In 2019 the British Libertarian Claire Fox wrote that;

Another fracturing prejudice is the notion that those who voted Brexit lacked comprehension of the facts and were easily duped. That voters were stupid, poorly informed and gullible, conned by spurious stunts. Think how often people refer to lies on the Leave battle bus as a key deciding factor, or the argument that fake news emanating from Russian geeks swung the vote[i].

This argument, frequently deployed by those on the political Right, has the effect of forcing its opponents to take the perjoration, ‘stupid’ off the table in the ideological battles that have scarred a number of democracies in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2009/2010. But Fox’s charge is not unique to those on the political or Libertarian Right. For those of a more cosmopolitan bent the adjectival deployment of ‘stupidity has often been the insult of choice. However, we wish to suggest here that  (1) the accusation of stupidity is too often used as a mindless sneer, which obscures important ways of ‘reading’ the world and (2) glibly taking ‘stupid’ off the table may be a political, cultural and epistemic mistake with significant consequences for understanding how we are to educate the capacity for judgement. Simply treating stupidity as either malfeasance or idiocy fails to attend to its etymological origins and  epistemic categorisation. In doing so we argue we mistakenly consider it to be a failure of knowledge and/or a manifestation of ignorance. Rather, stupidity derives from the verb ‘stupere’ from which we get stupefaction – that is, the condition of being overwhelmed and unable to navigate the congested terrain of too much information and discriminate between claim and counter claim; truth and falsity.

Drawing upon insights from economics as well as epistemology and psychology we will delineate a number of features of stupidity that militate against the exercise of good judgement. Following the work of Italian economist, Cipploa these include understanding stupidity as a transactional failure the consequences of which reduces the material and intellectual resources available to both individuals and communities and enhance those of the ‘bandit’. Building upon this and the insight of Tolstoy in ‘Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?’ (1890), stupidity may be considered as a  means of ‘obstructing the organ of attention itself’; a form of distraction or misdirection or diversion––from both the daily call of the external world and the moral and cognitive demands of our true or best selves in its engagements with the world.  Building on this we will demonstrate and illustrate the social power of group-think in reinforcing these transactional failures and forms of inattention and in doing so expand Cippola’s insights to distinguish stupidity as the quality of an act and not merely a condition of being. We will also argue that certain cultural features of educational policy and practice conduce to the cultivation of stupidity.

Finally, we will argue that the educational response to the challenge of stupidity is to be found in a careful reading and refurbishment of Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind and Bernard Lonergan’s Insight, which together provide a way of considering judgment  a counterpoint to stupidity and the central goal of education.

[i] It is worth noting that as things turned out the claims that the Brexit advertising was liberally peppered with lies have been subsequently vindicated.

This is a philosophical work which draws upon the insights of epistemology, literature, political discourse analysis and macro-economics to unveil the complex nature of stupidity and its myriad cultural refractions. In doing so it plots a series of connections between stupidity and failures of judgement that have significant implications for education and democratic discourse.

We propose to demonstrate and illustrate how a political and educational fear/anxiety of naming, delineating and analysing stupidity has been weaponised by anti-democratic demi-urges on the one hand and cosmopolitan hauteur on the other. Moreover, we will tentatively outline how a return to and a refurbishment of judgement as an educational goal may offer some escape from the corrosive energies of stupidity.

Albarese, Eleonora; Becker, Sascha O; Fetzer, Theimo; Novy, Dennis (2019) Who voted for Brexit? Individual and Regional data combined, European Journal of Political Economy. Arendt, H. I (1971) The Life of the Mind Cippola, C. (1976) The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Società editrice il Mulino. Festinger, Leon; Riecken, Leon W; Schachter, Stanley, (1956) When Prophecy Fails, University of Minnesota Press. Lonergan, B. (1957 and 1992) Insight: an Essay Concerning Human Understanding, University of Toronto Press