What constitutes a lack of knowledge when it applies to intellectual life and science? Is there a special, modern unintelligence? Is it possible to speak of stupidity among scientists?

The French philosopher Jean-Michel Couvreur provides an initial framework in La bêtise se soigne-t-elle? (2004). There should be a distinction between stupidity and the lack of information in a field a person does not claim to have any knowledge in. When people are called stupid, they are considered so because they should understand or they claim to understand something that they do not know.

Another French philosopher, Michel Adam, has devoted an entire book, Essai sur la bêtise (1975), to stupidity, enumerating the following qualities in stupid people:

• They are not interested in knowledge.

• They do not accept intellectual exertion.

• Their thinking is not based in reality.

• Nor are they bothered by their limitations but instead feel happy.

When it comes to knowledge, stupid people ascribe importance to phenomena that are trivial or passing. They ”explain” commonplace phenomena that do not require an explanation. They do not try to learn new things but instead repeat what they already think they know. They do not construct a discussion based on arguments.

In their social life, stupid people use words without giving weight to their importance. They refuse to acknowledge other people’s arguments. They do not bother with references to reality. Adam calls stupidity an act of aggression against society because stupid people can commit ”intellectual terrorism” against those around them when they go on about things that are not related to the topic, jump between topics and consistently point out their own wonderful qualities.

Intelligent people do the opposite. Above all, they observe reality. Adam emphasizes that they realize their limitations and in doing so have the tools to learn more. The same applies to ethics. Only morally mature people can understand that they have committed a moral mistake.

Adam sums up by saying that intelligence and ethics are what in a deeper sense facilitate an encounter between people.

Jacques Barzun, a French literary scholar and philosopher who spent his career in the US, notes in The House of Intellect (1959) that intelligence and intellectual life influence one another but can also be separated. Intelligence is connected more with an individual whereas intellect is connected with a collective, he argues, because it is based on tradition and on institutions like schools, universities, libraries and professional journals. In the mid-twentieth century, Barzun noted a strong anti-intellectualism in the Western world. He thinks that what is attractive to the general public nowadays is art and not science. Even among those who consider themselves intellectual, he sees a desire to live as artists.

Barzun maintains that the modern school does not force young people to work with intellectual material and so can not be said to provide them with any systematic intellectual grounding. Young people never discover the value of knowledge. They instead acquire a sceptical, negative attitude and reject the exertion of any effort. The vacuum left by school is filled by the mass media. Barzun stresses that a country that wants to have intelligent citizens must value its intellectual institutions and, in particular, schools.

The Swiss philosopher Jean Romain, too, observes in Le temps de la déraison ou l’illusion contemporaine (2000) that young people today do not value cultural knowledge and are not prepared to make sacrifices to become cultivated. What is ”in” is living in the moment. Today’s cult of youth, in Romain’s view, involves people praising different actions and ideas simply because they are common among young people. In actuality, the cult of youth is often the same as the cult of pleasure, hedonism, because the cult of youth often seeks immediate pleasure. Romain also associates this cult with the tendency to believe that if people just want something to happen, reality will turn out just the way they want.

Romain believes that this attitude is formed in the modern school. He has observed how schools provide students with ”pre-chewed” material, ”fast food.” This means that, instead of moving forward in terms of civilisation, we are moving backwards and are becoming more and more like the Third World. Romain identifies features in today’s education that are moving us in the wrong direction. The ideology of equality means that people operate under the assumption that everyone is equal, and if reality contradicts this thesis, then reality is rejected. This idea in turn is similar to ”nicenessism,” which assumes that every student wants to learn, wants to behave properly, never destroy anything on purpose and always tell the truth. There is also the assumption that people should feel sorry for students rather than that it is a privilege to study. Because students no longer need to do homework or pass exams to remain in the education system, Romain argues, it is understandable that laziness is a prominent feature of the modern school. When a relativist view of knowledge is also embraced, it is difficult for schools to maintain that knowledge has an important value.

Gustaf Östberg, a Swedish professor emeritus in engineering materials, emphasizes in Underförstådd kunskap (1995) and Om tvekan inför kunskap (2002) that laziness is one of the most important factors in explaining stupidity. He elaborates some of the effects of laziness with respect to knowledge production. Lazy people refuse to take into consideration information that does not fit in with the tradition in the field. They look for explanations only in the field they are already familiar with. They abandon their search even before arriving at an explanation. They claim without any evidence that they have achieved their knowledge goal.

Östberg cites the Austrian author Franz Grillparzer, who summarized the differences between stupid, average-minded and intelligent people. Stupid people think that every case is unique, average-minded people think that everything can be classified according to rules, and only intelligent people can simultaneously see rules and exceptions. Stupid people are lazy and do not worry about verifying the information used and do not observe reality. Average-minded people take reality into account, but tire quickly, think of something else and give up before the goal is reached. Only intelligent people observe reality, organize their knowledge mentally, and can distinguish between rules and exceptions. One of Östberg’s fundamental ideas is that professions have to confront risks. Knowledge is used in real, complex situations, and professionals must be able to handle both rules and exceptions.

In Elogio y refutación del ingenio, (1992) José Antonio Marina, a Spanish psychologist and philosopher, argues in a way recalling Jean Romain that we give too much space in today’s culture to playfulness, intuition and seeking pleasure. Playfulness and cleverness can be fun, but an adult person grows tired, Marina writes, because cleverness does not lead anywhere. This is, of course, natural because clever people do not have any goal beyond themselves. They live on improvisation and free associations. The opposite of this is teaching children to set goals and achieve them. What characterizes maladjusted individuals is their inability to plan and stick to a goal.

Marina has also been taken aback by how many people refuse to take reality into account. He sees a connection between a disdain for reality and the idea that everything and everyone is equal. If everything is equal, then nothing is important. So why would people maintain this distinction between what is real and not real? If everything is the same, then there is no reason to make any meaningful choices. Where knowledge is concerned, people can not distinguish between what is important and unimportant. Moreover, if all opinions are equally valuable, then there is no basis for speaking about values. Where moral questions are concerned, this means that ethics must be discarded, precisely because ethics involves identifying some actions as more valuable than others. Marina has observed a number of paradoxes:

– There is a tendency to consider only spontaneous actions as free. If only actions that are without reflection are considered free, then people can achieve nothing with this freedom, because it is not governed by their will. We get freedom with no content or meaning.

– Education, knowledge and reflection are seen as repression and deformation.

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Nonetheless, it seems that modern humans want to hear that everything is free, no effort is required, and anything can be chosen.

The Spanish philosopher José Luis González Quirós works along the same lines. He reminds us in El porvenir de la razón en la era digital (1998) that classical psychology distinguishes between reality, knowledge of reality and the subject who is thinking. He notes how psychology and epistemology are now both characterized by people confusing reality with their own desires. The tendency is to call reality whatever people choose to call reality. It is possible to talk both of ”knowledge autism” and psychological infantilism.

González Quirós emphasizes another consequence of disdaining reality. When objects are no longer considered real, people no longer need to care about what relation holds between words and reality. Everything becomes ”communication.” The mass media takes over the space that reality once held in our thinking. The media constitute the new reality. González Quirós maintains that constructivism has now taken hold of art and politics, and is about to take over science and philosophy.

Constructivism denies that there is an objective reality. Reality is reduced in an arbitrary way to the information we have about it. This in turn means that people close themselves off from what they do not like. It is the same approach to knowledge that characterizes totalitarian thinking. Acceptance of constructivism means that we have abandoned our previous way of viewing understanding. Understanding used to be understanding reality. Our freedom was in giving ourselves the opportunity to understand reality. If everything depends on our own will, then understanding is subject to our will. We do not need to understand what we do not want to understand, and we can no longer understand others through a common understanding of reality. Knowledge is no longer knowledge about reality but about what is said about reality in one’s own group. González Quirós argues that constructivism on an epistemological level corresponds to egocentrism in psychology. Individuals operate under the assumption that what they can or will not learn is of no interest to such an extent that it is possible to say that it does not exist.

A recent example from the world of science is the American science journalist Gary Taube’s review of literature on the impact of diet on different diseases in Good Calories, Bad Calories. Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (2007). He notes that the problem of obesity today was given a strong boost by a US Congressional decision in the 1970s to recommend food with a lower fat content, a decision prompted by a combination of bad science and political involvement. Regarding the science, a small number of people from prestigious universities were able to affect the lives and health of millions of people even though it is clear they took the kinds of shortcuts described by Östberg, among others. Taube identifies a number of factors contributing to their error. Extreme specialisation has been dangerous. The scientists in question had mainly read journals in their own specialist field and as a result missed knowledge developed in other fields. They only took into account recent literature and as a result missed earlier results and insights, which in this case turned out to be fatal. They mainly read articles in their own language. They were blinded by their collaborative relations and friendships with a group of colleagues at other prestigious universities and came to believe that they belonged to a group that was right.

To conclude, it can be said that researchers who have investigated intelligent or narrow-minded behaviour note that the development of sound knowledge and habits in a person’s intellectual life must be combined with moral and psychological development in that individual. The opposite of intellectually and morally developed people is unintelligent people who are not interested in reality. They actively ”close off” reality and replace it with their own attitude to the world. They are marked by the conviction that they are the centre of the world, and for them a conversation is primarily an opportunity to express their personal views. They talk about themselves. This is a field that does not need any advance research and one that they are experts in.

Translated by Susan Long