Stupidity

Why is there less variance in the opinions held by stupid people?

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"Understand it for me."

Anamnesis and Education

From the derivation of 'education': "The Romans considered educating to be synonymous with drawing knowledge out of somebody or leading them out of regular thinking."

There are two antithetical meanings in this derivation. Depending upon whether one considers the object to be drawn is the knowledge, or the student. In my day, it was clearly stated that knowledge was the object of education. These days the student has become the object., The deliverable product of institutional education has increasingly become more quantifiably and concretely 'the graduate' and no longer an abstract 'knowledge.'

Anamnesis is to recollect what one already always knew.

Chomsky, in a public lecture I attended in the 1990s, suggested that we all know what is right and fair, in social interaction. He further stated that the state has worked on its populace for hundreds of years to convince us that we don't.

Without wishing to fall into the trap of 'truthiness,' my gut tells me Chomsky's right. I think humans have an inbuilt theory of mind which permits (but does not materially entail) empathy. I think we are innately imbued with a facility to projectively imagine the position, feelings, available options and disposition of the Other in any interaction. I think there is sufficient reason to suppose that 'a fair go' is an optimal goal in societal interaction, if only because the iterated prisoner's dilemma suggests it. Without recourse to 'truthiness', I think it is true to say that if we live in a society whose values turn our stomachs, we are right to respond viscerally.

(I exempt from this consideration people who are autistic (whose ability to projectively imagine the Other appears to be undeveloped or absent) and sociopaths (who don't value the Other) but for the most part, people know what it is to be fair to another, and people have a sense of what's right. It would seem to be a neat exercise in deconstructing 'empathy' to learn to empathise with the unempathic.)

Hypothetically: this sense of what is right can be drawn from anyone by a structured enquiry into their values, into what matters to them, and empirical consideration of the implications of the expression of those values. It may be drawn from what Python (after Gurdjieff called) a process of guided self-observation. Python's reading of Gurdjieff goes on to say that such developments are "rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia." Current educational policy departs from a process of guided self-observation to focus on trivial 'attainment of learning outcomes.'

These 'learning outcomes' (we are told) render graduates for economic life, and as Nietzsche said (in "The Eulogists of Work")

At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work -and what is

invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late- that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.

Education which "always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions" is the antithesis of the guided self observation prescribed by Gurdjieff. It is consistent with education in which the student is drawn along (like a donkey in harness) and antithetical to an education which draws out knowledge, or leads the student to anmnesis.

I understand the societal goal of primary and secondary education in a democracy to be, rather, to provision the populace with necessary and sufficient means of participation in the government of the society. To the extent that this goal has been subverted to serve the production of a skilled workforce, society is being asked to socialise costs which ought properly to be borne by the consumers of the skills imparted and is being robbed of its ability to perpetuate itself as a democracy.

I once had the privilege of speaking to an elected representative, one Michael Photios, when he had the slimmest of paper-thin majorities. Michael put it to me that without 'leadership' by elected representatives we would still have capital punishment. In this, I think, he was seeking to distinguish an elected elite value system from a broad societal one. He was asserting that the long and hard-fought campaigns of people like Koestler (Reflections on Hanging) and Orwell (A Hanging) hold no value except insofar as they might influence that elected elite.

It seems to me that if Michael Photios' assertion is correct, it means that the masses of people, the population as a whole, are incapable of understanding the case against capital punishment, or that the case is not entirely made. I think that this implies a systemic failure of education in its presumed goal of giving the masses an ability to meaningfully participate. Michael appealed to my prejudices (that capital punishment was unethical) to prove to me that direct democracy couldn't work.

It's taken me twenty years to see it, but I think I have my rebuttal: If he and I can conclude that capital punishment is wrong, yet the masses can't, this means our system of primary and secondary education has failed them. If we, as a democracy, cannot provide the masses with the means of their own proper government, we have no right to the name. If we, as presumed elites, sit satisfied with our right to overrule the baser instincts of the people, to protect them from themselves, then we have failed to govern democratically.

It may be a pious and unevidenced belief, it may be false, but I suspect that what leads the masses to desire their own repression is a systemic programme of education to that end.

The Problem with Probability is that we don't teach it to everyone, although it's a minimally necessary life skill ... so people build in flood plains, they embezzle to put the proceeds (and presumably their life savings) through poker machines.

Michael Photios supported his assertion that the masses support capital punishment by reference to polls. Polling suggested that capital punishment was popular. Reminds me of John Cooper-Clarke's "Suspended Sentence" in which a tabloid stampede makes capital punishment mandatory.

Is Michael Photios' blithe acceptance of polling as evidence of the immutable will of the people acceptable in a politician? What of Paul Keating's statement that he didn't seek popularity, but the "regard of serious people?"

In a democracy, we're supposed to educate people enough so they are able to hold a valid opinion. Remember?