I was raised to believe that ignorance is a remediable condition.
People who used certain racial epithets, I was told, did so out of insecurity of their own place in society. They were telling on themselves, showing us their ugly side. They needed to do better. When I was a kid, about the worst thing my mother could say about you was that you were ignorant.
People could do something about ignorance. An ignorant person could read a book or ask somebody who knows. At the very least, a person could shut up and hide ignorance under a bushel.
The corollary to this is that we are all ignorant about most things. And because ignorance is symptomatic of not knowing and can be cured, it is not always rude or hateful to point it out. Sometimes you might even have a duty to point it out. You could always roll your eyes at ignorance.
Still, when I see Facebook posts detailing the war hero exploits of Bob Keeshan (who baby boomers will remember as Captain Kangaroo) and "reminding" us that the gentle-seeming Fred "Mister" Rogers was in fact a Marine sniper with 20 kills in Vietnam, I usually refrain from offering corrections. Ignorance is often its own penalty.
Stupidity is inherent and immutable. There is no coming back from stupid. Being stupid is like being born with a physical challenge. It's like being short or having red hair and freckles, though it's unlikely anyone will find your stupidity adorable. It's simply part of who you are, and therefore it's bad form to comment on someone's genuine stupidity. We are not to make fun of the stupid, because they can't help it. They have a condition.
No one ever spelled this out, but I always took stupidity as a different species of problem than merely a low IQ. Forrest Gump had a low IQ, but he was not stupid. (Or a real person.)
But what is stupidity anyway? It's easy enough to define ignorance. It's related to innocence. It's our default and possibly temporary condition (we are ignorant until we learn). Ignorance can be compounded by hate and fear and wishfulness, and can be a very destructive force, but I'd argue stupidity is more insidious.
There is a certain hubris attached: Stupidity is lazy, weak thinking that doesn't recognize itself as lazy, weak thinking. While it might be possible to develop better mental habits, to improve the way we think, the first step is for the stupid to realize their problem.
And stupidity is not something that can be cured by information gathering. It's a kind of self-delusion that might be exacerbated by doing one's own research. There's an intellectual dishonesty present in stupidity, a compulsion to deny all facts that don't fit the prescribed narrative. A stupid person rejects any evidence that doesn't support whatever notion they've adopted and rationalizes (correctly, as it turns out) that you can't believe everything you read or hear.
But the most salient characteristic of a stupid person is that they believe they are smart.
They may be right about that insofar as they may have the intellectual capacity to understand complex systems or interpersonal skills with which they might earn the confidence of others. The problem with stupidity isn't diminished capacity so much as it is a lack of humility.
Stupidity can co-exist with aptitude, and maybe even genius.
People can be high achievers and still knee-walking stupid. Kyrie Irving is not only a physical specimen; basketball requires a high level of cognitive skills and elasticity. The Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West is (though many of my old white-guy cohort will grumpily disagree) a genuinely important composer and creator whose music is consistently interesting. Surely Elon Musk has a skill set as well.
Yet all these men have recently demonstrated profound stupidity. They are weak thinkers who confidently spout nonsense that some of us find horrifying, some of us find entertaining, and a few of us take as dogma--nonsense which provides easy, cheap fodder for corporate "news" organizations seeking to monetize our attention.
One of the frustrating things about writing a newspaper column in the digital era is that none of you who have read this far are likely to disagree with me. I doubt anyone who reads this deep in any newspaper story genuinely considers Ye a legitimate presidential candidate. I doubt I'm reaching anyone who's genuinely stupid.
If you've got enough introspection and self-awareness to wonder about it, you almost certainly aren't. It is the nature of stupidity not to get that it is stupid. (This is the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect.)
One sure way to test negative for stupid is to do something that is objectively difficult, like giving a TED talk explaining the evolution of the modified Ron Erhardt-Ray Perkins offensive system or why James Joyce felt the need to write "Finnegan's Wake." If you're undaunted by the prospect of doing something like that, you might not be stupid.
Before you take that as a compliment, consider how easy it is to condemn stupidity in the abstract. We all do dumb things like buying bitcoin or predicting a 10-2 record for the Razorbacks occasionally, but we're not "stupid."
We can't be. A deep societal stigma attaches to being stupid. You can lose your job for being stupid. And, unlike benign ignorance, there isn't a simple cure.
Which brings me back to my mother's admonition. They can't help it. It's just their way to be stupid. Maybe we should just pat them on their heads and bless their hearts.
Because, after all, there aren't (yet) any (serious) support groups for the stupid. There isn't any support--that I know of, at least--for granting the stupid legal protections. Our Ivy League colleges aren't advertising that they're reaching their diversity goals by admitting unprecedented levels of stupid people.
But we are normalizing stupid. We are paying it attention. We are allowing it a place of privilege --especially if the stupid comes from the celebrity class. And the stupid appear to be organizing.
It probably won't be long before they get their own political party.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.