Words From The Exit Wound

Writing about stupidity is dangerous in that one runs the risk of becoming stupid oneself. Though this can, and probably should, be taken in a ‘Whosoever fights monsters…’ way, I would rather bring your attention to its self-perceptive/self-deceptive aspects. There is a tendency towards raging, purblind, against the evils of stupidity only to trip and fall over the untied shoelace of the fact that, not only are you stupid yourself, but you’ve compounded that plain and honest stupidity with self-congratulatory smugness, a more refined and potent form of stupidity. This, obviously, is the self-deceptive aspect; in the mad rush to chase down a jaywalker you’ve knocked an old lady to the sidewalk, causing her to break her hip and, a bit later, to die of complications resulting from that broken hip, you bastard. This happened, not because you’ve stared so long into the abyss of stupidity that you’ve assumed stupid thought patterns yourself, but because you were always stupid and used the war on stupidity as a defense against your own and others’ eyes. But what of the person who, having investigated stupidity, begins to find it lurking everywhere in his own life, in all those places he had believed safe? What is he to do with this stupidity that not only drowns the world around him but also flows from him, and, he realizes so late, always has? This is the problem of self-perception that everyone studying some abhorrent but highly contagious concept must face. It is no better to believe oneself mostly or entirely stupid than to believe oneself entirely free of stupidity. Both are instances of the unique forms of stupidity manifested by those who define themselves as its opposition.

It should be obvious by now that my understanding of ‘stupidity’ is somewhat peculiar, but I don’t think it’s wholly strange. Keep in mind, as we continue, that in considering stupidity as a subject here I am not at all trying to answer the ‘What is…?’ question that inevitably pokes in importunately as the unknocking roommate interrupting your latest sex romp as your partner’s just reaching orgasm and therefore most heightened in her sensitivity, partially because those aren’t the questions that interest me, and partially because I don’t think it can be done in a useful way. Stupidity is Protean and, as I said, highly contagious, and while its various manifestations obviously have a familial resemblance, I’m more interested in the differences—if I weren’t, this column wouldn’t be weekly; I could write one longish essay, or catalogue, detailing the earmarks of a stupid thing and never write again. Don’t think, however, that I’m admitting that I’ve got some unholy logorrhea compelling me to write publicly and continuously; rather, realize that stupidity, like a petulant child, does not sit still for its portrait, forcing me to give you constantly updated snapshots, taken at any available angle while it isn’t looking, if we want to know what that elusive-yet-ubiquitous fucker looks like. Stupidity can be ignorance, yes, but certain types of ignorance are much less objectionable than others. As said above, it can be both self-satisfaction and self-doubt; nor does this terminate the phrase.

The stupidity that most interests and repels me is the willful ignorance or deliberate obtuseness so common in every tier of education or class, or what-you-will. Virtually any group of people you meet (individual exceptions excepted, duly and obviously) will choose—choose (!), mind you—to be stupid about something. Inevitably. Whether it’s an academician deciding to examine his rosy glasses much more closely than the text they were donned to bring into focus, a rough pub-jockey getting that fight hard-on over some fruitbritches’ fancy words, or a child deciding not to pour clarifying light on an opaque word encountered while reading; it’s inevitable. However, it is more useful for allowing an examination of one of the major sources of stupidity: complacency. Or self-delusion, or self-bargaining, or the increasingly popular what-you-will. Except maybe the child, every subject of the above examples believed that he knew, not everything there is, but everything a decent person should know, by god! Ultimately, this amounts to the same thing as believing, as perhaps no man has done since the Renaissance, that one has entombed within oneself all knowledge, but with one major exception: unlike, say, Francis Bacon (who did not write Shakespeare, but that’s for another day), the professor with his glasses and the barroom pugilist are aware that there’s knowledge there—right there!—and decide it’s a priori useless, and choose to be stupid.

This is the kind of stupidity I intend to focus on, in whatever sphere I encounter it. Christian Science, Creation science, the ARI, Dworkin-bran feminism, Luntzspeak, and so on are all decent examples of what I’m talking about. There are many more, but I don’t want to shoot my wad in this paragraph.

Now for the tough part: I’m going to address my own stupidity. So, how am I stupid? Well, I’m fairly ignorant about most sciences (particularly an almost total ignorance when it comes to physics, except at its most abstract and philosophical), anthropological views of other cultures (especially non-Western), baseball, non-Western religions, 20th century philosophy (excluding Camus, Bataille, Cioran, and some others), politics, economics on any level, how to drive a stick-shift, knot-tying, and so on in both intellectual and practical veins, and, though I’m passively curious about almost all of it, I’m actively curious about very little at the moment. Though I’m unusually skilled at reading other people and picking up on all sorts of subtle behavioral clues, I make a balls of utilizing what I’m lucky enough to notice. I usually know the solution to my personal problems but let them fester secretly, like AIDS in Allan Bloom, instead of practicing the known solutions, which would, I suppose, be more like Magic Johnson. I exercise my rather excellent memory virtually not at all when it comes to the needs of other people, often finding their presence reminding me of what I left at home, or what I had never picked up, for this one or other among them. I think rather highly of myself and may have no cause to do so. I’m closed emotionally, and paranoid. I have no aim in life, no plans beyond next fall, and I may have forgotten how to be happy when I’m happy. I drink way too much and have the scars, stains, and burnt bridges to prove it. I eat poorly and exercise sporadically. I wanted to trim my beard as it was growing out of control, but rather than actually getting clippers I just shaved it off and am now watching fervently as the anemic stragglers struggle to restore my lost growth.

That’s enough about me, and will be the last you hear of me unless a personal anecdote is the seed for one of my future articles. As you should have guessed, the subject of these articles will be stupidity, as demonstrated by whatever I find, and especially of the sort I’m likely to encounter on one of the most intellectually circle-jerking campuses in the world. But things like world politics, pop culture, quotidian occurrences, and such will also be included. I’m probably most interested in aesthetic stupidity, but, no worries, I won’t limit myself. We’ll get a full portrait even if it takes this Cubist collage bullshit to do it. And, hopefully, I won’t end up an idiot myself while assembling it.