How to Deal With Idiots by Maxime Rovere

Author:Maxime Rovere
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHY THE POWERS THAT BE DON’T GIVE A DAMN

On questions they call political or religious, twits hold views with the firmness of a handyman’s vice. Convictions bring strength, calm and stability to most people, but to blockheads they bring a phenomenal degree of fragility. When they scream out loud at the slightest reservation or the tiniest objection you might want to express, they sound as injured as if you had pulled out a fingernail with pliers.

In such occurrences, a simple recourse is to cut the sound. Politics and religion share the characteristic of being concepts of an exclusively practical nature: your acts show what kind of citizen you are, just as they demonstrate what kind of believer you may be. Once you’ve switched off the soundtrack and let the acts be what they are, the unbelievable nonsense that human beings churn out about ‘God’ (without even wondering what they are talking about) or ‘the authorities’ (ditto) becomes as puffy as clouds drifting across a clear blue sky, beneath which you are free to come and go as you please.

In which a reflection on laws shows two different ways of fighting against the idiocy of institutions.

The preceding chapters present several ideas that go against the grain, up to a point. To wit: appealing to moral duty in daily life is, for the main part, a lamentation; what it bewails is the loss of trust; and reciprocal attention to the stories told is the best, if not the only, way to overcome such loss.

If I go by my experience as a teacher of philosophy, propositions of this kind usually divide the audience in two. Some listeners leave the classroom feeling satisfied and happy to play around with the new idea, to see what it can do; others, usually my favourite students, find the idea perfectly arbitrary and even inadequate. Teaching relies both on the more or less warranted support of students who take my ideas on board (and without whom teaching would be unbearable), and on the more or less justified demands of students who resist them. That’s how we make progress through the semester.

In my analysis of the moralising posture, where I reduced preaching to a plea for recognition, I conscientiously avoided discussing whether or not louts and idiots were responsible for their own stupidity (that is to say, for the stupidity of their actions) and I did not even broach the question as to who has the better grounds for appealing to the authority of moral law. On the contrary, I restricted myself to a relativistic approach, because I wanted to show that situations allow us to isolate specific problems about the use of speech, and therefore about how precisely to listen to moral discourse, and why such discourse is infinitely less effective than storytelling.

I now want to do justice to those readers who were not convinced by my arguments because they had in mind from the start situations where they were in the right. I can only agree wholeheartedly

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