When I think of the irreducibility of stupidity -my own especially- I feel oppressed by the monumentality of it, its scale and scope and persistence. I’ve often quoted Errol Morris saying that “error is the central feature of human existence.” Or as Albert Einstein put it, “Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
I’ve been reading Avital Ronell’s Stupidity, a book which is far beyond my comprehension (for reasons having either to do with her, me, or both of us). I failed completely to understand another work of hers called The Telephone Book, the prose of which is so impenetrable for me that I feel genuinely moronic when I attempt to understand even a paragraph; again, this may be her fault or mine, but she’s a well-regarded writer and I think I likely lack the lexicon and analytical skills needed.
But parts of Stupidity are striking, and I thought I’d quote at length from its opening:
“Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutch of denial—and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history. From Schiller’s exasperated concession that even the gods cannot combat stupidity to Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, to determine the exact status and level of Adolf Eichmann’s Dummheit…stupidity has evinced a mute resistance to political urgency, an instance of unaccountable ethical hiatus. In fact, stupidity, purveyor of self-assured assertiveness, mutes just about everything that would seek to disturb its impervious hierarchies.
“Neither a pathology nor an index of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.”
