The critique of pure idiocy

Hannah Arendt, in the year Hitler came to power

William Davies has published an essential critique of Trumpian stupidity. This could not be more relevant to my current interests, but quite aside from that, this is one of those essays that open up whole new vistas for thinking about fundamental social developments and patterns. I’d like to quote the whole thing, which you ought to read immediately if not sooner.

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.

Davies describes how Arendt, building on Kant, diagnoses stupidity as endemic state in modern societies in general, and totalitarian societies in particular:

[Arendt’s] reflections partly echoed the pessimism of Frankfurt School critiques of the “culture industry”:

[quoting Arendt’s essay “Understanding and Politics’} Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense. In many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity. . . . Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can no longer be regarded as “beyond remedy.”

If Kant’s version of enlightenment was now a distant memory, a glimmer of hope remained: stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because, absent some eugenicist paranoia, it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. People en masse — intellectuals as much as “the masses” — had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, regardless of their ability to do so.

Davies identifies a crucial ideological pathway here, which is Hayek’s classic neoliberal assumption that a quite literally omniscient market is going to radically ameliorate or indeed eliminate altogether the advantages of the clever over the stupid, since all will benefit equally from its ecumenical blessings on society:

Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasized that their primary function was to organize a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires, and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes. In the early 21st century, as platform capitalism has taken off, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by the Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomized controlled trials by the MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments, and explanations of human beings — with all their biases and errors — redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nano-details, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition.

As Davies’s argument implies, the current evangelists for AI are nothing if not almost parodic reflections of Ned Beatty’s famous speech in Sidney Lumet’s and Paddy Chayefsky’s eerily prescient 1976 film Network:

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Davies discusses how all this ties in with the concept of “conspiracism” — that is, in a world of accelerating stupidity, the constant creation of conspiracy theories without any theory, or, as Donald Trump would put it, nothing more than the observation that “a lot of people are saying:”

In a fully platformized world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviors and patterns; meaning, intention, and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from the political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the “new conspiracism.” Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination, or September 11) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies, and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast,

[quoting Rosenblum and Muirhead] The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture . . . not evidence but repetition. . . . The new conspiracism — all accusation, no evidence — substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.

There are complex ideological drivers at work here — Rosenblum and Muirhead view the new conspiracism as an effort to delegitimize democracy tout court — but the new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs.” Outlandish and pointless fantasies, like the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared, and repeated. Engagement — and revenue — is all.

The essay is full of similarly arresting and extraordinarily salient observations, in regard to the current situation in this country, and indeed around the world.