Trouble we do have, of course. In contrast to our great achievements in technology, we have our dismal failures in human affairs. Poverty, starvation, disease, crime, drugs, riots, wars (real and potential) all confront us every day on the news. Science helps us learn about nature, and technology provides us with the means for effecting change, but neither provides us with the understanding we need to help ourselves. Hence, people continue to suffer in sloth and apathy—ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed— while a self-content middle class smugly convinces itself it is somehow morally superior to the disadvantaged, and government charity doles out just enough useless help to keep the disenfranchised hopelessly dependent on the long spoon.

If this is the best we can do, we are indeed in a mess. Perhaps we would do better if we recognize that we and the institutions we believe in are the causes of our problems. Much psychological research has gone into the study of humans as problem solvers, which is all well and good because we can and do solve problems. However, virtually no attention has been directed toward analyzing our considerable ability to create difficulties and even less to our inability to resolve them. On the one hand, we are rather deft at dealing with natural problems; our scientific and technological triumphs are all over natural phenomena—the human body, genes, electromagnetism, space. On the other, our failures are self-generated, and we cannot correct them because those in power who created them simply do not recognize them as problems solvable within the system. Perhaps if we understood our foibles by applying the schematic model for stupidity advanced in this book, we could render human behavior comprehensible. Ethics could then be a function of knowledge rather than religious taboos in the way our technological expertise allows us to make informed rather than mystical decisions about our interactions with nature.

One example of the interaction of expertise, knowledge and ethics in human affairs is that of the increasing moral imperative for cooperation. Ironically, while technological success has promoted the growth of human populations, computers have made disruptive innovative thought more difficult and individual creative thought anachronistic. The development of new disruptive ideas is more difficult because technology is standardizing our cultural world. Conformity in dress, behavior and thought is promoted by centralized control in the fashion industry, the legal system and the media. We isolate ourselves from interpersonal contact with headsets plugged into boom boxes playing synthesized music or endure prefabricated laugh-tracks on sit-com TV. For variety, we depend on old-line fanatics, like religious fundamentalists, to upset the cultural quo.

stupidity.net