OVER at the Public Discourse, R. J. Snell has written an outstanding article applying the concept of “stupidity” to our post-COVID life. There has been plenty of stupidity to go around these days of course- some harmless, some harmful. Not all stupidity is bad in a moral sense, either.
Snell riffs on an essay by a 1930s Austrian philosopher named Robert Musil. Musil’s 1937 lecture “On Stupidity” absolutely deserves to be read. In it, Musil distinguishes between a blameless honorable stupidity and a blameworthy intelligent stupidity. Snell summarizes Musil this way:
“Honorable stupidity is a little dull of comprehension, . . . is poor in ideas and words,” but also has “more than a little of life’s rosy cheeks” and is “charming.” Sam Gamgee comes to mind, or Bertie Wooster. They might need to count on their fingers, but there’s nothing dishonorable in doing so.
If honorable stupidity is a weakness of understanding, the dishonorable version “is by far the more dangerous.” It is not the absence of intelligence so much as “failure of intelligence.” Intelligence is present but out of balance and “misshapen and erratically active,” diseased in some manner. The “higher stupidity” is a “misculture” causing not dullness of mind but a kind of blindness or refusal to see.Musil suggests three primary qualities of this kind of intelligent stupidity. First, it claims accomplishment and facility in matters beyond its competence. Second, it gives way to emotions at the expense of reason. Third, it is clever enough to invent rationalizations for its views, no matter how bizarre the view or silly the excuse. As a result, intelligence does not orient toward true knowledge of first principles and reality, as in Aristotle’s vision, but confuses the spirit. It results in a flight from reality, with all the cultural and spiritual pathologies attendant on living in an ersatz reality. Of course, given the unity of the human being, stupidity of this sort affects sensibility, causing taste and emotions to unmoor. Such intelligence becomes a dangerous disease of the mind and “endangers life itself.”
That kind of stupidity is certainly the kind of disease we suffer from in these woke times in our American culture.
I found Musil’s original conceptual analysis “On Stupidity” to be tremendously insightful, too. He writes that of the term “stupid” that:
Use of these terms is the plainest and worst self-protective expression there is; it is the beginning of a rejoinder, and already its end as well. There is something of a “short circuit” in this, and it is more understandable if we consider that stupid and vulgar, whatever they mean, are also terms of abuse. For the meaning of these terms, as we are well aware, lies not so much in their content as in the way they are used; many among us might well love the donkey, but be insulted if we are called one. The insult does not stand for what it signifies, but for a mixture of ideas, feelings, and intentions which cannot even remotely express, but which can signal.
This calls to mind another great philosophical essay found on the shelves of many bookstores: On Bullsh*t by Harry Frankfurt. Believe it or not, Frankfurt is a real-deal philosopher, and that is actually a real-deal book on a serious topic… no BS. Thomist philosopher Ed Feser wrote a blog post in appreciation of it; one big takeaway is the distinction between lies and BS (which evidently Howie Mandel’s new Bullsh*t The Game Show does not appreciate):
Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is not the same thing as lying. The liar, like the truth-teller, cares about what is true. The difference is that the truth-teller conveys it while the liar wants to cover it up. The bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t really care one way or the other about the truth. He isn’t using his communicative faculties for the sake of conveying either truth or falsehood, but rather for some other end, such as promoting himself.
Lies are one thing, and BS is another- that’s really useful to know!
I think I can add something to these philosophical analyses of Musil and Frankfurt by combining them, and defining a new term: stupid bullsh*t.
As we ordinarily use the term in our culture now, the sort of stupidity involved in stupid bullsh*t is the “intelligent stupidity.” When someone makes false statements to claim accomplishment and facility in matters beyond his competence, or indulges surface emotions over reason, or invents rationalizations to excuse falsities: what we have is stupid bullsh*t. Unfortunately, we have to put up with alot of stupid bullsh*t these days.
Thanks to Robert Musil, RJ Snell, and Harry Frankfurt for clarifying this.
Thank you for this piece. I love brilliant minds who care to point out distinctions. 🙏🏻
Thank you. Saw your link in the comment section of A Midwestern Doctor on Substack. Will read more!