Stupid Idiots
Lars Svendsen, Reaktion Books, £14.95
 

NORWEGIAN academic Lars Svendsen writes from multiple perspectives — thinker, joker, moralist and satirist — bringing humour and erudition to the philosophy of society, popular culture and everyday life.

Previous books have tackled themes such as boredom, fashion, work, loneliness and lying. His latest explores the pervasive, spectacular and dangerous failures of cognition known as stupidity and idiocy.

He begins with definitions: stupid people fail to think while idiots think badly. Stupidity occurs when we hide behind cliches and discuss matters without real understanding. Doubt can enable us to transcend stupidity, but we become idiots if we make serious errors in our thinking. 

Svendsen suggests a third category of flawed thinker — the stupid idiot — who sees erroneous ideas as self-evident truths and claims immunity from criticism. An entire chapter, The Stupid Idiot In The White House, is dedicated to the very model of a modern stupid idiot.

Svendsen acknowledges we are all prone to stupid idiocy. It’s a malaise with no single remedy: Gustave Flaubert warned against valuing conclusions over the process of thinking; Ludwig Wittgenstein urged us to tidy up our language, and hence our ideas; and, in his 1937 lecture On Stupidity, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil urged us to swerve stupidity and idiocy through “bescheidung” (modesty). 

Evidence and examples are drawn from a range of sources and disciplines — philosophy, psychology, economics, personal experience, management science and the arts. For example, in the chapter on stupidity, preliminary definitions are provided by philosophers such as Erasmus, Kant, Plato, Schopenhauer and Russell; but our understanding that stupidity is not synonymous with ignorance or a lack of intelligence is clarified by examples from history and literature. 

Adolf Eichmann’s stupidity is captured in Hannah Arendt’s description of his deliberately thoughtlessness, unexamined life and depersonalised language based on cliches and slogans. 

Similarly, Svendsen refers to powerful insights into the dangerous potential of “simple, common stupidity” in Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities (1930-43). The character Dr Arnheim — a “man of stature” reputed to know everything — is intelligent, unaware of his limitations and prone to superficial and pompous conversation.

Svendsen suggests Arnheim’s dislike of wit and irony is symptomatic of thinking unsupported by evidence or understanding.    

Contemporary ills are situated in historical contexts. Svendsen sees the elevation of feeling over thought — described by Hegel (1770-1831) as “antihuman” — as a threat to the quality of public discourse: “When debates become little more than reports about who feels what, we are witness to a gathering of idiots.”

Identified as being “excited by affirmatives” by Francios Bacon (1561-1626) and evident in Hitler’s advice that reading should be limited to sources that support one’s existing worldview, confirmation bias makes a significant contribution to the spread of disinformation via social media.    

The philosopher Edward Winters claims that “Jokes and witticisms evaporate under the glare of analysis.” Not necessarily. Svendsen leavens his examinations of thought and behaviour with wisecracks that are not diminished by scrutiny.

Praise is due to translator Matt Bagguley for his seamless contribution to a witty and accessible flow of ideas: the book is packed with wordplay and idiomatic humour. I must confess, I am curious about the Norwegian equivalent of the phrase “thick as two short planks.”

This is a slender, introductory work, but the author’s scholarship is as impressive as his wit. There are detailed references, signposts to further reading and — increasingly rare in shorter books — a useful index. Arguments are cogent and for the most part well evidenced. The exception is a chapter on conservative stupidity and radical idiocy, in which the argument is vague and underdeveloped. I resisted the urge to join Svendsen in giving two cheers for liberalism. 

Stupid Idiots is an effective and entertaining overview of a fascinating aspect of epistemology. And the current distortion of public debate in the interests of a super-wealthy power elite makes it a timely and important publication.