Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, photographed by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, France, 1918. Photo courtesy the Imperial War Museum, London, Q 3255

陆军元帅道格拉斯 · 黑格,英国远征军指挥官,欧内斯特 · 布鲁克斯中尉拍摄,法国,1918年。照片由帝国战争博物馆提供,伦敦,Q3255

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, photographed by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, France, 1918. Photo courtesy the Imperial War Museum, London, Q 3255

陆军元帅道格拉斯 · 黑格,英国远征军指挥官,欧内斯特 · 布鲁克斯中尉拍摄,法国,1918年。照片由帝国战争博物馆提供,伦敦,Q3255

作者: Sacha Golob + BIO

A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

奥地利小说家罗伯特•穆西尔(Robert Musil)在纳粹流亡中去世的几年前,在维也纳发表了题为《论愚蠢》(On 愚蠢)(1937)的演讲。其核心思想是,愚蠢不仅仅是“愚蠢”,不是缺乏处理能力。对穆西尔来说,沉默是“直截了当的”,实际上几乎是“光荣的”。愚蠢是非常不同的东西,而且更加危险: 危险恰恰是因为一些最聪明的人,最不笨的人,往往是最愚蠢的人。

Musil’s lecture bequeaths us an important set of questions. What exactly is stupidity? How does it relate to morality: can you be morally good and stupid, for example? How does it relate to vice: is stupidity a kind of prejudice, perhaps? And why is it so domain-specific: why are people often stupid in one area and insightful in another? Musil’s own answer, which centred around pretentiousness, is too focused on the dilettantism of interwar Vienna to serve us now. But his questions, and his intuition about stupidity’s danger, are as relevant as ever.

穆西尔的演讲给我们留下了一系列重要的问题。愚蠢到底是什么?它与道德有什么关系: 例如,你能在道德上既善良又愚蠢吗?它与罪恶有什么关系: 也许愚蠢是一种偏见?为什么它是如此具体的领域: 为什么人们经常在一个领域愚蠢而在另一个领域有洞察力?穆西尔自己的回答,围绕着自命不凡,过于关注两次世界大战之间维也纳的业余爱好,而不是现在为我们服务。但是他的问题,以及他关于愚蠢危险的直觉,和以往一样重要。

Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.

愚蠢是一种非常特殊的认知缺陷。粗略地说,它发生在你没有适合这项工作的概念性工具的时候。其结果是无法理解正在发生的事情,并由此导致将现象强加于粗糙的、扭曲的文件夹中的倾向。

This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

这是最容易引入的悲剧案例。第一次世界大战期间的英国最高指挥部经常使用他们年轻时骑兵作战的概念和战略来理解堑壕战。正如陆军元帅道格拉斯 · 黑格(Douglas Haig)的一名下属后来评论的那样,他们认为这些战壕是“暂停的移动作战”: 也就是说,它们是流动的战线,只有一个简单的警告: 多年来实际上什么都没有改变。毫不奇怪,这对他们制定策略并没有什么好处: 除了物质资源的短缺,他们还受到一种“概念过时”的阻碍,因为他们没有更新认知工具来适应手头的任务。

In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation

Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust. The stock solution to Tom’s quandary is simple willpower. Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.

Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Indeed, in at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation: when Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, took Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, through the tricks underlying the seances in which Conan Doyle devoutly believed, the author’s reaction was to concoct a ludicrously elaborate counter-explanation as to why it was precisely the true mediums who would appear to be frauds.

While I have introduced it via ‘conceptual obsolescence’, stupidity is also compatible with a kind of misguided innovation. Consider a country that excitedly imports new conceptual tools not from a past time but from a very different place. Global debates over social justice, for example, are now dominated by a set of ideas and terms taken from the United States, a nation marked by an incredibly specific historical and cultural trajectory. Simply transferring that framework to other countries, such as those in which class is less starkly racialised (for example, states reliant on exploiting white migrant labour from eastern Europe), or in which it is racialised in much more complex ways (for example, states such as South Africa) is conceptually and socially risky.

Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous when compared with other vices. First, unlike character flaws, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Suppose the problem with Haig had been laziness: there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him. But if Haig worked himself to the bone within the intellectual prison of the 19th-century military tradition, then solving the difficulty becomes harder: you will need to introduce a new conceptual framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalising new concepts is tough work.

Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge

Second, stupidity begets more stupidity due to a profound ambiguity in its nature. If stupidity is a matter of the wrong tools for the job, whether an action is stupid will depend on what the job is; just as a hammer is perfect for some tasks and wrong for others. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. It is vital to separate this point from familiar and condescending claims about how dumb or uneducated the ‘other side’ are: stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level.

Musil’s indulgent, almost patrician, attitude to ‘honourable’ dumbness was certainly dangerously complacent: consider its role in the anti-vax phenomenon. But dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge.

We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific. Furthermore, we can see that there will be many cases that aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects. Imagine someone who had been blind to all evidence that they were being cheated on finally asking themselves ‘How could you be so stupid?’ Here the problem is not pure stupidity: the concept of a cheat is common enough. What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.

So stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least one part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.