Hello everybody,
This week, we’re looking at the philosophy of stupidity.
You can find the companion article here: How to spot a stupid person with Carlo Cipolla’s “golden law of stupidity”
Paid members can hear my audio narration at the end of the newsletter.
Thomas sat in silence as his mom opened the letter.
Earlier that day, his teacher had shouted at him again. “Idiot boy! Good for nothing!” she screamed in front of the class. She wrote a letter and said:
“Give this to your mother. Do. Not. Open. It.”
Dutiful and honest, Thomas took the letter back to his mom. He waited for her disappointment.
His mom read the letter, and her fists clenched. She made that growling noise she only made when she was furious.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Thomas said, and she looked up at him. Her face transformed. She ran to cuddle the young boy.
Thomas’s mom took him to the school and demanded to speak with the teacher. As Thomas sat outside, he heard muffled shouts.
“How dare….if you ever….taking him out….”
After that, Thomas was homeschooled — mostly by his mother but increasingly by knowledgeable others. Every day, she would tell him he was brilliant. He was gifted. He was so, so smart.
Thomas Edison became one of history’s most famous geniuses — an inventor who changed the world and who is now an emblem for intelligence. Only years later did Edison learn what the letter from his teacher had said:
“Thomas is addled. He should stop coming to school. It’s pointless.”
Today, we learn about stupidity and intelligence.
Stupid blind spots
This story has been embellished over time. It’s true that Edison was called “addled” by his teachers, and his mother withdrew him to homeschool. But it’s probably not true that a letter was sent home, or that his mother hid the “addled” part from young Thomas. But, as the saying goes, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Anecdotes like this survive because they often reflect a broader, cultural truth: “intelligence” and “stupidity” are not things you can easily label.
Let’s give the teacher the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that Thomas was a daydreaming, unruly boy who never followed instructions. Well, that teacher’s entire 19th-century pedagogic model was built on the idea that “schoolwork” meant intelligence. The greatest educators of the day argued that essays, algebra sheets, and good grades meant you were “intelligent.” And so, when young Thomas didn’t match those criteria, “addled” would have been harsh but true to the standards of the day.
Today, we know it’s hard to define “intelligence.” While we might be depressed by how rigidly antiquated the school system still is, society more broadly has gone beyond the “grades mean smarts” mindset. And, of course, if we cannot easily define intelligence, it’s no wonder we also struggle to define “stupidity.”
Some people argue that “stupidity” is the same as “dumbness” — it’s a matter of IQ and brain power. Others might say that “stupidity” is the same as “foolishness,” where someone simply doesn’t think things through. Immanuel Kant — who always had an opinion on most things — argued that “stupidity” meant an inability to recognize some event as belonging to a certain rule. For Kant, stupidity is a congenital inability to apply general concepts to particular cases. The well-educated physician may know all the broad rules but cannot apply them correctly. It can’t be helped. They’re a stupid doctor.
I think there’s something to all of these. Like the word “good” or “love,” “stupidity” has a range of uses and is understood broadly. I’ve certainly used “stupid” in all of the above ways, but if pushed, I’d say I most often use “stupid” as a synonym for “foolish” in my everyday vernacular. When I try to carry five bags of shopping from the car rather than making two trips and inevitably drop them all, my wife will say, “That was stupid.” And she’s right.
But in terms of the philosophy of stupidity, I prefer what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about it in their 1947 work, Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer, stupidity is a “blind spot.” It’s where we are simply unable to see the good, the right, or the “intelligent” thing to do.
We all have blind spots. Sometimes, these mean gaps in our knowledge. I know very little about car maintenance, so I’ll probably drive a creaking car until its tires fall off. These blind spots are resolvable in that we can read a book, watch a YouTube video, or take a course — often after life reveals our blind spot to us (as when I end up broken down on the way to London).
But Adorno and Horkheimer define a blind spot more in terms of some unconscious repression or “scarring.” They argue that there is often some negative and formative experience in our lives that forces us to develop a blind spot. It’s when something in our upbringing teaches us to simply look one way all the time.
They give a metaphor: Imagine a snail, sliming along with its antennae out. The antenna is how the snail experiences the world and learns. Now, imagine a bird plops down nearby. The snail panics, pulls in its antennae, and retreats to its shell. No more curious learning and exploring. Hide. Defend
We are all snails. We have various ways of experiencing the world and various ways of learning about the world. But from our earliest childhood experience, some of these ways are nurtured, and others are burned off. Here are two depressingly common examples:
A boy loves reading science books. He tries to talk to his parents excitedly about what he learns, but they laugh at him. They sneer at reading, and they mock him. The boy develops a blind spot.
A young mother is desperate not to repeat the mistakes her own mother made raising her. She is obsessively attentive to every action of her daughter. She’s always around. Always helping. And yet, her obsession with correcting means she is blind to the good her own mother did. She doesn’t let her daughter explore on her own, develop independence, or develop confidence in her own abilities.
We all have our blind spots. Most of these are born of some kind of negative stimulus. A dad’s mocking laugh. A mother’s neglectful parenting. A teacher calling you “addled.” If you beat down a mental process enough times, it simply stops growing back. If you never use a muscle, it will atrophy.
So, what are your blind spots? What are you stupid about? And is there a way to resolve it?
Next week, we’re exploring difficult conversations, and so I’m asking:
What’s been the most difficult conversation in your life?
Send me your thoughts via email or comment below.
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Listen to my spoken voiceover of this article here: