STUPIDITY AND HOMO SAPIENS (in three parts)

1 THE VALUE OF STUPIDITY

Einstein said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not too sure about the former.” A rather jaundiced view of Homo sapiens. But he insisted: “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” As something of an expert on stupidity, my own anyway, I would like to contribute my two cents worth – or perhaps one cent’s worth. My main point is that we underestimate the value of stupidity. It is a very important factor in . Consider the impact of stupidity on our systemic and institutional lives, forgetting for the moment our personal lives.

1.1 The medical system: stupid accidents and behaviour help to maintain our medical system. Stupidity tries to keep our hospitals full, and contributes to the economies and careers of the entire medical system: nurses, doctors, surgeons, X-ray technicians, ambulance drivers and paramedics; and also the machinery and technology from CAT scans and MRI machines to stethoscopes; and the medical schools; and it also maintains much of the pharmaceutical industries and legal drug systems. It would be invidious to mention how much car accidents or train wrecks (or my bike crash and broken wrist) all cost, and who benefited.

1.2: Stupidity keeps our legal system expanding with judges, lawyers and police officers, and all those teachers who trained them, and the law schools; and the construction workers and architects building new prisons as the rate declines; and the criminologists and sociologists writing books about the causes of, and solutions to, crime; and the social workers trying to help the families in these punitive times; not to mention the politicians, who are so tough on crime, except their own, to get re-elected. (You think that’s cynical? That is why they are the bottom of the list of the most respected people, at least in Canada – it’s probably similar in the U.S. and the U.K.. Only 10% trust car sales people, but worse than that, only 9% trust national politicians (Bricker and Wright, 2006: 66). A minority, 29%, trust lawyers, but 94% trust firefighters, who are at the top. (The other 6% just may not trust anyone, or perhaps they know some firefighters.)The legal system is largely dependent on the stupid, but often also on highly intelligent people too. It is curious that one can be very stupid and very smart at the same time, but the common denominator is often greed, and : the belief that one is cleverer than everyone else. One example: Bernie Madoff, whom the judge described as “evil”, which is light years beyond stupid, and sentenced to 150 years for defrauding investors of $20 billion, which was pretty clever.

Put simply, crime is the raison d’etre, the engine, of our criminal justice system. Without it, jobs would disappear, and many of our TV programs, films and novels. And stupidity is one of the engines of crime: the criminals so often get caught, eventually, or murdered or, like so many school shooters, kill themselves.

1.3: The political system would be boring without the plethora of scandals which sell the media systems, both print and social media: Clinton and Lewinski, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Iris Robinson in Northern Ireland, and so many others. In France, perhaps, not so much, though Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have changed the French sexual culture single-handed. Certainly the newsworthy stories are not all about sex, they are often about money. In Canada we have recently read about several scandals among our Senators and a provincial premier involving such alleged issues as claiming a modest country cottage as the main place of residence (to claim an Ottawa living allowance), claiming a travel allowance for personal business, chartering private aircraft and booking all the seats, then cancelling all but two, for the family, and so on. Ah! The trough! But they were all caught. Credibility shot. Dismissed from the party. Forced to resign. Stupid! But again with the greed.

1.4: All this keeps the media alive and prospering and keeps us indignant and self-righteous…as if many of us would do any different, given the chance. As an aside, I just forgot to put my coffee mug under the machine. Coffee all over the floor. Stupid. I told you I was an expert. The same day, but later, the woman upstairs forgot to put the hose from her washing machine into the outlet, left her apartment, and flooded her apartment, mine below, and the one below mine. Forgetful. Does that count as stupid? I think so. Others say no. Forgetful and stupid are not the same; which is true – but I see the former as a component of the latter. So did my teachers: forgetting French irregular verbs required physical from the sadistic Fr. Bouret S.J. Forgetting to stop at a STOP sign will likely ensure civil sanctions from the police.

1.5: Finally, the , cosmetic and clothing industries are about selling their products to a gullible population in a consumer-oriented culture, and our banking and financial systems facilitate this in so far as it helps their bottom line. Conspicuous consumption has been the norm even before the sociologist Thorstein Veblen and the rise of capitalism (not to forget socialism): Alpha Romeo anyone? Armani? And if you or I are foolish enough to buy into this consumer hype, and to actually believe it, then we will soon be in the debt pool, drowning. But we do, which is why we have an advertizing industry, a banking industry, and foreclosures, bankruptcies, suicides, divorces…at least partly thanks to the cupidity of Wall St. and Madison Avenue and the stupidity of Main St. But that is not quite fair. To trust bankers nowadays might be stupid: hence the foreclosures and the debt; but trust is not in itself stupid, surely, though it may be misplaced. Likewise believing advertising. What we have here is capitalism at its worst, responsible for the 2008 meltdown and increasing inequality. Coincidentally or not, Gallup recently polled people in 124 countries, effectively, “Do you trust your banks?” Responding yes: 77% in India, 47% in the U.S., 26% in Iceland and 11% in Cyprus. (Time 1 Sept 2014:8)

In sum, stupidity is not just stupid, it is extraordinarily useful, and even necessary (as well as extremely destructive: see next week). It maintains our medical, prison, criminal, legal, social work, media, advertizing, cosmetic, clothing and academic industries, as well as and economics; and it keeps large sectors of our population gainfully employed.

Lifestyles cause deathstyles. We are complicit in our own deaths to a huge degree by our unhealthy habits of eating, drinking, and lack of exercise; e. . eating: anorexia, diabetes; drinking: liver disease; smoking: cancers of the lungs, throat and tongue; exercise: , diabetes and heart attacks. Not to mention drugs, gambling, sex and high risk hobbies and occupations.

Today there are so many obvious stupidities: drunk driving, smoking (I found it very hard to quit), unprotected sex (unless you want children of course), cycling without lights at night, fishing or canoeing on the water without a life jacket, texting while driving, starting up in crime (which can pay but is an occupation with high mortality and incarceration rates), failures to recycle, both personal and political,…please feel free to add your own favourites and experiences.

But here is the problem: we may agree that some of our actions, or other peoples’, or government or corporate policies are stupid; but how can we operationalize the concept? How can we measure stupidity? (How to define it? Check a dictionary or Wikipedia.) We have measures of almost everything: time and space and speed, fertility and mortality rates, G.D.P., presidential popularity, crime…but not stupidity. Can we compare stupidity rates by age, sex and ethnic group? Or by state or province? With accurate statistics we might be able to ameliorate the high costs. Certainly we do have some measures: smoking rates, obesity rates, but we do not yet have a universal measure reliable for individuals and for cross-cultural comparison. We have IQs and EQs, and we need SQs.

Yet despite its value, I only found one poem in praise of stupidity:

See the happy moron

He doesn’t give a damn

I wish I were a moron,

My God! Perhaps I am!

(Eugenics Review July 1929)

That poem was no doubt meant to be amusing, but it stands as a salutary reminder that the so-called “morons” were killed under eugenics programs, not only most systematically in Nazi Germany, but also elsewhere; and according to some informants, physically or mentally challenged babies are sometimes left to die due to lack of care, by omission not commission, even today.

This perspective on stupidity is only one: what sociologists call the functionalist perspective. Marx wrote on the functions of crime, and Durkheim on the functions of crime and also religion; and American sociologists have written on the functions of inequality and poverty. This is not to praise crime, inequality, poverty or stupidity, of course; most of the work on these topics now is on their high costs and dysfunctions, but it is to broaden our understandings of why they still persist, despite their high social and economic costs. There are benefits too. (For alternative perspectives on stupidity, see Wikipedia, and on accidents see Synnott, 2009: 190-209. To be continued next week: “Measuring Stupidity.”)

Bricker, D. and J. Wright, 2006. What Canadians Think. Toronto: Seal Books.