372. "Stupid," a Dangerous Word America Needs

I hate where this post is going to end but I am going to start it anyway, with this: the right word for Trump followers who believe these fake news stories (like that Hillary Clinton is behind a child sex-slave ring operating out of a pizza parlor), the right word is "stupid."  Not "deprived" or "left out" or "despairing" or "victimized," which you may use after looking into their position in society.

Those words may apply but I think many of us use them now simply because we're pressed to find words that leave us with approved emotions — sympathy with the suffering, desire to make up for neglect, indignation at oppression.  "Stupid" leaves us with, or reveals, contempt.  Once allowed, maybe, but not now.

The trouble with those customarily approved words is that they don't fit.  Think Trump supporters are "deprived," go to northern Ohio with the New Yorker reporter, hear the Trump line from construction workers, find out they're making 40,000-50,000 a year, and there goes "deprived."  Go to a Trump rally (via TV), see such a wide range of people all worked up by obvious untruths, and there go the rest of the customary words.  Left is the one word that fits them all, "stupid."  

We can justify our use of it by saying we're "calling a spade a spade," and accuse others of euphemizing by adding, "and not a dirty shovel," but in any age we resist words like "stupid." Because they give pain. 

More interesting now, though, is our resistance to them because — my guess —  they transfer our attention from something extrinsic to the creature to something in its nature, and give us a much more difficult problem.  You can clean the dirt off a shovel but a spade is what it is.  You can change "bad schooling" and "poor health" and "economic deprivation" (to use alternative problem-labels) but confronting "innate disinclination" you're helpless.

That's disinclination to study and I believe there is such a thing.  Some students simply would rather talk or tweet or daydream than buckle down at a desk or do their homework.  They don't have much against dropping out in tenth grade to work on cars or have babies.  They can be of any color or gender.  And they think Trump is great not because they have been left out but because they have not learned the things in school that would tell them that Trump is not great, that he is false-great.  That they are falsely worked up.

If there's one thing that Western educators try to do it's to improve students' ability to distinguish the true from the false. To make them less credulous.  That's what made the West powerful and prosperous, loss of the credulity and superstition that held other cultures back.

All right, that's the task the West handed its teachers, to pass on a critical view of belief.  And here's what else it handed them: capitalism, the engine of its prosperity.  In capitalism you go for profit and if there's more profit in selling things than in telling the truth about them you suppress the truth, or put a spin on the false, making it appear true.  Eventually you have what we have now, a culture full of hokum.  Smart people making money off of credulous people.  In every mail, from every telephone, on every screen, hokum.  Fine-spun, coarse-spun, we're up to our eyeballs in it.

And in every living room, suspicion.  When a dollar's at stake you can't trust anybody.  Even the New Yorker and the Economist, farming out their subscription campaigns, feed us hokum.  Everywhere but in schools, it seems, people are doing their best to make us comfortable with it.

And in the middle of all that comfort appears the teacher now, say at the door of a Trump rally. "OK, time to get serious.  Election time.  Get uncomfortable with falsehood.  Remember what you've learned.  Ready, set, discomfort."

Maybe you expected teachers to succeed. "We're paying all these people so much money to implant respect for truth, surely, when the chips are down, that respect will kick in." 

You don't know the odds.  They are about forty to one against the teacher who tries to lift the weight of culture from a student.  You're not going to hear truth whanging the scales.

So?  Do something about your culture, America?  No, too big a job.  But there is a little job we can do.  With language.  Go back to words that give pain.  Pain, we forget, is the earliest and most powerful teaching device.  Nature, to teach us, makes sure we feel pain when we do things that lower our ability to survive.  Mothers teach us through pain that anticipates nature's pain.  "Step off the curb before I get there and you get a smack."  And it works.  So, pedagogues, don't knock pain.

When we're older, mothers substitute disapproval for the smack.  Pain is still the object.  We're supposed to feel it when we take up with glue-sniffers.  Disapproval introduces a much broader pain.  When somebody you respect, somebody who knows you, and knows what you are capable of, and looks forward with hope, when they disapprove you get a smack you feel all through your psyche.

Think of a preacher.  In the standard model, a parent substitute.  His job (in my day always a man) was disapproval, making people uncomfortable.  My colleague Max Pullen (maybe some of you will remember him) showed what a firm idea he had of that job when we went together to a church where he sensed far too much comfort.  "I could hardly listen," he said of the sermon, coming out.  "All love.  Nothing but be comforted, you're loved."

"What do you want to hear?"

"I want to hear, 'Listen, all you damn people, quit doin' what you're doin'.'  Those are sins.  Knock 'em off.'"

I hear the speech he, dead now, would have us make to our former students: "Listen, all you damn graduates, quit swallowing this stuff.  It's hokum.  Spit it out."

If teachers now, not wanting to go as far as Max did, settle for a  "stupid" call, they still have what Max and his preacher had behind them: the respect of their listeners, who know that the teacher and preacher know them, know what they are capable of, and hold high hopes for their future.  A "stupid" from them will really hurt.

Even if they hear it only in their mind's ear.  "What are you, stupid or something?"  At the rally.  "Oh, oh, Max sees me."  They begin to see themselves. "What are we doing down here with these glue-sniffers?"

It might be easier to overcome our reluctance to use "stupid" if we remember how easily and usefully it has been used in our literature, in earlier times.  In England's neo-classic period it was used without hesitation, and precisely for the contempt in it.  Dryden's departing king of dullness describes his chosen heir, Thomas Shadwell, thus:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years.

Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he

Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Then in the next generation there was Pope with his Dunciad, finding stupidity right and left.  The new king, "a demigod of stupidity, the true son of the goddess Dulness" (Wikipedia),  was the popular entertainer Colley Cibber, who had "a brain of Feathers, and a heart of Lead."

Of course Shadwell and Cibber would be hurt, but if mediocrity presumes to play in this league this is what it gets.  Readers of English literature, sophomores of the future, will thank you, Messrs. Dryden and Pope, for keeping these bushers out of the anthologies.  As future Americans will thank you, plain-speaking teachers, for keeping bushers out of political conventions.  Damn the shame and pain.

I'm too far out of it to know how far we've given up on shame and pain.  My conservative friends tell me that under liberal dominance we've gone nearly all the way, as seen in our quickness to forgive underperformance on grounds of deprivation — of a race, or a class, or a region.  Behind it, no doubt, were the softies who earlier forgave undone homework.

I have doubts about that, but I have no doubts about one thing: that homework is what America now needs most.  In which case it would be good for students and teachers to lower on their walls all other slogans, all that comfort, all that might excuse.  At the top no assertive politics, no ethnic pride, no self-worth.  "It's the homework, stupid."

And here comes the ending I am afraid of.  Maybe you can see it.  No, it's not that I have put a stamp of approval on ugly talk, not that I have enfranchised cruelty and licensed insensitivity, though that's frightening enough.  It's that I have paved the way to fascism.

I laid down the stones with my contempt for stupidity.  Fail to qualify this and you've got contempt for the common man, now commonly "the populist," who can vote whether he's stupid or not.  The most dangerous terms are to me the most fetching, the ones from baseball.  You want a winning team you keep the bush-leaguers off it.  This is serious major-league business.  And government is serious business, serious as a World Series.  Playboys, featherheads, amateurs never rising above the bush leagues, don't deserve to conduct it. 

So there you are, on your way to dictatorship or some other form of autocracy.  If you call the common man stupid you are saying that democracy is built on feathers.  That's stupid so —here you go — let's build on something solid. Like intelligence or learning or skill.  As found say, in this elite group, or this dictator here.