A few years before he died in exile from
Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture
in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that
stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of
processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’,
indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very
different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because
some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most
stupid.
Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What
exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be
morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to
vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it
so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and
insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around
pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar
Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition
about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.
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.
Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated
conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s
grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this
from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons.
Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error.
Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the
irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom
wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering
dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower.
Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of
the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual
equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute
willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self
and our world.
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.
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.
Musil’s indulgent, almost patrician, attitude to ‘honourable’
dumbness was certainly dangerously complacent: consider its role
in the anti-vax phenomenon. But dumbness alone is rarely the
driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you
will find the stupid in charge.
We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why
someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in
another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific.
Furthermore, we can see that there will be many cases that
aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects.
Imagine someone who had been blind to all evidence that they
were being cheated on finally asking themselves ‘How could you
be so stupid?’ Here the problem is not pure stupidity: the
concept of a cheat is common enough. What we have here is rather
someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they
failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally
didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to
emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents
possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock
them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we
can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.
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 ancestors 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. |
