Stupidity Endures, and It Takes Unexpectedly Rich Forms in This World | QDaily's Books of the Year ⑦

The only consolation is that our lives are so rich we're confident we could expand the Chinese edition of The Dictionary of Human Stupidity until it's as thick as Webster's.

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been pulled about by great questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the disappearance of intellectual voices — or their drowning-out in the noise — only deepens our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what let us see the road ahead clearly.

So in our "2018 Book Recommendations," we've tried to introduce, as widely as we can, some books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce them to readers in good faith.

We've also drawn on our contributing writers to help finish the job. They are always ahead of the curve, and they see further. Our thanks to them.

This is the third piece in our nonfiction book series, on the ever-growing supply of stupidity. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is an editor at QDaily.

1.

No doubt about it: there are more and more stupid things in the world.

When Nicolas Sarkozy was president, Pierre-Louis Colin, a speechwriter at the French Foreign Ministry, wrote a book — a guide to finding the most beautiful women in Paris. Not just a guide, either: it came packed with "techniques," such as "how to admire lithe young nannies and voluptuous young mothers without their knowledge," or how, when a downpour arrives, to "catch the curves that soaked clothes can no longer hide on drenched women."

Elaine Sciolino's new book is called La Seduction. As The New York Times's top correspondent in Paris, she was baffled that this promising young expert at the Foreign Ministry hadn't chosen to study how Sarkozy's France was projecting its power to the world in new ways, and had written this sexist book instead…

Facing Europe, France, Paris — facing the moveable feast… Americans will never again surrender themselves whole to the might of French culture the way Hemingway did nearly a century ago, brash, coarse and sure of himself.

Ms. Sciolino said: "This book could absolutely never be published in America."

That is a signal of stupidity. Why couldn't it be published? Or rather, why think about the question that way?

In 1964, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Office in the United States. She set out, it is said, to change the idea that "the office is a minefield for women": "Based on my own observation and firsthand experience in 19 different offices, I've found the office sexier than a Turkish harem, wilder than a college fraternity weekend, more debauched than a Hollywood pool party, more charming than Cary Grant's smile, and more blood-stirring than a Playboy centerfold. Everything that happens here is richer than a sex kitten's daydream."

That passage comes from Cubed, published in Chinese in 2018 — an American book that looks back, decades later, at the history of the American office. It describes a game called "Chase" that turned up in American offices in the 1950s:

The rules of "Chase" were simple. Whichever announcers and engineers happened to be free would join in, pick out a secretary or a file clerk, and chase her up and down, through the record library and back to the studio, catch her, and pull off her underwear. Once the girl's underwear had been pulled off, she could put it right back on if she wanted to. Nothing bad ever happened. Pulling off the underwear was the game's only goal. During the chase the girl would often scream, thrash about, blush, make threats or pretend to faint, but as far as I know, no one ever reported it to management. In fact, the girls often wore their nicest underwear to work.

Ms. Brown, mentioned above, worked at this "Chase"-playing radio station, but unfortunately… "Sometimes I'd look up from my typewriter, hopeful, at the three or four players huddled by the door, scheming, but the verdict was always the same. Too young, too pale, too flat-chested… clearly not who they wanted to chase." "Back then I had no money, no college degree, a face full of acne, and parents from the hills." She later became the editor of Cosmopolitan.

Enough of that.

I'm not saying these things weren't stupid in 1960s America, and I'm certainly not encouraging chase games in the office — that is not only stupid, it's adolescent. I open with this unflattering example only to make a point: opposing sexual harassment is one thing; a man (even a sanctimonious Foreign Ministry speechwriter) writing about how he hunts for beauty — or discovers it — or a woman writing about her own understanding of and longing for a sexy office, is another. Setting up too many impossibilities — this can't be done, that can't be done — is stupid.

In an essay called "Children and the 'Hidden Persuaders,'" Italo Calvino sorted human stupidity into types:

Human stupidity can be divided into two kinds: patriotic stupidity and unpatriotic stupidity. The patriotic kind also takes in stupidity about religion and the family — in short, the kind of stupidity that hides behind things owed sacred respect, things no one dares joke about. The unpatriotic kind people can criticize and mock freely, because it concerns thoroughly worldly matters. The dangerous one is the first. It is the intellectual's task to spare no effort in defeating that first kind of stupidity, to shrink the territory of negativity and passivity that it has expanded, in every form, under the pretext of sanctity. The rest of stupidity can be left to the children to fight.

To put it more plainly: I wish there were fewer sacred things. Sanctity is contagious and it protects itself. Once a thing has caught the sacred glow, bystanders keep off, don't spit on it, don't come too close — and that tempts more and more people and things to stick the "sacred" label on themselves. The nation, the government, the leader, the first thirty years, the latter thirty years, local governments and their bureaus down to village committee chairmen, heroes, mothers, police officers, model workers, Huawei, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, the five elements and yin-yang, proprietary intellectual property, the first wife, sanitation workers, firefighters… the share of it that intellectuals have to answer for keeps growing.

I think our intellectuals have a much more exhausting time of it than Calvino did.

2.

Frédéric Mitterrand, nephew of former French president François Mitterrand, became France's culture minister. He is gay. He also paid for sex in Thailand and Morocco. He wrote all of it into an autobiographical novel, The Bad Life. And he wrote it vividly, in lurid detail.

Our Elaine Sciolino — author of La Seduction, judge of French culture — again couldn't stand it.

She felt not only that the book shouldn't have been published, but that if Frédéric Mitterrand were in America he'd have had no chance of reaching the cabinet.

Personally I find this book deeply disturbing, even a little chilling. Its content is pornographic beyond question, and beyond that, it reveals a self-indulgent exhibitionism, even outright exposure. I can't understand how Frédéric Mitterrand could publicly describe exploiting Arab boys in a country with millions of Arab citizens and still expect his fellow French citizens of Arab descent to trust him. I think I understand very well one of the most famous rulings in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court: in a 1964 obscenity case, Justice Potter Stewart, defining pornography, said, "I know it when I see it."

So I feel it deeply: I knew it when I read it, too.

And here is the problem. A Supreme Court justice's standard rests on an institution. He was granted that power, and it became law. Everyone has a standard of their own for what they'll know when they see it.

If he hadn't written it, could he have entered the cabinet? Would these things then not exist?

The French told her that her reaction was too American: "That's a beautifully written book, full of human dignity."

What is the American way? What is human dignity? What is human nature?

Before long, these may all become concrete, bewildering questions. If we know nothing of the complexity of human nature, of the tangled inner world of every individual, we will fall into ignorance without a doubt.

Back to our big subject — stupidity. Very often it stands next to its good partner, "ignorance," and ignorance is not a shortage of capacity to learn. It's an attitude.

Someone quoted Karl Popper: "Ignorance is not merely a passive lack of knowledge, but an active attitude — a refusal to accept knowledge, an unwillingness to walk through the door that leads to knowledge, a rejection of knowledge itself. In a word: ignorance is anti-knowledge."

We'd rather pretend certain things don't exist than hear news that they do, and without the information that they exist, there's no way even to begin studying them.

Susan Jacoby tells a story I've privately taken to calling "the law school's human tragedy." It goes like this:

Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor and a columnist for The New Yorker's website, has shown us an unsettling scene: at some of this country's best and oldest law schools, teaching rape law has become fraught with difficulty. Gersen points out that before the mid-1980s, rape law wasn't part of the law school curriculum, because it was thought unimportant, and because it was believed — correctly, in most cases — that victims had almost no chance of prevailing in court. Later, as the feminist movement fought to change the laws and mindsets that blamed victims without thinking, nearly every major law school added rape law to its curriculum. But over the past decade or so, student groups (and some spineless faculty) have subverted feminism, insisting that rape law shouldn't be a required course because it upsets too many female students. "Student groups that represent women's interests now routinely advise students that they shouldn't be forced to take courses focused on laws related to sexual violence, which could be distressing. These groups also demand that criminal law professors give notice before class that the rape law unit might 'trigger' traumatic memories. Students frequently ask professors not to test on rape law, out of fear the material will hurt their exam performance." Worse, many students object to a teaching method used for centuries in every law school — one that requires students to argue from a position they may not personally hold, from the prosecution's side or the defense's. Gersen said: "More than a dozen newly hired criminal law professors at different institutions told me they've dropped rape law from their courses, saying there's no need to take on the risk of students filing complaints over feeling uncomfortable." … Few consequences could be worse. What rape victim would want to hire a plaintiff's attorney trained at a law school that never taught its students how to win a rape case? And if a student's feelings are too fragile to sit through a classroom discussion of rape law, how could that student ever become a competent lawyer? The training that men and women must undergo in any discipline follows the same logic — no matter how much pain the discipline causes students. The same logic applies to those who believe boys and girls in elementary school need protecting, that they must not be knocked about by the opposite sex's learning styles. Think what a shock these fragile children will face once they grow up and enter a world where men and women work together. From childhood education to higher education, the essence of junk thought is an authoritarian, illogical thinking that tries to shield us from uncomfortable truths.

Susan Jacoby says "few consequences could be worse," and I agree completely. And I think this harm began the moment we started pretending human nature doesn't exist, and treated ignorance as a stance.

3.

Susan Jacoby tells that story in her book The Age of American Unreason.

Something about this book seems fated to be misunderstood. People who dislike the "thanks for the invite" style of writing will take it for the same Zhihu-flavored self-satisfaction; people less confident of their own intelligence may feel that another public intellectual has come to flex on them; and because the author is a white woman who never stops mocking Trump, she loses every reader skeptical of the Democratic Party…

So even on Douban, most of the bad reviews come from people who skimmed a few paragraphs and rushed to share their opinion.

The book is in fact far more forceful than people imagine. What it detests is exactly this sort of person — the one who glances at something and jumps to a conclusion.

That could well be us.

She spends a great deal of the book arguing against "junk thought." Junk thought, Susan Jacoby believes, is more frightening than the anti-knowledge force of the ignorant, because the people who hold it are, as a rule, smarter.

Junk thought shouldn't be lumped in with stupidity and simple ignorance, because the people who deploy junk thought are often very intelligent. Their aim is to mislead and confuse the public, and the public lacks a sufficient grasp of the logic, scientific method and basic arithmetic needed to see through poorly designed studies.

A number of knowledge elites, course-selling elites and "I'll read the book for you" elites are flashing through your mind right now. Yes, them.

Her example is Summers.

In a 2005 speech, Summers compared the scarcity of women in science to the scarcity of Catholics in investment banking, the scarcity of white players in the NBA, and the scarcity of Jews in agriculture.

This inappropriate analogy is no way to open a discussion of "innate" talent, because apart from the average height of Black basketball players, all of Summers's other examples in fact show how well culture and socialization shape career choices and opportunities.

Needless to say, Israel's agricultural sector is full of Jews, and it's Catholics who run the Vatican's finances. Had the Catholic Church set up its headquarters in the Congo two thousand years ago, I'm certain the Pope and his senior financial advisers would be Black Africans.

Susan Jacoby says what makes Summers's speculative remark junk thought "isn't the idea that men and women might have different innate talents, but that he reached a conclusion with nothing behind it." He committed a simple logical error: faulty generalization. And that error got swept into a heated argument — Summers's "political incorrectness"; Summers speaking an unwelcome "politically incorrect" truth; criticism of Summers's "political correctness"; "I'm a Republican, so I objectively and rationally support the real reason behind this 'political incorrectness'"… Caught up in this rich tangle of positions and arguments, people almost always miss Summers's simple logical error: faulty generalization.

She also gives the example of anti-vaccine campaigners — one claim holds that vaccination is linked to a high rate of autism in children.

If someone had told me in 1969 that the 1990s would produce an anti-vaccine movement — a case study in junk thought and junk science — reported on respectfully by the news media, I'd have thought the prediction pure nonsense. Junk science and junk thought cannot be separated, and that shows fully in their shared lack of logic, a trait often bound up with deliberate manipulation. The inability to tell coincidence from causation is the first and most important warning sign — telling coincidence from causation is a basic requirement for grasping scientific knowledge. Precisely because of this, when a child falls ill weeks or months after being vaccinated, it's easy for grieving parents to blame the vaccine. The anti-vaccine movement is riddled with conspiracy theories, tied both to the political right's distrust of government and the political left's distrust of conventional medicine — the latter a legacy of the fringes of the holistic medicine and New Age movements of the 1960s and '70s. Over the past 25 years, autism rates seem to have risen markedly around the world. …People have also studied possible environmental influences, but on this question science still has no clear answer. Whatever is actually driving the rise in reported autism cases, one related coincidence is that the number of immunizations recommended for children has also gone up.

Susan Jacoby quotes the late star scientist Carl Sagan, who put the difference between real science and pseudoscience concisely: the former "grows by error, weeding out its mistakes one by one," while the latter holds theories "often woven so carefully that they're immune to experimental disproof, and by and large cannot be overturned." Yet when real scientists refuse to accept pseudoscientific claims, "that in turn gives rise to conspiracy theories about their suppression of the truth."

I don't want to turn inward and examine myself at the end of every paragraph, but plainly, over here all of this is already daily life. From top to bottom we generally understand neither logic nor science, and we don't have much grasp of respect either; when the argument gets too tangled to sort out, we reach for theories like "echo chambers," "empathy" and "concentric circles" to cheer ourselves on. The one who has it all down to a science is our former national talk-show host Cui Yongyuan, who picks up every weapon at hand and uses his own cleverness to spread every kind of junk thought.

4.

In the late 19th century an English merchant named Little brought his family to China to do business. His wife, Mrs. Archibald Little, was a colonial-minded literary type who wrote In the Land of the Blue Gown, a record of her life in China. She told this story:

May 1895, a notice: Be it hereby announced: foreign devils have incited bad men to steal children and render them for oil. My servant, a woman surnamed Li, saw it with her own eyes. Everyone please keep children from going outdoors, and please cooperate. Judging by what came after, the Chinese believed this anonymous notice completely. Even the most enlightened Chinaman — American-educated, head of a large industrial group — believed that "the Catholic church's walls are so high, its doors shut tight all day long; there must be a reason." A Chinese manservant who had worked at the British consulate most of his life was asked by his mistress: "Surely you don't believe those rumors. You know me and the master — you can't believe we'd gouge out children's eyes?" The manservant sighed heavily: "I don't know." All of China believed that foreigners dug out children's eyes to render into oil for developing photographs.

The first part relates to our fashionable term today, "post-truth." What follows goes a little deeper. In the past we didn't generally use the mocking, discriminatory word "stupid" — we used "ignorant," which carries a note of "grieving for their misfortune, raging at their refusal to fight." There's really no difference, and there may be a more accurate word still: "uncultured."

What we usually call values isn't an opinion about one thing. It's the method one ought to have for looking at a wider range of things. That, I think, is what "culture" is. It contains logic, common sense, and the "empathy" we questioned above — otherwise how could kindness exist? Otherwise you could work alongside a master and mistress for years and still not be able to tell whether they gouge out children's eyes. Not being able to tell is exactly what suffering from being "uncultured" looks like. I call it the "Master, I don't know" syndrome.

Yi-Fu Tuan, in Topophilia, a book that at first glance has little to do with stupidity, raises some ideas I think bear on this and can explain what the syndrome really is:

Perception, attitude, value and world view are some of this book's key concepts, and their meanings overlap. Each word's meaning should be clear within its particular context. Perception is both a sensory response to outside stimuli and the act of actively and deliberately etching a particular phenomenon into the mind, while other phenomena are ignored or shut out. The great majority of things we perceive have value to us, whether for the needs of survival or because they provide some satisfaction derived from culture. Attitude is first of all a cultural category — the way a person faces the world. It is far more stable than perception, and it forms over a long period of perception, or experience. Children can perceive, but apart from what they feel physiologically, their attitudes have not yet taken shape. Attitude implies experience, as well as a fairly settled view of interests and values. Children live within an environment, but they have only just come into possession of the world; they have not yet formed a world view. World view is conceptualized experience. A small part of it is individual, but far more of it is socialized. It is a system of attitudes or beliefs. The word "system" indicates that these attitudes and beliefs are joined by a structure, even though, from an objective standpoint, those links can look somewhat arbitrary.

You've surely thought of the condition called the "giant infant." Beyond the traits we all know, this should count as an important hidden one — and its destructive power could well leave you living your whole life in the 19th century.

So the reason to raise something that happened more than a hundred years ago is really to talk about our own era, which has already made a great deal of progress. We can read now, we hold bachelor's degrees, or diplomas from 985 universities, and yet in many places we are marching briskly back into the past. Take the Freemasons, which suddenly became a hot term on Chinese Weibo a couple of years ago — no different from the story of gouging out children's eyes to render oil for developing photographs. The Jews, supposedly, are still banding together, scheming to wipe out everyone in the world — the Nazis, Black people, the Communist Party, Henry Ford in the early 20th century, laid-off Ford workers in the early 21st, the Chinese… And it isn't only the Freemasons and the Jews: there's American GMO technology and crops, global trade, patents, the Minnesota police…

Not everyone dares paste a "post-truth" notice up on the street, but if you really pressed the question — assuming they were honest — the answer, after a long pause and a deep sigh, might really be: "Master, I don't know…"

5.

2018 gave us a book you could keep by the bed: The Dictionary of Human Stupidity. It may look fragmentary, but if you treat it as a reference work — not a tool for looking yourself up when you've been stupid, but a unit of measure — it's genuinely useful.

Take "airport security," for instance: a fine unit of measure.

[Airport Security] Henry David Thoreau once said: "Every fool has his own set of rules, and every fool follows them." In this day and age, that line could serve, word for word, as some officials' motto. Because terrorism runs rampant, it forces brilliant officials to keep setting up security checks at airports, at those places where passengers are so willing to be searched with no dignity at all.

Boarding corridors in Italy today have simply become a road to stupidity. Along the way, passengers must go through a series of useless rituals, purely to keep everyone at a high pitch of psychological tension. But what is the use of making people take off their coats, watches, belts and shoes? If terrorists really wanted to blow us to pieces, they could easily strike before the security line, as they did in Brussels and Istanbul in 2016.

We Chinese have a lot to say about this ourselves, because for us it's not just airports — the subway does exactly the same thing every single day.

I figure that if smart people all over the world are against something, it must be stupid.

Eric Hobsbawm had little patience for any of it. As a leftist revolutionary intellectual, he had that particular leftist bravado, and he said: "Although the numbers they [terrorists' acts of terrorism] kill are far higher than before, statistically speaking they're actually quite limited, and set against the numbers killed by state governments, they're small potatoes. For the purposes of military aggression they don't amount to anything at all. Unless such groups obtain nuclear weapons — not unimaginable, but not imminent either — what we need in the face of terrorism is a cool head, not hysterical fear." Manufacturing an atmosphere of bone-chilling fear, he said, is exactly what terrorists are trying to achieve.

In Britain, under normal circumstances, most of us have confidence in the balance struck by the government and the forces of public order, even if it slips out of control once or twice. But since 9/11, things haven't been normal. We've been submerged in wave after wave of political rhetoric — unnamed terrorist threats from abroad, hysteria over weapons of mass destruction, the notorious "War on Terror," and "defending our way of life" against a poorly defined external enemy and its terrorist agents at home. This rhetoric is nothing but stirring up trouble for its own sake, meant only to send chills down the public's spine, and it does nothing at all to counter terrorist activity — as for the political purpose behind it, I'll leave that for you to answer. Because manufacturing an atmosphere of bone-chilling fear is exactly what terrorists are trying to achieve. Their political goal isn't reached through acts like killing people, but through loudly publicizing the massacre they're about to carry out, throwing the public into chaos and out of control. During the period when Britain truly faced repeated challenges from terrorists — the years of continuous trouble from the IRA — the basic principle the authorities used against terrorism was to deny them, as far as possible, any exposure or any chance to publicize countermeasures against them.

Of course someone will say: this hasn't happened to you — once it does, it's a matter of life and death. That kind of talk, steeped in the arts of empathy, can shut a lot of people up. But if we're talking about the cost to society as a whole, it has to be weighed. And there's another reason: it's the same as the way our supervising government officials, on hearing that a Didi driver had raped and murdered a passenger, couldn't wait to shut the whole company down. It isn't only lazy governance — it's likely that officials get more fired up once they've caught the scent of rent-seeking in the matter.

Robert Gordon, the economist, said:

Airport security wastes 200 million hours of precious passenger time every year (roughly 600 million passengers times 20 minutes of security time each), equivalent to wasting $8 billion worth of time a year. Aviation security screening worldwide is in fact an overreaction to 9/11. Looking at 9/11 itself, U.S. aviation security found only one vulnerability: the cockpit door was too flimsy. Within days the cockpit had been fitted with an especially strong security door that no one could break through. Even though the security problem was solved within a week, fourteen years of unnecessary security measures have still wasted billions of dollars' worth of passengers' time every year. The 2001 security system, which had passengers walk quickly through X-ray to check for guns and metal weapons, was already enough.

There is plenty of material here that works as a unit of measure. It reads almost like a portrait of our entire lives — even though the Italian author of The Dictionary of Human Stupidity had only Italy in mind, or at most extended his thoughts to Europe and America. Stupidity, you should know, went global long ago.

[Denialism] Some European countries have recently created the crime of "Holocaust denial," meaning to fix certain historical facts by law. But this is a double-edged sword. On one side, it recalls the attempts of totalitarian regimes to rewrite history however they pleased; on the other — a side that's overlooked or even ignored — genuine truth doesn't need to force people to believe it. The only truths able to establish their own authority completely are the theorems of mathematics and science. The first rests on absolute logical correctness, the second on a high probability grounded in experiment. So-called historical truths are not among them; they are often unreliable. The only sensible crime of denial would be one that protects the Pythagorean theorem or Darwin's theory of evolution, punishing the stupidity of those who deny them.

[Political Correctness] The peak of stupidity produced by political correctness came in the 1970s. At the time, American feminists objected to the word "history," arguing that its prefix "his-" underscored that history was written from a male point of view, and that a separate, female-perspective version had to be written and named "herstory." If you're going to argue like that, it isn't political correctness at all — it's stupidity, through and through.

[Twitter] In the 1920s, when Paul Valéry first met Einstein, he proudly showed him his notebook and said: "I always carry it with me, to jot down any sudden flash of inspiration, so I won't forget it. Do you do the same?" Einstein answered: "No! I rarely have flashes of inspiration, so there's no risk of forgetting them." Without doubt, almost everyone today can recite at least one formula that crystallizes one of Einstein's flashes of inspiration, while almost no one can recall a single one of Valéry's aphorisms — not even the opening line of his 1926 novel Monsieur Teste, "Stupidity is not my strong suit." One can easily imagine, then, how much of the 500 million tweets sent every day by people more foolish than Valéry survives the great sifting of the internet's flood of information. A good way for a Twitter addict to see their own foolishness is to check whether the fragments of their thinking can be distilled into one final idea, and whether that idea can be fully stated within a 140-character limit, with room left to toss in a line of Dante's terza rima. But most people, it seems, can't manage even that — as Fellini put it in 8½: "I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway."

These few entries, picked out more or less at random, all map onto every kind of stupidity discussed above. When I think that after all our hard work over so many years the world seems to have made so much progress, and yet we still have to worry about this, there's a despairing pain in it, like watching everything burn to ash.

The only consolation is that our lives are so rich we're confident we could expand the Chinese edition of this dictionary until it's as thick as Webster's.

For instance, I just stole a glance at NetEase, and a whole run of entries came pouring out: comment threads. Superman. News. Center stage. Pinned to the top. Algorithm. Headline. Comments disabled.

Don't assume you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the thing everyone carries inside them. You've just been unlucky enough not to get the chance to put your own stupidity on display.

Cover image is a still from the film 3 Idiots, via Douban.