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In Defense of Stupidity

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.” ― Edgar D. Mitchell

There’s a story I sometimes tell, because I feel like it communicates something important in a pretty vivid way. It’s my “look at that, you son of a bitch” story, if you will. It’s set about eight years ago, at a used bookstore where I used to work. We had a regular who was definitely not named Ed. Ed was a decent guy, always polite at the register, and he’d take the time to talk to you a bit. He liked Kung Fu movies mostly, so he’d come in every week or three and check to see whether any new VHS tapes were on clearance. This happened often enough that we’d save stuff for him, if we saw a tape that we thought he might enjoy- a guaranteed sale, plus we liked him. He wasn’t a reader though. Ed had a really limited vocabulary, and his thinking was slow, so recreational reading was a challenge. Conversation was a bit touch-and-go as well, a bit like those upgoer-five challenge essays where you try to explain things using only the thousand most common words in English. I don’t think it was a developmental problem as such, he didn’t have any of the obvious trisomy anatomical markers or anything like that. As far as I know, he was just a guy at the extreme lower end of the IQ bell curve. But one day, he came in looking pretty stressed out, and asked where the Bibles were. So one of our employees takes him to the religion section, and hands him one of the Protestant ones. It was a typical sort of Bible, gilt-edged with a textured black surface, like what you’d find in the back of a pew. “No, not that one,” he says. “A really used one.” So, the employee helping him out pulls the cheapest one off the shelf, a used paperback that we were selling for a buck, but he still looks unhappy.

“Is that the most used one you have?” Well, like I said, we like Ed. So the employee goes to the back, saves one of the Bibles that we were going to recycle. It’s absolutely falling apart- broken spine in twelve places, dog-eared pages, covered in highlighter and doodles in the page margins, the cover was holding on by a thread. But when Ed saw this thing, his eyes lit up. “Yeah, that one!”

We gave it to him for free, and he took it to one of the tables near the back of our shop and started flipping through it. After a bit, he took out his cell phone, made a call, and still looking through his new Bible begins VERY LOUDLY arguing with his mother.

This was when I walked in, by the way- the first half I heard secondhand. So there I am, about to clock in for work, and I pass Ed yelling at his phone, “NO MOM, IT’S NOT IN HERE. I TOLD YOU, IT’S NOT.”

It turns out, Ed was trying to resolve a particular theological difficulty. He and his girlfriend had sex, you see. His mother, who still acted as his guardian, found out about this, and raised some strenuous objections on religious grounds. Ed and his girlfriend, on the other hand, had enjoyed the sex very much, and weren’t buying his mom’s argument that they had sinned. So Ed went to the source of moral authority to try and prove his mother wrong.

The problem was, Ed was barely literate, and his God’s revelation was in the form of a book.

He struggled with young adult novels, let alone a dense text that had been originally translated from Hebrew and Aramaic. So Ed’s brilliant insight was to find the most used Bible. One where the broken spine opened automatically to the pages that had been read the most often, where dog-eared pages and highlighters told him what was most important, and notes in the margins explained things he couldn’t understand. And sure enough, this method led him quickly to the (correct) conclusion that the Bible is basically silent on non-adulterous extramarital sex. A theologian could give you some well-developed reasons why Ed’s mom was correct, but these are all contextual second-order inferences; if you’ve committed to a straightforward sola scriptura religious tradition, it’s surprisingly difficult to justify a ban on premarital sex.

There are a lot of reasons I like this story, but I think the reason that’s most important to me is that it’s an intellectual triumph by a stupid man. Ed’s accomplishment here is something that’s worth celebrating! Not just because he came up with a clever solution, but because the problem he overcame was in part the problem of his own cognitive limits. It was a transcendent moment, in the deepest meaning of that word.

Look at it, you son of a bitch.

In Defense of Stupidity

Follow my twitter bc im basically inactive here

Follow my twitter bc im basically inactive here

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