Carol almost makes it a point to read the worst in what I write. I have actually given up communicating with him.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- Perhaps we can save the concept of stupidity if we regard it as developmental rather than essential. People aren't born stupid, but they make themselves stupid in a very careful and deliberate way. Moreover it's quite selective; you can be deeply stupid about one topic and quite penetrating about another. It takes work, but it can be done.
I'm with Joanna on this one, though I generally don't like to deploy stupidity as a polemical category. Wise's rationalizations were not in fact crafty, I think. They were as Joanna suggests stupid in my sense of cultivated stupidity. Wise has become very accustomed to mobilizing fatuous, empty cliches in faculty meetings and encounters with her superiors. It's always worked before. We might regard stupidity in this sense as not only something acquired, but an actual skill, if stupidity consists in saying stupid things. The point is to say the right stupid things to the right people; to align, as it were, your stupidities with theirs.
The stupidity only appears as such when the alignment fails, as it has in Wise's case in speaking to the larger public. It's very much to her credit that she now obviously feels like an idiot. Shows that she's not *essentially* stupid at all.
On Mon, September 8, 2014 10:06 am, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Joanna: That's partly because, normally, this type of people never have to
> deal with any opposition or criticism. It makes them ... stupid.
>
> -------
>
> This habit of linking obnoxious behavior or stupidity of decisions to
> personal "stupidity" of the agent is one hell of a bad habit.
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk