Liberals and conservatives agree on very little. One thing upon which they do concur is that stupidity is rampant. They merely identify it as residing in different places. Each side is certain that the worst nonsense is located among their foes. Those other guys obviously wouldn’t recognize common sense if it bit them in the derriere.
When I was young, I assumed that people were getting smarter all the time. With so many more of us receiving college degrees, we were plainly using our brains more effectively. Higher education promised to instill critical thinking and this was surely happening.
At the time, I had not heard about Harold Wilson’s observation regarding colleges. This former Cambridge Don and English prime minister explained that these schools enabled students to recognize nonsense when they encountered it. Because universities spouted so much highfalutin drivel, their graduates were no longer intimidated by it.
Neither was I aware of Thomas Sowell’s later assertion that well-educated people are frequently experts at rationalization. It’s not that they know more than others, but that they can use their intelligence and learning to devise arguments that sound persuasive, despite their absurdity.
Nowadays, of course, the primary source of nonsense is politics. The arguments about how we should be governed have become so heated that intelligent people support the most ridiculous proposals. The Green New Deal is a case in point. A moment of unbiased reflection would demonstrate that its aspirations are untenable.
But who has time to reflect when so much is at stake? Politicians are not seeking the truth; they are seeking power. The goal is to defeat their rivals, not to add to our shared store of knowledge. Thus it is and thus it has always been. Indeed, it is built into our genetic makeup.
I am currently completing a manuscript that I hope to have published in a month or two. It is entitled Social Stupidityand its main thrust is that no matter how smart we are we are destined to do foolish things. Our social nature is such that we often refuse to use facts and logic when making important decisions.
Part of the reason is that the world is so complex we seldom have the time or the resources to ascertain the truth. Another is that for our societies to function, we need shortcuts to adjudicate the inevitable clashes of interest between individuals.
Human hierarchies provide a method for getting around these difficulties. Thus, we rank ourselves against others to determine where we stand. This enables us to coordinate complicated activities—but at a cost. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we follow the lead of our superiors. They are regarded as authorities.
This is all well and good when our leaders know what they are talking about. It can be a disaster when they do not. Given that both liberalism and conservatism have run into empirical roadblocks, those in their vanguard are often misguided in their ambitions.
What is worse, these leaders are typically ideologues who do not care about ascertaining the truth. The Mueller report supplies a lovely illustration. To wit, members of the House judiciary committee demanded that they see this narrative in a completely unredacted form. Then, when this was made available to its leaders, the Democrats refused to read it.
Why did they decline to review the facts? The answer is simple. Their goal was not to find out what was true, but to defeat their rivals. They wanted their side to win, even if they had to resort to fabrications to do so. Interestingly, the Democrats also eschewed reading unfavorable materials when Bill Clinton was impeached.
This attitude toward the truth is commonplace. It is not that people are stupid, but that they often act as if they were. The notion that we humans think for ourselves has more to do with inflating our self-opinions than with what we actually do.
We humans are a strange species. Although we have larger brains than any other animals, we are not calculating machines. We are a social species. As such, politics is part of what it takes to maintain communal integrity, but oddly what can also rend us apart.
We are presently enduring one of those periods when our intelligence may be a handicap. Instead of using our brains to figure out how we can work together, we are applying them to determine how to destroy our adversaries. If this goes much further, we may all be in jeopardy.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Kennesaw State University
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