The Perils of Calling Smart People Stupid
by rsbakker
I still haven’t had a chance to look at the comments… But I will, once my master, the Great God Procrastidemus, gives me permission.
Otherwise, having completely alienated another one of the fine patrons of the coffee shop where I spend my mornings writing, I thought I would talk about the perils of calling smart people stupid.
The conversations almost always start with some variant of the question: “So you think you’re a critical thinker?” The most recent one ended with me saying, “I’ll shut up now,” to the response, “Yes. Please do.”
Now I’ve had dozens of these conversations, almost always with people in the humanities. Quite a few professors frequent the shop, so I end hearing quite a few sweeping statements about how benighted the poor world is – a claim I whole-heartedly agree with, the exception being I’m inclined to lump the speaker (in this case, myself) in with the rest of the world.
Now I’ve resigned myself to the fact that in some respects, all that distinguishes the educated from the evangelical is the sophistication of their tactics. They both think the other is the sign of the End. The both think themselves morally superior to the other. And they both despise genuine criticism.
I know I do. It’s like this involuntary muscle begins twitching, and I literally purse my lips to prevent myself from speaking. It seems like I have to let the thing tire itself out before I can honestly consider the hard words I’ve heard. When I do speak, I have this strange sense of convincing myself as I speak – and moreover, using my knowledge and vocabulary as a kind of weapon. I find it takes real effort to take a step back, shake my head, and realize I’m simply playing the confirmation game.
Now I like to think I’ve managed to gain some good cognitive habits over the years. I think I’m pretty good at reminding myself that things are always more complicated than they seem. I think I do a fair job at qualifying my claims, and hedging my commitment to newly acquired ‘facts.’
If I still feel as if I have a leg up on the people I’m debating, I think I’ve become good at reminding myself that they feel almost precisely the same way.
I used to feel as though I had become quite good at debating others in a nonthreatening way, but now I realize that this isn’t true at all, at least not in the way I had assumed. I actually think that I have become good at debating points -religious, political – with people lacking graduate degrees in the humanities. The evangelicals I question and debate, for instance, almost always seem to like me afterward – even when I manage to freak them out.
So why isn’t this the case with academics in the humanities? It could be my own insecurities – perhaps I come across as needing to score points against them. Or perhaps, there’s a tacit hierarchy that I’m violating – the hierarchy of the Judge and the Judged.
You see, critical thinking, among many humanities academics, is the cornerstone of their mythic self-identity. They are, you might say, Ordained Critical Thinkers – this is the very sphere of their expertise. So when someone like me comes along claiming that the biggest barrier to critical thinking is the assumption that you are a critical thinker, I’m guessing that it constitutes a kind of existential threat.
I have a friend who once roomed with an expert in ancient languages. Whenever the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses came canvassing, he would invite them in to peruse his library of biblical texts – Aramaic, Coptic, New Testament Greek, etc. – and totally, utterly, freak them out.
I’m starting to wonder whether something parallel is going on here. To pin your self-identity to critical cognition in the absence of any real knowledge of human cognition has got to be an uncomfortable situation, akin to being a Goethe scholar without being able to speak German, I suppose.
Or maybe I’m just an asshole.
“Amen Brother!”
Hi Scott. Long time reader (at least, of your work, the blog hasn’t really been up that long), first time writer. I know precious little about human cognition, so I’ll stick to what I know.
So I can’t speak for the humanities as a whole; I can barely speak for the philosophers, though I’m soon to be classed as one by bits of paper. But my experience (by way of reference, I left physics for philosophy) is that much like the rest of the small set of the world I’ve encountered, humanities people come in more and less irritating versions. I’m fortunate enough to work in a philosophy department with a heavily applied bent, where it is acknowledged that our “critical thinking” is of a very specific kind.
With that in mind, I think it isn’t unfair to say that critical thinking, or maybe even all of language use is a kind of weapon, or at least share similarities with weapons. I’ve read some of your posts about how words strings of code that other people then reinterpret, but it doesn’t seem that there is all there is to it. After all, it would seem that one reason people choose certain kinds of words to put down is to attempt to get others to pick them back up and interpret them in certain ways. That’s a game of chance to a certain extent, but there is a lot of tactical expertise going on there as well.
I’m reminded (if you’ll excuse the flattery) of The Warrior Prophet, and the memory you provide of Khellus’ training, regarding the circle and keeping people out of it. Apart from being a badass scene, it isn’t all that dissimilar to my experience of the way that academic folk use language. Especially against those they don’t want to/think they shouldn’t have to deal with.
The problem we might think is that most academic folk aren’t particularly skilled. They don’t try their skills against others across disciplines as a matter of course, with the exception of a small by growing set of individuals like the oft mentioned Cordelia Fine (who, by the way, is super nice in person). Moreover, they don’t try their skills against the skills of other non-academic folk. Their “moves” become esoteric, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, getting caught up in the forms over the functions of argument gets messy. Of course, that isn’t necessarily a problem merely for academics or the humanities: plenty of people hide behind the trope of “having real-world experience” as a way to avoid getting rid of a whole bunch of shitty beliefs.
On a related note, in “keeping people outside the circle” academic folk love to get obsessed with certain ways of accomplishing their own conceptual self-defense. They are conditioned to act in certain ways, which is great for the highly structured world of academia, but sucks when you mentally square off against someone who doesn’t throw punches in the way you are used to. That’s where you probably find you tend to get them riled up, because you (too them, if I can continue to indulge in conjecture) move *like* what they expect, owing to your previous life, but not the same. And the thinner that separation is, in my experience, the more unsettling it becomes.
Anyway, I’m now valiantly attempting to procrastinate my way out of work on my dissertation. You might be an asshole, but I’m not sure that’s all you are. You just aren’t committed to an orthodoxy in mental combat. Or at least, you go looking for others, I’m sure you slide into grooves as well. I happen to be a fan of orthodoxy as a stepping stone to greater skill overall, but it most certainly isn’t all there is to fighting.
Looking forward to Disciple of the Dog.
Excellent, although tricky to pull off in the case of the Mormons (who are told to extricate themselves if it becomes apparent that the meeting is going to be anything other than the “investigator” receiving the sales pitch).
I was wondering if you’ve come across a collection of immediately demonstrable cognitive duping examples that one can wheel out at times like these? I’m thinking something like half a dozen experiments you could share with someone to soften their cognitive fervour at particularly judgmental moments. I figure it’d also be a useful way to kick off my own day too..
Really looking forward to Disciple of the Dog.
“Or maybe I’m just an asshole.”
It could only be one or the other, not both?
I dunno – it’s like I get a faint feeling you want to be both in the affirmation of the thing your working on, and yet work on it externally/not following its courses? Even the self asscribed asshole notion is simply picking up a role that’s within the thing you were questioning.
In terms of criticism – well, I think two distinct things get clumped in as being the one criticism. One is something like if you drop a hammer and a feather in a vacuum, they both fall at the same time (always freaky to see…also if you shoot a bullet directly forward and drop one at the same time, they both hit the ground at the same time!). Okay, and the other is stuff like so and so way of living is the way to go in future. Now in this case it gets into what is really just preference, like saying pizza, not icecream, is the way to go. And no wonder part of you goes into confirmation – because your an icecream man or whatever is your own thing on the matter.
Sifting preferences away from cold facts (like the bullets dropping at the same time) is really hard to do in real time conversation. Or atleast I think it is.
That said, I have no idea how your conversation went. And even with time now, I’m looking at “So you think you’re a critical thinker?” and by itself, can’t sift it into either category. I dunno what you were pitching to your fellow coffee drinker.
Hmmm, I don’t sound supportive through all that. Maybe I’m an asshole…
There, did an all too in joke lol…hehe…