Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. – Jean Cocteau
George Rebane
So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here). Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages. (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge. Only the former is correctible.) Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people. He immediately opens with –
We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.
As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power. The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions. The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic. The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.
Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels. Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings. Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’.
With the advent of radio, the consumption of print communications began a downward slide that continues to this day. Radio allowed a few strong (and well-funded) voices to be heard far and wide, with the result that the diversity and debate of opinions diminished as the American mind began to coalesce into something more homogenous in outlook and interpretative skills. It became easier to flip a switch, lean back, and effortlessly absorb what everyone else did, than to pore through pages of small print.
As mass media multiplied through coast-to-coast radio, television, cable, and internet, our attention and homogeneity were supported and directed by monied interests, and finally constrained by new forms of corporatist censorship, both explicit (e.g. on social media) and implicit (e.g. academe). Concurrently, the advent of professional sports competitions broadcast nationwide provided perhaps the best diversion for Americans who now came to eschew national affairs as something uncomfortably distasteful and not worthy of inclusion when polite company assembled. ‘I don’t discuss politics’ or ‘I try to avoid politics’ became the mantra for people seeking to project higher sensibilities. But having a favorite baseball or football team, and discussing/debating their fortunes, players, and owners became an acceptable pastime in any company, and participation declared that you were a ‘regular guy’ (or woman) and at one with the people.
The political classes promoted such diversions since it camouflaged many if not most of the stupid things politicians continued doing with public policies as government began its relentless growth with the Great Depression. Many people, ranging from the late ‘conspiracy theorist’ Bill Cooper to scholar and historian Victor Davis Hanson, have devoted their careers to alert America to how we as the people (“idiots”) are diverted by government handouts of bread and promotion of circuses, managed mainly through the mass media. We regularly see our streets filled with thousands of sports fans celebrating a team victory that has a minimum impact on their lives, and care more about the proclivities of a sports star than take notice of what is said when a select group of the powerful and wealthy gather in Davos or Jackson Hole to discuss how they will shape our world.
To Lance Morrow “stupidity is one of life’s big mysteries, like evil, like love, an ineffable thing. You cannot exactly define it, but you know it when you see it, as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography. It takes many forms. Stupidity is entitled to no moral standing whatever, and yet it sits in a place of honor at the tables of the mighty; it blows in their ears and whispers promises.”
As mentioned above, my own assessment is that stupidity can be defined on both retail and wholesale scales, but in some cases it may be difficult to identify if we don’t know the knowledge base that is to be processed to yield a conclusion/decision.
Morrow’s ‘Unified Field Theory of Stupidity’ postulates that its rise is due to the “death of privacy” that came about with the “subversion of manners and authority (two of the great casualties of the 1960s)”. In the 21st century all this was “ensured by the stupendously intrusive capabilities of Big Tech”. Morrow concludes his apologetic on mass stupidity with –
The death of manners and privacy, I argue, are profoundly political facts that, combined with other facts, lead, eventually, to an entire civilization of stupidity. It’s a short ride from stupidity to madness. Soon people aren’t quite people anymore; they are cartoons and categories. And “identities.” The media grow feral. Genitals became weirdly public issues; the sexes subdivide into 100 genders. Ideologues extract sunbeams from cucumbers. They engage in what amounts to an Oedipal rebellion against reality itself.
So there you have it – stupidity examined from a more sophisticated perspective and perch than what my own humble attempts have been to identify and expose it on the individual level. Alternative explanations for our communal insanity are welcome as always.
rebanesruminations.com 
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