Has there ever been a stupider time? There's just so much stupidity available for consumption these days, it's so widespread the world teems with it. Used to be people were careful about saying stupid things. These days people revel in it. There's no shame in public stupidity. Stupidity finds stupidity and reinforces stupidity. There are groups organized around stupidity. Tribes of stupidity. People are proud of their stupidity and shout it from the hills. Saying stupid things is like carrying a flag - a freedom banner that says 'I'm so free I can say the stupidest things imaginable!' People wear stupid slogans on their clothes. Support stupid people who say the stupidest things in their politics. They buy stupid products advertised by stupid people who make stupid claims about them. They watch stupid movies, play stupid video games and listen to stupid songs. This is truly the age of stupidity. I'm not saying there aren't smart people. And I'm not saying smart people aren't doing smart things. I'm saying that stupid people saying and doing stupid things rule the day. So much so that even smart people are saying stupid things. I like to watch videos online about ideas. I've noticed that there are a lot of very smart, highly educated people promoting and taking seriously some of the stupidest ideas. Lately, for example, I've been interested in theories of consciousness. Reading books about consciousness from lay-scientific and philosophical perspectives. For decades, the theory and study of consciousness was an area considered marginal at best in academia. It wasn’t taken seriously. If you wanted an academic career specializing in the theory of consciousness it was a fast track to obscurity or unemployment. Now there seems to be an entire industry of academics solely devoted to theories of consciousness, and online discussions about consciousness abound. They talk about consciousness from all kinds of angles, philosophical, psychological, neurological, zoological, sociological, quantum-mechanical, mathematical and spiritual. The funniest part is that no one is quite sure what consciousness is, and they all say as much. Maybe that’s the reason some of the stupidest theories by smart people I've seen are posited about consciousness. They say consciousness does not really exist, or that rocks are conscious, or that consciousness exists outside of our consciousness, or that what we think is consciousness is actually a computer simulation in which we live. I have nothing against stupid theories. History demonstrates how some theories once thought stupid turn out to be correct. It's important to put forward stupid theories. But most stupid theories turn out to be just stupid, and these days we're inundated by them. The difference is that there used to be a system in place to separate the promising stupid theories from the ones that are just stupid. There were gatekeepers before that blocked most of us from hearing the unpromising stupid theories. That gatekeeping system has evaporated and now we hear them all. Obviously social media is a big part of it. Smart people with stupid ideas can reach a wide audience, just like dumb people with stupid ideas can, and everyone loves attention. In fact, stupid ideas are magnets for getting attention. It's how the National Enquirer became a newspaper empire. If you’re an academic toiling in obscurity on a stupid theory, the incentive to put your half-baked ideas out there is undeniable. Of course, for the rest of us with stupid opinions, social media has been a bonanza. We can take adolescent pleasure in showing how free we are to say stupid and irresponsible things. At the beginning of widespread internet access we all thought it would make us smarter and more informed. It turned out the opposite. We learned that we are far more attracted to stupidity than expertise. Ignorance is definitely bliss. It feels good to let our cellphones tell us what to do and how to think. But we shouldn't forget that being stupid is actually a very big deal. Stupidity inevitably leads to chaos, disorder and destruction. Wars result from stupidity. I think our turn to toward populist far-right politics relates to our age of stupidity. With so much stupidity on display we want strongmen leaders to save us from ourselves. Our pervasive apathy and disillusionment also relates to all the stupidity to which we are constantly exposed. Even our fear of AI relates to stupidity. Many of us believe it's inevitable that the computers we create will become more clever than us and decide to be our overlords because we're just too stupid to do anything about it. We seem convinced by our own stupidity that we are irredeemably stupid. That would be a paralyzingly self-defeatingly stupid conclusion to draw.
4 comments:
There was a time when only people with relevant credentials were asked to express their opinions. Nowadays, the only credential you need is a mouth. You mention social media, but another good barometer is TV. Back in the 60s, you could turn on your TV and watch a learned debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley on, for example, race relations (you can watch it on YouTube), but now it's the Kardashians, or the Tiger King or some other such drivel.
Another barometer of course is politics. Compare Donald Trump to John F. Kennedy on the stupidity continuum. Plato thought that the "Philosopher-King" was the best model for political leadership. I wonder what Plato would say if he were alive today. (See also one of my favorite e.e. cummings poems, "plato told them".)
Didn’t know that ee cummings poem. Holy crackers. That’s a poem we could discuss over whiskey. ‘A nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el’?
I learned that “The final lines of e.e. cummings’ poem refer to Manhattan’s dismantled Sixth Avenue elevated tracks, which were bought as scrap metal by Imperial Japan three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” Never thought of cummings as a political poet.
Oh yes, quite political, and an ardent passivist of course. You may be familiar with his novel "The Enormous Room" about his arrest and imprisonment due to his anti-war stance in Europe during WWI.
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