Stupidologiology

William Davies, found in the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and elsewhere, is an enterprising writer, and since he is occasionally found on Novara Media, is also an enterprising speaker. He has come in with an analysis of ‘Stupidology‘ for n+1, and the Guardian picked it up as one of its ‘Long Reads’, though changing the title to: ‘A Critique of Pure Stupidity: Understanding Trump 2.0.’

His basic argument, and it is basic, is:

Trump is stupid.

Brexit was stupid.

I am not stupid.

Neither are my friends.

How is it that the stupid people have power?

I’ll show my cleverness by writing an article about their stupidity.

Well, the sad news for William Davies is that I am cleverer than he is. I see through his trickery. Why? Because I am capable of self-criticism, I hope, and he is not: he does not even try it. And criticism is better criticism, in fact, exponentially better, when it includes self-criticism.

Let’s see if I am self-critical. Here goes. I might be wrong. Perhaps Kennedy is a noodle-eating-poodle. Perhaps Trump is a Donald-I-Am. Perhaps Pope Leo is a hero, standing there with his hand on a bit of ice. Globalism might be the ideology of the future. Who knows? I have views in politics, no doubt, but I recognise the need to separate them from my views about what politics is about. There.

Now, let’s ask Davies. Could he be wrong?

No. In his own words:

To many of us, the central problem is that live not so much in a time of lies, as one of stupidity.

Is there the slightest possibility that this stupidity affects William Davies? Why, not at all. As far as he is concerned, the stupidity is over there, on the Right, and the cleverness is over here, on the Left. “Many of us” = him and his friends.

Most of his article is standard Leftist-centrist chunder. Complaints about breaches of security and the policy of tariffs. Timeline stuff. But it is decorated with bits of analysis from Hillary Clinton (“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me, it’s the stupidity”), Trotsky (“When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking”), and Arendt (“Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense”). Yes, Davies is a hintellectual.

And his conclusion is that we are seeing a “new hostility to the very idea of evidence-based government” (in the original n+1 version, this was “new hostility to the very idea of public use values”, whatever that means: well done, Guardian, for changing it). But it is not very convincing. It is not very convincing, because it is so very political.

Let us have a little dialogue.

DAVIES. One needn’t indulge in such dark fantasies [Davies had been ruminating on eugenics] to hope that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance.

ALEXANDER. It already has done. Trump was its comeuppance. The stupidity was already there.

DAVIES. Trump’s basic lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to Trump himself.

ALEXANDER. It sounds as if you, not Trump, need to go and read Hume on causality. Or MacIntyre. Or anyone. In which world, exactly, does policy A lead to outcome B? In which world is anything so certain? It is your stupid belief in the certainty of the relation between input A and output B that is the problem: since it means you fail to understand politics. Politics is, inevitably, a world in which policy A does not certainly lead to outcome B.

DAVIES. 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 say, can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.

ALEXANDER. Quite. And since you like evidence so much, I submit, as evidence, the stupidity evident in the political response to the pandemic. Or, if you like, I submit, as further evidence, the stupidity which is now functional in Whitehall and the three-letter-agencies of the Capitol. Surely, the ragtag right of Trump and Farage is a lot less functionally stupid than the regimes it is provoking.

DAVIES. It is hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things—universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

ALEXANDER. I am glad you agree. But why did you mention Spicer and Alvesson? You seem to be very much committed to the functional stupidity of the “very things” that “help make the world intelligible” to you.

The dialogue has to finish there as Davies veers off to talk about Arendt, then Hayek, then Musk. He dislikes the “neoliberal” habit of trusting markets, trusting models, trusting large-language-models: he thinks this is no good. And I agree. He is against reducing everything to status of patterns, of explaining everything human in terms of behaviour. I agree. But then he hops over to some more authorities, this time political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, to say that everyone goes running after viral opinions online. Ah well, Rosenblum and Muirhead should stay calm, and so should Davies, for this is just politics when the people do it. It is all in Coriolanus.

He goes on a bit about Arendt, everyone’s favourite dreamy author. Then he comes back to his own favourite theme.

Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human.

This cannot be true. It is not true because it is implausible, indeed, impossible. But it is also not true because it is political. Davies is offended, aggrieved: and he is trying to make a stern, adult sort of artefact out of his offence and grievance by posing as clever and detached. Well, it is not good enough. It just means that Davies, like most of those on the Left, appears to abandon all of his understanding of what politics is when he is carrying a political grievance.

So let me remind him what politics is. Politics is an uncertain world containing a clash of wills, a conflict of intentions, a dispute about status and right: it is a world largely created by hope or aspiration or wild anticipation of a possible good, which may, admittedly, be a partial good: partial in the sense of incompletely achieved, and partial in the sense of only satisfying one party. In addition, the possible good can also be bad, by design, or again bad, by consequence. And that is true on the Left, as on the Right.

And it is really the most boring, the most confounding, the most limiting fact about journalists like Davies that they think their retreat into cleverness, and their condemnation of the opponents as stupid, is going to work. It is the squeal that emanates from a displaced establishment. And it is the sort of squeal that, in its inability to hear itself, proves the necessity of the attempt to displace this establishment: an attempt that, for better or worse, has found its motor in Trump.

(Note. The Guardian said its version was slightly different from the original version. I checked and the only interesting difference I could see in the non-paywalled bit was that Davies, in the original n+1 version, said that US writer David Brooks was “sinister” whereas the Guardian version, he said Brooks was “centrist”. That’s quite some emendation. Centrist = sinister? What is going on? Well, I assume Davies wrote “sinister”, and the Guardian changed it to “centrist.” Why? Well, perhaps because the Guardian thought, “Let n+1 pay for libel, we’ll check Wikipedia, ah, it says Brooks is a centrist, go print the legend.” Wikipedia also says that Brooks says he was a liberal who came to his senses, and is now a sort of Burkean Whig. Aye, that would be ‘sinister’ in Davies’s world, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately Davies, despite being clever, forgets that the word “sinister” means “left”, not “right”.)

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.