Anyone who has existed above ground in America for the past several decades cannot fail to recognize the on-going phenomenon of the celebration of idiocy in supposed leaders and candidates for leadership in the Republican party. Recent examples, of course, abound. Feel free to insert your own relevant examples here, but a mere mention of the names Perry, Cain, Palin or Bachmann should suffice to prove the point. (Gingrich, the faux intellectual, is a variant.) How can it be that these people are being considered for high office by the Republican electorate? It’s not a question, really, about the candidates themselves. Idiots abound in any society; idiots with pretensions to greatness are practically inevitable. But what moves ordinary people to support these idiots, even after they’ve been exposed as dolts and hypocrites?
If you want the long answer to that question, I recommend Richard Hofstadter’s book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It’s nearly 50 years old now, but still rings true. He uses the tools of the historian to trace America’s love affair with ideas and people who are simple, powerful, and totally moronic. But for my money the work of Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, comes closest to giving a satisfying explanatory theory of dolt-dom.
More below the fold.
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is justly famous as an analysis of how religion, particularly the sort of religion that arose from the brand of Christianity associated with American Protestantism, was fabulously well suited to modern capitalist societies. Today, when people think of the Protestant Ethic at all they usually think in terms of the admirable qualities of hard work, diligence, good-old-American-stick-to-it-iveness and so on. But Weber’s theory was not simply a celebration of hard work and goodness; it was an explanation of how one gets from a particular, theologically-grounded view of the nature of social reality to a particular complex of behaviors. At the center of this theory is what he calls inner-worldly Protestant asceticism. Even by the time of his writing in the early 20th century, he said that in the United States this quality was pretty much divorced from its theological roots yet it still exerted a powerful influence on all kinds of social realities, including those we might associate with “anti-intellectualism.” In other words, even when the theological stuff had evaporated, the ways of thinking and acting that it inspired remained, for good and ill.
What Weber called “inner-worldly Protestant asceticism” was born out of the theology of Calvinism. It starts with an idea about God. God is all-powerful. God is above every human thing. He is so powerful, so beyond our comprehension, so beyond our puny attempts at goodness, that he is mysterious, inscrutable. It follows, then, that those who are saved receive that salvation not by doing anything in particular but as a free gift from God. It follows from that that there are two classes of people, those who are chosen by God for salvation, and those who are not. Since their choosing had nothing to do with their own actions, all that the chosen ones can do is to humbly accept that wonderful gift and try to live up to it. However, even when they don’t live up to it, it doesn’t negate God’s choosing of them. They are therefore immune to all “normal” considerations about morality or intellectual fitness; nothing can un-do their chosen-ness.
Is that beginning to sound at all familiar? For a George W. Bush, for instance, there is really no sense in doing a lot of soul-searching or second guessing. Because he is a conduit of God’s special purpose it doesn’t matter what he knows or doesn’t know or even what he does or doesn’t do, it’s all out of his hands, as it were. It’s all up to God and he’s just an instrument on which God’s destiny is played. There is a need for diligence and method and application, but it is not application to a search for truth that is tortured by the realization that one could be wrong or that there might not be some ultimate truth to be found, it is a search for God’s truth, that is, for that state of mind and state of being that conforms to God’s all-knowing will. It is a search for worthiness of the already-conferred gift, not a search for facts.
As such the essence of the “quest” that such individuals are on is not really about the world “out there,” it is about finding and expressing the self that is in harmony with God’s intentions -- a self that is, as it were, God’s hero. Therefore, paradoxically, what Weber describes as “asceticism” is an inward journey of self-transformation that ultimately gets expressed in self-aggrandizing heroism. As Weber says of this sort of “ascetic,” “For him it suffices that through his rational actions in the world he is personally executing the will of god, which is unsearchable in its ultimate significance.” When it comes time to act “within the world,” Weber says that the ascetic “must become afflicted with a sort of happy stupidity regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions.” The ascetic knows that “the world” is just a place of sham and pretense, that his or her ultimate judge is God and that her or his only task is to fulfill his God-ordained, heroic destiny.
For those viewing and judging these gifted ones (and who are also formed by the Protestant Ethic), the question is often not about such minutia as policy positions, prior qualifications, or discrete actions in the moral or political realm – or, for that matter, ascriptive characteristics like gender or race -- the one and only question is whether or not this person feels "chosen" to fulfill a particular destiny. One evaluates that not through rational means – tallying up this vote or that credential – but through intuitive means. Does this person talk and act and think like a chosen one? For starters, does he/she claim to be chosen and special, maybe not in so many words but in the way he/she approaches the task of running for office and the expectation of taking on the mantle of leadership (Newt Gingrich territory, to be sure)? Even when it’s not done in reference to a particular religious or theological system, this is the sort of calculation that Weber would expect voters to be making when they assess the charisma of a candidate. Voters, as well as candidates, engage in their own form of “happy stupidity.”
The importance of this sort of analysis is that it clarifies a way of thinking about public matters that is deep in our American DNA. We are not a society that is inclined to make its big decisions based on a technocratic distance. Perhaps it is because we are so big and so diverse that we need to fall back, especially in times of crisis, on charismatic figures that can move us in emotional ways that are essentially religious in substance and tone and character.
The good thing about happy stupidity is that it can break through Gordian knots, as Roosevelt did during the Depression and the Second World War, and as Martin Luther King, Jr., did during the Civil Rights era. Any civic, or, for that matter, business leader worth her salt knows that an appeal to charisma or a positive founding myth, no matter how contrived, can do more to move people and situations than mounds of facts.
The bad thing about happy stupidity is that, like many other technologies of the soul, it is essentially devoid of moral content. An appeal to a country’s destiny or to the greater good of the firm taps into our tribal brain and can cause people in groups to do things that people as individuals would find abhorrent. Perhaps this is one reason that Weber found this willful ignorance induced by the Protestant Ethic as being so amenable to capitalism. A religiously-inspired notion that delegates the consequences of one’s actions to God is extraordinarily useful and inevitably feeds the bottom line, which can be construed as the ultimate arbiter of right-ness and justice, let the other costs be damned. What is the American corporation, after all, but a social device that enshrines this principle and reduces the complexity of moral calculation to mere financial profit or loss? God’s will, reduced to a balance sheet. The corporation as a false person-hood is an extraordinarily useful morality-avoidance machine.
Weber helps us to see that our current rash of political idiocy is not really new and that it is not just an aberration. It is part of who we are as a people. It’s been there since we declared, out of the blue of some sort of faith, that there were truths that were self-evident. That was a sort of divine idiocy on which our revolution was built. But there are other forms of idiocy that can run riot and plunge us into fruitless warfare or profligate budgetary nonsense.
What is needed is a greater appreciation for the constant appeal of happy stupidity, and for it to be checked by principled and persistent critique.