INTRODUCTION

Perhaps stupidity is a somewhat vague term. In general, we know what it is. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as the “Quality or state of being foolish; extreme dullness of understanding; crass foolishness.” Dr. L. Loewenfeld, in his thorough German treatise On Stupidity, points out that the word may be applied with regard to an individual or with regard to single acts of persons who are not considered stupid. The wisest person is capable of occasional foolish deeds.

I shall speak here of stupidity not only as weakness of understanding but also as improper response of any sort. I shall not, however, particularly concern myself with awkwardness of body. Moreover, I have considered certain aspects of mental inefficiency in How to Think Logically (No. 1063), Insanity and Other Mental Disorders (No. 1094), and several other Little Blue Books. I shall try not to repeat myself except where this appears necessary.

When we speak of a man as being stupid, we mean usually that he has less than average intelligence. But here we are again employing words which are without exactness. Intelligence cannot be measured as though it were a matter of weight or specific gravity. There are so-called Mentimeter tests, somewhat similar to the army intelligence tests with which some of my readers may be familiar; but they do not entirely live up to their name. They do afford a rough index to the possession of certain qualities. They should not be used without considerable caution, however. There have been a number of unwarranted attempts made to draw deductions from these tests as though their value had been conclusively demonstrated.

Dr. George A. Dorsey truly says, “I can test your capacity or intelligence or your will only as I can pick a winner at a horse race. I know at the end of the race.” The whole idea of testing and grading seems to be based upon an academic fallacy. Who was more intelligent, Socrates or Napoleon? Pasteur or Alexander the Great? Shakespeare or Goethe? If these men had been given Alpha or Mentimeter tests, should we be able better to answer these questions now? I think not.

Stupidity is a relative matter, just as intelligence is. In a primitive tribe, the man who has good muscles, good vision, and good hearing, with a certain amount of what we call savage cunning, is amply able to take care of himself. He may become chief and he is almost certain to be well supplied with food and wives. In a civilized community, if he is extraordinarily well supplied with the endowments mentioned, he may perhaps make a fortune as an athlete. In this case he will not lack for wives, either. But if he is intellectually of low grade, he may not be able to retain his large earnings. He is likely to spend them quickly for foolish luxuries and to dissipate them by gambling. Then, when middle age weakens his muscles, he is forced to adjust himself to inferior living conditions. Then he is called a fool—a term seldom applied to one actually in possession of considerable wealth.

What is stupidity in a college town may be ordinary intelligence in a mine or a sculptor’s studio or on the baseball field. It may even be genius. People who are extraordinarily developed in one direction may be underdeveloped in others. A man may be a great general or an industrial leader without having an ear for music. We are not justified in calling a scientist stupid because he absent-mindedly hands the conductor a button instead of his ticket. His act is one of stupidity, however, as I use the term here. If his absent-mindedness should manifest itself frequently while he is conducting important scientific experiments, it would be indicative of great stupidity, of unfitness for his work.

What we call folly or stupidity may amount to a lack of will power, an inability to concentrate upon the problems of life. Or it may be due to improper habit formations. Usually, but perhaps not always, it is connected with a lack of intellectual capacity in the narrow sense. The idea of stupidity is after all subjective. The martyr-masochist (we may take Jesus and Socrates as examples, although their lives as we have them seem to be masses of legends) is a hero to his follower, a “damned idiot” to the unsympathetic. But, from the point of view of their own development, they are not stupid. They do what it is within them to perform and to suffer. Here I pay no heed to the verdict of history, and rank the unsuccessful with the successful Christs. When Nathan Hale was hanged, he did not know that the Revolution was going to succeed. He did not know that the school books of his country would some day set him up as a patriotic example. If these states were still British colonies, we should probably think of Hale—if we thought of him at all—as a fool. We should probably think of George Washington and all the other rebel leaders in the same way.

John Brown’s scheme was absurd. The chance that his expedition should succeed was not one in a thousand. It failed, and yet his failure helped finally to bring about the abolition of slavery. Edmund Clarence Stedman was right when he wrote in 1859:

Would Brown have been more of a fool if the United States had been destined to retain Negro slavery? In other words, is failure positive proof of stupidity?

I suppose the answer depends in the final analysis upon our definition of failure. The man who has given up his life to disinterested service can hardly be blamed for not having earned a large fortune. Even if we are unable to sympathize with his motives, we must understand that he probably succeeded in realizing most of his own ambitions. Sometimes, indeed, people work hard in one direction to forget failure where success was most desired. The laurel wreath may then fall to ashes amid the applause of the unseeing crowd.

But in general we rate a man according to his seeming ability to adjust himself to his environment. We soon forget his petty stupidities if he is able to do some one thing better than his neighbors, provided only that his accomplishment is highly rated. At present the preacher who can send his hearers into convulsions of religious ecstasy is almost sure to get his name into Who’s Who in America and is fairly certain, if he possesses a certain flair for business, to amass a comfortable fortune. But the same man, born in an irreligious age might be simply a lazy good-for-nothing or even a patient in an insane asylum. What became of all the potential scientists who were born in the Middle Ages and accomplished nothing? Poor stupid fellows, most of them must have been called by their neighbors.

As a matter of fact, we know few people well enough to be justified in calling them stupid. Of course not all the feebleminded and demented men and women are removed from the world’s work. But it is better to keep the definitely diseased mentally out of our conception of stupidity. Since we are concerned with the conquest of folly and since the mental disorders are either incurable at present or curable only by medical treatment of one sort or another, we shall leave them out of account. What interests us primarily is the correction by the individual himself of his own minor stupidity.

We should understand, though, that mental capacity cannot be enlarged by any effort of the will. After an individual has reached his full growth, his mental capacity may be decreased by an accident or disease, but there is no known way by which he or others can increase it.

Still, mental attainment can be raised, for the reason that it is never equal to mental capacity. To elevate the level of mental attainment means (in the widest sense of the word) to educate. What we call stupidity may really be ignorance or lack of order. Moreover, lack of order, that is, an imperfect scientific method or logical system, is the most common cause of ignorance. The man who has learned how to study, not the one who has acquired a few random scraps of information, is on the way to becoming educated. The slow apprentice is sometimes undervalued when he is actually laying the proper foundations for his work.

Teachers often fail to appreciate the merits of the boys and girls in their care. If they are intelligent, they can see that certain bright children are properly acquiring their Latin and their English, and may some day be teachers themselves. But that the boy who simply cannot learn his literary history may have it in him to be a poet—that they are ordinarily unable to understand, unless the boy is already writing verses for the school magazine.

A high school teacher once asked me why I didn’t think of taking up the profession of chemist. I was too amazed to reply. And yet, from the ordinary academic viewpoint of grades, he was justified in his question. I stood somewhere near the head of his class, relatively higher than I did in my English section. The new science was of considerable interest to me, even if the mechanics of laboratory work proved somewhat irksome. But a professional chemist must attain a certain amount of manual dexterity and a considerable interest in the mechanics of his work. It is probable enough that some of the boys whose work in the high school class was mediocre are now on the way to becoming successful chemists.

On the other hand, I feel that I appreciate literature more intelligently than the classmates of mine who were better prepared in high school to explain the allusions in “Comus” or to tell what Wyatt and Surrey wrote. For me, at that time, the subjects were dull because they were still unclothed with flesh.

This bit of autobiography is set down here for the light it may shed upon problems of development as they are presented to the teacher and the parent. It is not always easy to tell the true trend of a child’s abilities. Sometimes, indeed, the boy or the girl knows, even if the teacher does not. When there is a question of genius, perhaps genius is necessary to recognize it. To the world it may be the living image of stupidity.

It is true that genius in the restricted sense is such a rare phenomenon that most of us need not concern ourselves about the ability to recognize it. But the products of genius, especially when they are of a novel sort, are likely to prove puzzling. No less a critic than Henry James wrote about one of Walt Whitman’s books of verse: “It has been a melancholy one to write about it.... It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.” Despite all Whitman’s tricks of false poetizing, this verdict is decidedly unjust. The fact is that James was not himself poet enough to recognize poetry except in traditional garb.

To stigmatize difference as inferiority is an egregious form of egotism. It indicates a lack of the ability of self-criticism, too. Hard-headed business men are wont to look down upon poets and philosophers, and these are accustomed to retaliate in kind.

The qualities which enable a man to succeed in business are of course different in part—although by no means entirely—from those which make an artist. The musician and the sculptor must not be judged too harshly for deficiencies in their ability to carry on commercial transactions. Many artists find it advisable to leave all matters of business to agents or managers.

We must be careful, then, not to consider people stupid simply because their experiences and their ways of life do not coincide with our own. If they do not possess that particular wisdom which is ours, they may be amply compensated in some other way. The man who has lived all his life on a farm does not know the city ways: but neither does the town-bred man know how to manage cows and chickens.

When the scientist goes into a remote region and finds that the inhabitants believe in all sorts of queer superstitions, he should not consider them all stupid on this account. They have had no opportunity to learn the methods or the conclusions of modern science. They should be judged no more harshly than Socrates would be for knowing nothing of the geometry of Minkowski and the equations of Lorentz. Living in his time, the philosopher could not be familiar with modern mathematics. Living where they do, the Arkansas “hill billies” naturally cling fast to the superstitions of their fathers.

But the educated man (so called) who believes that breaking a mirror will bring him seven years of bad luck is, so far as this belief is concerned, stupid. The authors of Genesis are not to be reproached for thinking that all the species of men and animals were brought simultaneously into being by a fiat of God. Considering the state of knowledge in their time, their idea was natural enough. But it is a disgrace when men calling themselves scientists now shut their eyes to the abundance of testimony for organic evolution. I think we can call them stupid without any priggishness.

However, stupidity of one sort does not altogether damn any individual. A man with very foolish prejudices and without any particular understanding of history may nevertheless be able efficiently to manage a great industrial establishment. He may or may not be a good collector of antiques. His ability to tell good music from bad must be judged without reference to his other elements of mental and physical strength and weakness.

The only criterion we have for stupidity is lack of success in one or another respect. And yet, as we are all aware, the chance factors play a great part in determining success or failure. The successful general is not necessarily cleverer than the commander he defeats, even when their forces appear to be evenly matched. The millionaire may differ from the pauper simply in that he has had better opportunities.

This and other considerations have brought about various attempts to measure mental ability directly. We have already considered briefly the intelligence tests now being used by various psychologists. Of still lower value, by far, is phrenology, the pseudoscience which examines the skull to find there an index to the mental faculties and traits of character. So far as the mind has any one single organ, this is the brain. But it does not seem that the shape of the head or the existence of certain “bumps” on it bears any definite relationship to mental capacity.

Even the weighing of the brains of the dead does not seem to give any absolute conclusions. Pearson and Pearl, examining thousands of individual brains, found that the mean average brain weight of the adult Englishman was 27 grams less than that of the Bavarians, 57 grams less than that of the Hessians, 65 grams less than that of the Swedes, and 120 grams less than that of the Bohemians. Are we to conclude that the average Bohemian is proportionately more intelligent than the average Englishman? Certainly not without additional evidence.

A man who died in an asylum in Vienna was found to have brains weighing 2028 grams and without any pathological alterations which microscopic examination could reveal. Gambetta, the famous French statesman, had brains weighing only 1241 grams, or 150 grams less than the average.

Aside from weighing the brains, all sorts of measurements and examinations have been made, but these post mortem intelligence tests remain of indefinite value. Nevertheless it appears that the structure of the brain is responsible for the difference, or for part of the difference, between a highly intelligent and a stupid individual. But the physiologists and the anatomists have not altogether solved the problem.

We do know that certain diseases sometimes reduce intellectual capacity. A serious attack of typhus fever, for instance, may leave the patient feebleminded or at least comparatively stupid. Injuries to the head or tumors of the brain may do serious injury to the mind. Or the gray matter of the brain may be injured by various drugs, leading to more or less definite mental changes.

Probably a great many fools are such simply because they have never had any chance to develop those qualities in which they might have excelled. In them we could not find any physical basis for their stupidity, I suppose, even if brains gave up their secrets in the dissecting room. Of course education is not identical with intelligence, but it affords means of arrangement and order. Perhaps it is necessary to add that by education I mean more than the formal teaching of the schools and colleges. As we have seen, we do not lay undue weight upon the minor eccentricities and deficiencies of the man who can write a great poem or compose important symphonies. But let us suppose that the potential genius never learns his alphabet or his musical scales. All that remains to him in life is his stupidity.

It is sometimes said that the man who has genius in him will not be stopped by difficulties of this sort. He will somehow educate himself. Actually we have seen men with none of the usual advantages display sufficient power of will to reach their goal. But we know little of those who have been discouraged. Here we have a certain justification for the democratic idea of education for all, even if this seems to lead to some unfortunate results.

The educated fool, the man whose head is crammed full of facts and who may possess a certain fluency in argument but who is yet unmistakably stupid, exists among us in large numbers. At least in part, though, the fault belongs with the system of education. Specifically, the teacher thinks of the multiplication table or the college entrance examination as an end in itself, without regard to the individual pupil, his capabilities and his needs.

Even in our best educational institutions, little progress has been made in the synthesizing of knowledge. The student working at his psychology seldom has it borne in upon him that if the science has any meaning at all, it is an instrument for criticizing literature and for understanding life. Knowledge is not bound up in little packages labeled English A and Social Ethics 4 and Biology 9a, as university catalogues seem to indicate.

The more we learn, the more specialization becomes necessary. And thus it happens that we have admiralty lawyers, physicians who have forgotten all that they ever knew except that which pertains to the genito-urinal system, specialists in the calculus of tensors or in plant histology. This tendency to specialization, which can hardly be escaped or regarded as an unmitigated evil, yet stimulates the production of wise fools.

If the university professorships are many, there is still room for instruction in the art of thinking, which means really the art of living. But here, I greatly fear, the qualified experts are pretty conspicuous by reason of their absence. It is, after all, a somewhat optimistic definition which makes man the thinking animal. Most of our reactions are instinctive or habitual or inspired by our emotions. In fact, constituted as we at present are, the attempt to do nothing except as the result of formal thought would be fatal.

But perhaps the attitude of thinking for oneself might be profitably encouraged. The ordinary teacher is literally frightened when a pupil discovers something for himself beyond the text and the commentary. This is as much as to reproach the teacher for not having done any original teaching!

It is a human trait to follow the lines of least resistance. Therefore the intelligent pupil reasons out matters for himself only when he has failed to prepare the set lesson. Then he calls his act one of “bluffing.” If his recitation or his examination paper is found satisfactory, he feels that he has outwitted the teacher. Unfortunately there is a considerable amount of truth in this assumption. But it is a truth which does no credit to our educational methods.

If we are to learn how to think at all, we must learn it by ourselves, and largely through many trials and by rejecting a great many errors. (In the final analysis, all education is self-education. We cannot successfully be crammed full of knowledge by any outsider. A good teacher can do no more than stimulate and point out certain pitfalls.) Some people never learn to think for themselves—and no thinking which is copied from another deserves the name of thought at all. Originality is the leading, the differentiating, ingredient.