"HOW I BECAME
"HOW I BECAME
STUPID"
(What if Ignorance
really IS bliss?...)
April is here, the strains of Aaron Copeland's 'Appalachian Spring' appropriately accentuate the clarity of this bright Sunday morning, and as you read this I shall be on Molokai once again, taking care of some details related to our purchase of a small property there to retire to. Outside, the sun is shining once more after weeks of seemingly non-stop rain here in Sunny California, birds are chirping enthusiastically, the highways are already absolutely challenged with raging hormones and congested with brain-cell challenged motorists, and I am briefly reminded of my profound sadness over the loss of such simple pleasures as watching children play in the local park. For this specific example of a loss of innocence we have what seems like an almost epidemic plague of child molesters to thank, a group that now includes a disproportionate percentage of the Roman Catholic clergy and the Michael Jackson person. While criminal molestation of children is nothing new to the world, the present media blitz of daily instances of child molestations serves to reinforce melancholy awareness that nothing we do in life nowadays is free of onerously suspect potential. Although I have never had children of my own, in my opinion one of the best balms for treatment of the weary spiritual wounds to the human soul over time is the simple pleasure of watching children play, totally unfettered as they are by the somber cares and woeful concerns of mature adulthood. Regrettably, owing to the acute and growing public awareness of child abductions, molestations, and related heinous violations of moral norms (QED: Michael Jackson, et al), one cannot but keenly understand (and lament) the suspicion parents bristle with whenever a strange adult has even the most innocent and innocuous interaction with their children. One sees these parental admonishments take hold ("Don't talk to strangers", etc.) reluctantly knowing and accepting the stark fact that such constrictions in the normal ebb and flow of childish innocence are vital contraints that must be observed when social standards of trust and normalcy have fallen into such a complete state of disrepair as have ours today, in America. Just another example of the failure of America's promise, in my opinion, and a particular apt demonstration of why our much ballyhooed national socio-cultural 'diversity' is NOT a good thing. Cultural homogeneity is far more conducive to maintenance of social norms than cultural heterogeneity and yet we are still hit over the collective head each day with blandishments about how diversity is our national strength (rather than our ultimate national downfall). To those who hasten to contradict this outlook, I will qualify that statement somewhat: Yes, IF a moderate to high level of intelligence and wise reflectivity were established components of contemporary American life, diversity would be a blessing. However, given the fact that ordinary people demonstrate high levels of the diametric opposite attribute (abject stupidity), such high-minded aspirations can only result in the ultimate disintegration of the Great American Experiment (known as capitalistic democracy). Aside from the fact that American levels of stupidity among ordinary people are a favorite subject of mine, this leads me to the subject of this month's rant, a book I happened to stumble across quite recently.
The book in reference is arrestingly titled "how i became stupid" (use of lower case letters SIC), by Martin Page. Page is French and the book originally appeared in that language as "Comment je suis devenu stupide", published by Le Dilettante, Paris 2001. The English translation (by Adrianna Hunter) was put out as a Penguin Book in 2004. It is touted as "An international cult favorite" and I can easily see why, since it deals with the chief aspects of life that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom: our ability to reflect rationally on the quality of our life experience and our awareness as an organism with a sense of 'self' (or expressed another way, our 'intellect'). While the book has only recently been formally recognised as worthy, by virtue of the bestowal of an award (The German Euregio-Schuler-Literaturpreis), it has to date been translated into 24 different languages and has been embraced as a sub-culture favorite of intellectuals in a number of countries. The book has a strong flavor of Voltaire to it, and while not a perfect masterpiece of writing style, the core thesis comes through quite winsomely, through delightful and liberal use of sardonic irony. The author, Martin Page, who was 25 when the book was originally published, has written an erstwhile fiction novel about a protagonist whose name is Antoine, the cross-cultural offspring of a Burmese father and a Breton mother.
Antoine is frightfully intelligent, fluent in Aramaic language, possessed of several University graduate degrees in absolutely useless subjects (useless as preparation for job skills, that is), and a tormented intellectual. Perhaps the best way to introduce his personna is to borrow a paragraph from the back cover of the book:
"Tortured by the depth of his own intellect, plagued by his own overwhelming sense of self-awareness, and the moral implications of every action he makes, Antoine, a 25-year-old Aramaic scholar, is at the end of his rope with only one viable solution insight: he must renounce his intelligence by any mean necessary. What follows in Martin Page's wickedly funny satire is an odyssey unlike any other, as Antoine walks the streets of Paris trying everything from alcoholism to stock-trading, to the prescription drug 'Happyzac', in order to lighten the burden of his mind upon his soul, and to fulfill his dream of becoming stupid enough to be a happily functioning member of society."
It is easy enough to understand that Martin Page uses his own direct life experience to write the book, which is encouraging, since it gives many of us who harbor similar tendencies to regard life as a cruel joke some reassurance that there are more 'maladjusted' Proustian souls like ourselves out here (mixed in with the flock of witlessly bleating sheep that is the majority of the human race) than we have perhaps allowed for. I won't ruin the book for you, as it is a delightful read of only about 150 or so pages, but a few quotes from it are definitely in order to further tantalise you and whet your anticipation of having a peak into Antoine's tormented mind.
"Nothing annoys me more than the stories where, at the end, the hero is in the same situation as the beginning, but he's gained something. He's taken risks, survived adventures, but in the end lands back on his feet. I don't want to be a part of that lie: pretending I don't already know how all of this will end. I know full well that this journey into stupidity is going to turn into a hymn to intelligence. It will be my own personal little Odyssey--after my shared of trials and dangerous adventures, I will end up back in Ithaca. I can already smell the Ouzo and stuffed grape leaves. It would be hypocritical not to admit it, not to say that, right from the beginning, the hero's going to come out OK--he's even going to come out of it a better man. The conclusion, painfully contrived to seem natural--will proclaim a moral, along these lines: 'It is good to think, but we must make the most of this life'. Whatever we say and whatever we do, there is always a moral grazing somewhere in the meadows of our personalities.
"It is Wednesday, July 19th. The sun has at last decided to come out of retirement. At the end of this adventure I'd like to be able to say, like the character Joker in (the film) Full Metal Jacket: 'I'm in a world of shit...yes, but I am alive. And I am NOT afraid!'
More of Page's insight:
"Intelligence is one of evolution's failures. In the days of the first prehistoric humans I can just imagine some little tribe where all the kids run through the scrub chasing lizards and picking berries for their dinner; they gradually learn from the adults how to be perfect men and women: hunters, gatherers, fishermen, tanners. But if we look more closely at the life of this tribe we'll see that some children don't join in the group activities: they stay sitting by the fire, sheltered inside the cave. They never learn how to defend themselves against a saber-toothed tiger, or how to hunt; by themselves they wouldn't survive a single night. And it's not out of laziness, no, they'd like to be capering about with their friends, but they can't. When nature brought them into the world, it slipped up. Within that tribe there's a little blind girl, a boy with a limp, another one who's clumsy, and absent-minded.... So they stay by the fire all day and , as they've got nothing to do and video games haven't been invented yet, they just have to think and let their minds do all the capering. So they spend all their time thinking and trying to decipher the world, dreaming up stories and inventions. That's how civilisation was born: because a bunch of imperfect kids had nothing better to do. If nature never maimed anyone, if the mold was always flawless, the human race would have stayed a protohominid species, quite happy with no thoughts of progress, living perfectly well without Prozac or condoms or Dolby Digital DVDs.
"I have the curse of reason: I'm poor, single, and depressed. For months now I've been thinking about my illness of thinking too much, and I've established with complete certainty the correlations between my unhappiness and the incontinence of my mind. Probing and pondering and over-analysing have never given me any advantages; they've only played against me. The process of thought is not a natural one, it hurts; it's as if I were uncovering bits of broken glass and lengths of barbed wire in the air. I can't seem to stop my brain or slow it down. I feel like a train, a big old steam train hurtling along the tracks, a train that will never be able to stop because the fuel that makes it so dizzyingly powerful, the coal, is the whole world. Everything I see, feel, and hear throws itself into the furnace of my mind, fires it up, and makes it charge full steam ahead. Probing and pondering and over-analysing is a kind of social suicide because it means you can no longer take part in this life without inadvertently feeling both like a bird of prey and a vulture picking apart everything it sees. When we try to understand something, more often than not we kill it, and now I can feel the dangers of this encroaching on me: cynicism, bitterness, and infinite sadness. You very quickly become good at being unlucky and unhappy. It's impossible to live if you're too aware, too thoughtful. Take nature, for example: everything that lives happily and to a ripe old age is not very intelligent. Tortoises live for centuries, water's immortal, and Milton Friedman's still alive. In nature, (rational) awareness is an exception; you could even postulated that it's an accident because itg gives no guarantee of superiority or of particular longevity. In the context of the evolution of the species, it doesn't represent any better form of adaptation. In terms of age, numbers, and occupied territories, insects are actually the masters of the planet. For example, the social structure of the ant colony is far more effective than ours will ever be, and there isn't a single ant with a chair at Harvard.
"Everyone's got something to say about women, men, the police, and murderers. We generalise according to our own experiences, to suit ourselves, depending upon what we understand within the slender means of our neuronal networks and in the context of our perception of things. This facility enables us to think quickly, judge, and take a position. It has no intrinsic value, it's just a system of signals, of little flags we all wave. And everyone defends the virtue of their own advantages, their sex, and their positions.
"In a debate, generalisation has the advantage of simplicity and of making arguments more fluid so that they're readily understandable, therefore they have greater impact on the listener. To translate that into mathematical terms, discussions based on generalisations are like additions, simple operations that are so self-evident they seem convincing and relevant. On the other hand, a serious discussion would seem more like a succession of inequations containing several unknowns, integrals, and reshuffling of complex numbers.
"A learned person taking part in a discussion will think they're simplifying things, and all they really want is to make deletions and alternations, sticking asterisks at the end of words, putting footnotes at the bottom of of the page and endnotes at the end of the book to explain what they're really thinking, and from where it stems. But in a casual conversation at the end of a corridor, at a sparkling dinner party, or in the columns of a newspaper, that really can't happen: there's no room for rigorous accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, or honesty. Virtue is a rhetorical handicap, completely inefficient in a debate.
"Men simplify the world with words and thoughts, and that's how they create their certainties; and having certainty is the most potent pleasure in this world, far more potent than money sex, and power all combined. Renouncing true intelligence is the price we have to pay for having these certainties, and it's an expense that never gets noticed by the bank of our minds. In this instance, I actually prefer those who don't huddle behind the cloak of reason, and come out and admit the illusory nature of their beliefs. Like a believer admitting that his faith is just his own belief and not preemption on the 'truths' of this world.
"There's a Chinese proverb that goes something along these lines: 'A fish never knows when it is pissing'. The same applies perfectly well to intellectuals. An intellectual is convinced of his own intelligence because he's using his brain. A mason uses his hands, but he too has a brain that can say, 'Hey! That wall's not straight and anyway you've forgotten to put the cement between the cinder blocks.' There's a dialogue between his hands at work and his mind. The intellectual who works within his mind doesn't have that dialogue: his hands don't pipe-up and say 'Come on, man, you've really goofed up! The Earth is round!' The intellectual doesn't have that distance, that discrepancy, so he thinks he has or can have an enlightened view on every subject.
"Intellectuals obviously aren't the only people infected with intelligence. I'm convinced that intelligence is a defect shared by the totality of the population, without any social distinctions: there's the same percentage of intelligent people amongst history teachers and Breton sea fishermen, amongst writers and typists.
"One thing that can be conceded is that, even if we get no guarantee of intelligence from familiarity with great works, using our minds and reading the output of geniuses, it does at least increase risk. Of course there are people who've read Freud and Plato, who can juggle with Quarks, and tell the difference between a Peregrine Falcon and a Kestrel, and who'll still be idiots. All the same, by being in contact with a multitude if stimuli and by exposing the mind to an enriching environment, intelligence can potentially find a breeding ground just like any other disease...
Another delightful snippet follows:
"Human beings are really like their cars. Some have a life with no options, no extras, a life that just runs along, can't go very quickly, quite often stalls, and needs frequent repair work. Other lives come with every possible extra: money, love, beauty, health, friendship, and success, not to mention airbags, ABS, leather seats, power steering, 16 valve engine, and air conditioning."
And yet another:
"Was it Nietzsche who said 'Intelligence is a crazy horse: you have to learn to hold its reins, to feed it the rights oats, to groom it, and sometimes to use the whip'?"
And finally:
"The whole of society is a sentence passed against me. Work, studies, modern music, money, politics, sports, TV, models, newspapers, cars.....now there's a good example....cars! I can't cycle or walk anywhere I like and make the most of this city: my freedom is completely condemned by cars. And they smell and they're dangerous..."
I think these small hooks are sufficient to entice you into taking up this slim volume and giving it a go. These few excerpts printed here are just a tiny bit of the delightfully ironic reflection to be found in this book by author Martin Page. Further, it provides a frame of understanding within which to reconcile the fact that as yet another reflective individual, all I am guaranteed by possession of that aspect of my personality is a life of endless frustration by trying to apply intelligence to the world of human affairs. Like the protagonist of Page's book, I've already crossed alcoholism and religion off my list of possible salvations. Next week I intend to contact my primary health care provider and ask about the possibility of undergoing a frontal lobotomy so that I can finally feel like I belong to the rest of the human race!
Cheers, Chez Doc Boink, April 2005
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("HOW I BECAME STUPID", by Martin Page, A Penguin Book, 2004, paperback, 160 pages, ISBN 0-14-200495-2)
(Photo: Record album cover from "Music for non-thinkers: The Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band", RCA Victor Phonograph Record # LSP-1721, 1958)
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