Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Movie stars are beautiful, and that should tell us something.

U.S. Republican Senate candidate for Georgia, Herschel Walker speaks at a campaign event alongside Former Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley.

I have this saying to explain belief in angels, habitual lottery playing, love of pro wrestling, supermarket tabloids and MAGA: “Remember, half the population is dumber than average.” That is wisdom speaking. It’s harsh, but does it not make some very humane allowances for folks whose misadventures, or worldview, are otherwise unfathomable.

OK, granted, strictly speaking, the aphorism is inaccurate. By definition, exactly half the population is dumber than the median. But when we are speaking of 350 million people, the average and the median are essentially the same. So, whatever the terminology, half of the country is somewhere in a range from slightly dim to really fucking stupid to intellectually disabled.

Ergo: televangelism donors, Covid deniers and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

QAnon? QED. If you believe that Earth is inhabited by alien lizard people, you are probably at this very moment in the wrong place. You might want to check out Dog the Bounty Hunter. Or the Congressional Freedom for White, Heteronormative Christians Caucus.

But this raises a moral conundrum. Not on the facts, mind you. Looking at Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Bob Good of Virginia, the sad reality is too apparent. Their aggregate IQ falls in the upper range of moss. And if we’re discussing Greene, apart from her profound historical ignorance and incapacity for abstract reasoning, her illiteracy alone is simply breathtaking. She has called a petri dish a “peach tree dish.” She has called the Gestapo, the “gazpacho.” She has pinned the California wildfires on energy beams from space in a conspiracy between Democrats and Jewish bankers. And she has argued that mask mandates for the Covid pandemic are foolish, because cancer kills many  Americans and nobody makes us wear masks to prevent cancer.

When I said “simply breathtaking,” by the way, I used the root word “simple” advisedly.

So the issue is not whether she and many of her MAGA colleagues are halfwits. The issue is: Is it bigoted to say so aloud? I quote here the late British science journalist Michael Hanlon, writing seven years ago in New Scientist:

Sneering at people’s DNA isn’t allowed any more. If you refuse someone a job on the basis that their ancestors happened to live in places where dark skin is a useful adaptation to strong sunlight, you will, in civilised countries, be in trouble. We don’t enslave people on the grounds of their genetic inheritance, make them sit at the back of the bus, or refuse them entry to golf clubs. Such attitudes are, properly, deemed repellent.

Yet there is still one sort of genetic discrimination that is not only legal, it is universally applied and wholly respectable.

Namely, he said: anti-moron bias.

Putting aside race and ethnicity, you would never hear me insult anyone on the basis on sexual orientation, immigration status, body type, disease, physical disability, nationality, financial status or degree of attractiveness. I mean, when a decade ago Susan Boyle stunned the entire world by somehow singing opera while ugly, nobody ever actually uttered the U-word. It was implicit in the global incredulity. But not, you know, outloud. Because one doesn’t.

Bigotry is bigotry, and modern society is intolerant about intolerance. We can’t even discountenance the category of employment formerly known as prostitution. It is now sex work. And fair enough; it’s not for me to judge someone else’s threshold of dignity — although it removes a pointed arrow from my quiver of disdain for politicians and tycoons who make moral compromises for money. Calling Mark Zuckerberg or Joe Manchin “sex workers” just doesn’t pack much of a wallop.

So why do these taboos not apply to dopes among us? Mind you, if someone is actually developmentally disabled, we would never gawk or roll our eyes or in any way demean them. So how to justify describing, say, Donald Trump, who is despicable on so many other levels, as a “six-alarm cretin” or “dumber than a wad of wet spackle” or “intellectually on par with an anchovy?” And how about his 73 million supporters? (That’s million, with an m, as in, “73 million fucking nightcrawler-brained mouth breathers.”)

Look at Jordan Klepper of Comedy Central. His career skyrocketed when he began frequenting Trump rallies, interviewing all of the most egregious simpletons, and repurposing their ignorance and stupidity to entertain the right side of the bell curve. And (almost) exactly half of America can’t get enough of it. But how can Klepper so arrogantly turn up his nose at fellow citizens who, through no fault of their own, couldn’t think their way out of a litter box? This is America. There are no arbitrary qualifications for citizens to vote. Not race or sex or land ownership or literacy and certainly not intelligence. Otherwise, like the dark times before women’s suffrage, we’d deny the franchise to half of our neighbors. So if some douchebag has been persuaded that the Democratic party is dominated by pedophiles, because he doesn’t have the reasoning power of a moist towelette, shouldn’t we celebrate our fundamental egalitarianism — even though that fucking nitwit wants to deny the same right to blacks, Latinos, Asians and (in a shocking, but not surprising, recent development) women.

American-valueswise, this is quite a pickle, is it not?

Except for one thing: Stupidity is not race, or sex or left-handedness. It is not some benign distinction. It has harmful consequences. Not only is low IQ highly correlated to crime, it is also linked to bigotry and — you have no idea how it delights me to write this — Republicanism. This from LiveScience:

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice.

The publication also spoke with Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, who said, according to LiveScience, that “polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals than those of other political persuasions.”

Hodson cited two landmark British tracking studies, the first of which followed subjects born in 1958, and the second those born in 1970. They were measured at age 10-11, and again at 30-33, along with their views on social issues and race.

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and "Schools should teach children to obey authority." Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn't mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

Therefore, votes do not make terrible decisions. Voters make terrible decisions — especially idiotic voters. What the hell are we gonna do about that?

Eugenics is probably out of the question. It’s been tried before, by the Nazis, which tells you everything you need to know on that subject. And we certainly aren’t going to have an IQ standard for voting rights; that’s simply un-American to the hilt. There remains, however, one potential solution:

More elitism.

I’ll just retype that, in case someone imagines a slip of the keyboard has taken place: What we need is a little bit more elitism.

There was a time when Americans of every stripe admired and respected education, knowledge and expertise. We demanded it of our doctors, lawyers, professors, business leaders, technocrats, journalists and elected officials. Today, nativist populism is so out of control that “elite” is a slur. Republican rhetoric closely approximates the ideology of fascist and communist revolutions, whose purges — often murderous — unfailingly began with the intellectuals. Are we in 2022 America or 1977 Cambodia?

The consequence is that our stupid fellow citizens by the 10s of millions are voting in the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. In fact, it is not unlikely that in January she will be part of a Congressional delegation that includes — as U.S. senator — this man:

In a July 9 appearance, he spoke about climate change, suggesting that Georgia’s “good air decides to float over” to China, replacing China’s “bad air,” which goes back to Georgia, where “we got to clean that back up.”

That’s from the Washington Post. Then there’s this, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, quoting the candidate’s opposition to the climate-protection provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act:

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker, the man who, in a Fox News interview about gun control following the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, offered the following:

“Well, you know, it’s always been an issue, because as I said earlier on, they wanna score political points ... People see that it's a person wielding that weapon, you know, Cain killed Abel. And that's the problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You talk about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women, that's looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?”

In a previous Fox interview, he was more concise: “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”

Walker, whose only qualifications are a sterling football career and a series of preposterously transparent lies, is the MAGA candidate in a red state. The polls put him in a dead heat with Raphael Warnock, the incumbent. Despite the fact that the challenger is, evidently, borderline brain dead. Now I ask you: We expect our movie stars, and TV stars and pop-music stars to be gorgeous. It’s a form of discrimation that somehow falls outside the radar of equity scolds. I mean, if you’re doing a zombie show, you maybe, maybe, can cast the lead without finding an actual zombie, no matter the accusations of exploitation and expropriation — but God help you if he or she is not a 10.

Can we not also waive the intellectual egalitarianism for our elected leaders? Can’t we agree as a society that it is better to have an experienced captain on the bridge, an educated professor in the lecture hall and a representative in the Senate who doesn’t imagine himself to be an FBI special agent and can, at a minimum, out-debate a basket of kelp?

I say it’s possible. After all, haven’t we agreed that the last remaining discriminatory non-taboo — calling a nincompoop a nincompoop — is seldom met with opprobrium but rather a concurring nod of the head? That means that the society has weighed mean-spirited derision and truth and come down on the side of truth. So perhaps that also means we can restore respect for the (admittedly unequally distributed) virtues of intelligence to its proper place in the creation of institutional hierarchy.

We cannot affect the balance of intelligence in the electorate. That’s not only wrong, it’s literally impossible. But we must restore it to the institutions that keep society alive and healthy. Because, at this juncture, we are indeed in a vicious cycle: morons electing morons (and scoundrels), who in their official duties pander to morons. There was an absurd and prophetic movie about that.

It was called Idiocracy.