recognize the nationalistic self-centeredness which inhibits our perception of ourselves as part of a global community.

If there is a sign of hope, it must be that the West permits people to question as well as to do. This combination makes our civilization potentially self-corrective, as it promotes learning and makes us at least theoretically capable of adapting not only to nature in general but to our own subjective nature as well. Further, it invites us to adapt our moral code to what we learn.

Ultimately, the intellectual/moral imperative is for less imposition and more balance. We should not be imposing ourselves on the world or our values on each other. Rather, we should be balancing our need for myths, quest for moral order and desire for material achievement with the necessity of learning history’s overwhelming lesson: We must live together. To fail to do so would be very stupid indeed.

By the way, if you think this a trite way to end this book, take another look at the subtitle on the cover.

The American fiasco in Iraq is a potent example of national stupidity.