Why We Are Stupid
HUMAN beings—the fact is, alas, only too obvious—are not very intelligent. They persist in believing in propositions which there is no reason to think true; and in embarking upon conduct which will demonstrably not lead to ends such as they desire. The first characteristic produces superstition, the second war, two of the most persistent phenomena of human history. Now, desiring truth, to believe without evidence, and desiring happiness to act in such a way as to produce pain, are the characteristics of stupid creatures. So stupid, indeed, are we that, in Mr. Pitkin's view, stupidity is the most outstanding of all our characteristics. That some- thing- is wrong with the contemporary world we all agree. Science has made us so completely masters of the physical world that poverty and want' are now unnecessary : the economic millennium is, in fact, a practical possibility. Never- theless, most men remain poor ; many are in actual' want. Oux economic system is out of gear, and our civilization threatened by destruction in the next war. Something, it is obvious, is very 'wrong. Can it be ourselves ? -Mr. Pitkin assures us that it is. What, then, can be the matter with us ? Ill-health, ignorance, superstition, decaying glands, inade- quate education, ill-will, malice ? No doubt we are suffering from all these in their degree. - But more than all-these, under- lying them and producing them, is stupidity. Hence, if man is to put right what is amiss, he must become more intelligent. Unfortunately, the recipe for intelligence is not known. A prolegomenon to the production of intelligence is, however, a study of stupidity. We must first find out why it is that we are so stupid. Hence " a thorough inquiry into- stupid people and their acts has become a major issue of statesman- ship." This inquiry Mr. Pitkin has undertaken, or rather he has undertaken to introduce it, for the history of stupidity will, he assures us, be 'prodigious—he speaks of the " first thirty or forty volumes." - Even the " Introduction," which has been " compressed - to an irreducible minimum " by the excision of 125,000 words from the original manuscript, runs to 550 pages.
It is a formidable work, within the pages of which is collected an enormous number of diverse facts, some of them comic, most of them depressing, and all of them of intense interest. Mr. Pitkin's outstanding virtue is thoroughness. He con- siders than first in relation to his external environment, the victim of heat and cold, of want and disease and bacteria. He then _considers his internal organization, the constitution of his blood, the secretions of his glands, the structure of his brain. He proceeds finally to survey him in relation to his fellows, in love, in business, in politics—relations in which he shows to so little advantage as he " piles dullness on blunder and heaps the whole into chaos," that Mr. Pitkin is moved to wonder whether he " sees aright." Throughout, the author is concerned with the same question, " Why is it that man is so stupid ? " The answer is apparently endless. Drink makes him stupid, and so does tobacco ; so do drugs, heat, and damp, bacteria, hookworm, dirt, fatigue and disease, the woman he loves, the food he eats, the age to which he insists on living. Killing makes him stupid, and so does war, for in war it is the least stupid who are killed.
Take, for example, the case of hookworm. Apart from its physical effects, hookworm makes men's " mental and physical reactions sluggish . . . They are dull and apathetic, have difficulty-in concentrating, and when spoken to, seem not to hear. When asked to do things, they behave as through a fog." Now Vir) per cent. of all- the people in the.tropics engaged in agriculture suffer from hookworm. The word ". tropics " brings up the-scarcely less stupefying effects of damp and heat. " The Mood tends to -remain near the surface till -cooled ;. and the result is that more than one-third of the entire blood suppiy .is to be found in the vessels close to the skin. This deprives the intestines, the brain, and the other organs of their needful- amount, and general malnutrition ensues." -Hence, tropic neurasthenia," hence mental and physical stagnation, hence quietism, indifference, apathy, contemplation of the navel, Yogi, lotus eating for • this world and Nirvana for the next.., Jactged by our standards, nobody in- the tropics really wants either to do anything onto think-anything. ..According to Mr. Pitkin, his indifference is thoroughly justified. It is *only "mad dogs and Englishmen (who) go out in the midday sun."
Or take age. Mr. Pitkin has discovered that the brain starts shrinking by the thirty-fifth year. By the forty-fifth, -the endocrine glands begin to subside. Taste, hearing, sight and touch are already past their best at thirty. By fifty, memory has weakened, and in the later fifties the energy curve drops sharply. And so on . . . There is no end to the disa- bilities of the old. We are then told the age average of the persons whose position enables them to determine the course of events—for example, of the great men who made history in the War ; the youngest, Wilson, was fifty-eight, the oldest, Clemenceau, was seventy-three. Is it any wonder, asks Mr. Pitkin, that events go so much awry, that history is as it is?
In spite of its thesis, the book is far from depressing.
for one, have found it in the highest degree stimulating. Perhaps this is due in part to the gusto of Mr. Pitkin, who attacks his subject with a high-spirited exuberance which he maintains to the end. His style matches the excitement of his thought. The following, a description of the Russians, is a typical example. " Not a race Rather scores of races in a jumble of tongues and customs : old Slav, Ural-Altaic folk, Mongols, Turks, Germans, Tatars, Turco-Tatars, Turco- Mongols, Slavo-Teuto-Turco-Mongols, and. a thousand and one lesser bastardies and brothel-babes, not to mention that now deposed handful of Scandinavian-Teutonic despots who, for generations, looted the peasants and called it governing." Every now and then his habitual rudeness to mankind achieves a certain distinction of invective, as when, for example, lie says of Kitchener " in the presence of bis memory, all the donkeys salute." • So many are the shots that Mr. Pitkin makes that inevitably a few are beside the mark. I doubt, for example, whether it is correct to say that " the England of 1914 was fully 50 per cent. shrewder, wiser, keener, more alert, -and generally better, than - the sorry swarm of pallid beggars and loafers now living on a dole and great memories of Empire." Or that men take .to philosophy when they are old, because, in comparison with politics or business, it requires so little energy. But then, as a contemporary Englishman who happens also to be a philosopher, I am biassed on both points. Stupid as we are, we are entitled to console ourselves with three reflections. First, as Mr. Pitkin points out, it is only the very stupid who could have been insensitive enough to survive so much suffering as the human race. - Secondly, stupidity is a fairly sure recipe for a certain low-grade general happiness. Thirdly, it is astonishing and highly comforting that beings so stupid should have managed to survive at all.
Ci E. M. JOAD.
Previous page
