Stupidity,” Jean Cocteau remarked, “is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”
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.
The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered dueling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.
Cable news provided the Greek chorus. American government and politics became cartoons. The Democrats, all unknowing, played Wile E. Coyote to Mr. Trump’s Road Runner. Twice, the Democrats’ Acme Impeachment Committee rigged up the big bomb (heh heh), lit the fuse and held its ears. Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!
“Trump is crazy!” “Trump is Hitler!” “Trump is a Russian agent!” “ Bob Mueller has the goods!” Beep beep!
Stupidity has been in the air for quite some time. And alas, Mr. Trump isn’t going away soon; neither are Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff or Mazie Hirono —each a paragon of the phenomenon.
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.
Stupidity reappears as a perennial theme of literature and history: King Lear breaking up his kingdom in the first act, or the entirety of World War I, from Sarajevo to Versailles. In her 1984 book, “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman examined four grand stupidities: the Trojans’ decision to accept the Greeks’ big wooden horse and move it inside the walls of the city (an illustrative myth), the Renaissance popes’ failure to deal with the complaints of Martin Luther and others that led to the Reformation, England’s boneheaded policies under George III that lost it the American colonies, and the Americans’ mishandled intervention in Vietnam.
I have always thought that the 1960s, besides being the gaudiest and noisiest and most entertaining decade, was one of the stupidest, with its stupid war and stupid ideas (morons smoking banana peels about summed it up). The grown-ups had made a stupid mess in Vietnam; the young swarmed onstage, too numerous for their own good, and, being on the whole vastly inexperienced in the business of life, made stupid messes of their own. The counterculture became the culture. A lot of the music was great. Today many baby boomers are starry-eyed about the days of their youth. The ’60s set forth a paradox: It’s possible for a decade to be filled with tragedy and ideals, and at the same time to be essentially stupid.
In that thought, one approaches the core of the mystery. Most of the tragedies of that time, in fact, were stupid: the war, the murders of John and Robert Kennedy, to name three essentially meaningless phenomena that have, in time, passed over into what Thucydides called “the country of myth.” Is it possible that stupidity—far from being a shallow, comic thing—is at the heart of historic tragedy?
I’ve been working on a Unified Field Theory of Stupidity. My hypothesis: Stupidity dominates in our time because of the convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements that—mixed together at one moment, in one cultural beaker—have produced a fatal explosion of brainlessness. What are those ingredients? You will have your own list, of course.
My nominees will seem eccentric at first. The subversion of manners and authority (two great casualties of the 1960s) prepared the way for the death of privacy, which would eventually be ensured by the stupendously intrusive capabilities of Big Tech in the 21st century. Manners (and in a different way, authority) depend on respect for the privacy of others, as well as one’s own. Manners depend on reticence, even mystery. When those ingrained regulations, those protections of the individual mind, are gone, then you may open the floodgates to (among many other things) pornography, which is a massively lucrative assault on individual dignity and collective decorum—an assault on the manners of a society and, if you will forgive my saying so, on the divinity of the individual.
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.
At the Tower of Babel, the Lord—whatever his reasons—confounded the languages of the peoples of the world. I suspect he has found he can achieve the same effect by making everyone stupid.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money,.”
