Stupid is as stupid does

As readers have been complaining in letters to the editor, the powers-that-be decided to divide that road into three lanes. Not a bad idea in itself but, having done so, the bright light responsible did not indicate who had the right of way, the traffic going in an easterly direction or the traffic going west. This could have been done by simply drawing arrows, but the new lane has instead been left entirely blank. So what has happened is that the road is now a two-lane, and there have apparently been a few near-accidents thus far. Naturally, it is just a matter of time before a head-on crash occurs if these lines remain as they are.

It is a similar kind of stupidity that lies behind the waste of three million dollars to buy Eye-in-the-Sky towers without cameras, as well as the spending of $40 million on a blimp and unsuitable surveillance equipment. It is the same type of stupidity which explains the inability of the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) to coordinate relief efforts whenever various regions in the country are cut off by floods. And it seems to be stupidity, rather than corruption, which underlies a lot of the incompetence in so many different areas of national life.

Such stupidity is not inherent, in the sense that the general mental capacity of the population has declined. But it may be that our cultural norms do not in general produce thinking persons. This could be why there is a failure of intelligence even with persons with PhDs. So we have School of Education lecturer Winford James arguing in the Sunday Newsday (15.01.06) that "evolution, as conceived, is a highly intelligent process. It must be to have designed something as complex and as utilitarian as syntax."

But the beautiful thing about evolutionary theory is that it accounts for how complexity can arise from very simple components. This applies to language as well. Researchers Martin Nowak and David Krakauer have conducted animal studies which show how natural selection probably guided the three steps in the evolution of human language, from sounds to words to the proto-grammar spoken by our distant ancestors.

Nowak’s team has demonstrated mathematically how complex languages are all composed of a few sounds, and how simple grammar rules evolved to reduce mistakes in communication. In a separate study on syntax, done with Victor Jansen of the Royal Holloway University of London, Nowak showed that syntactic communication would develop in an environment of sufficient complexity, where survival depends on important information being quickly dispersed.

(However, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, argues that human language evolved through sexual, rather than natural, selection — ie human beings developed speech in order to chat up each other.)

But James, despite his field being linguistics, knows nothing of this and did not bother to find out about it before writing a two-part article on language and "intelligent design." And it seems to me that such a lack of intellectual rigor amongst our most educated persons is a causal factor of stupidity at lower levels. But this may, I admit, be an illegitimate leap in logic. It may be that a society can produce technically competent persons without having norms which put value on purely intellectual work. Such a society would view education in utilitarian terms (producing efficient electricians and engineers) and be more or less indifferent to ideological matters (like critical thinking or inculcating knowledge of ancestral cultures or moral instruction). Countries like Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea seem to prove this to be so. After all, these are societies which, by most basic measures, provide all essential needs for their people. Yet they do not produce significant art or science nor do they worry about ideological issues such as identity or political paradigms.

At the same time, the culture of these three countries is essentially Chinese, and ancient China is one of only three civilisations where scholars have enjoyed high status unrelated to their economic position. (The other two were ancient Greece and 19th century Britain — seventh-century India also had a culture where philosophers had high status, but they had to belong to the wealthy Brahmin class in order to become philosophers.) So it may be that, even if these modern offshoots of China now see knowledge as utilitarian, it is the intellectual culture they have inherited which makes them so successful both at acquiring knowledge and adhering to ethical norms.

But, as a society, Trinidad and Tobago doesn’t have such a culture. Thus we find that an incompetence of intelligence exists at the middle levels as well, which is where the norms of a society are shaped. So the Independent Senators, except for Dana Seetahal, didn’t even know the President could not exempt them from the Integrity Act, and compounded their error by offering the most absurd arguments, effectively dissected by Reggie Dumas, to justify being exempted.

And in the newspapers, the discourse degenerates daily — an eloquent writer identifying the "criminal imbalance" of local music as a factor in the crime situation, citing PNM activist and Afrocentrist Muhammad Shabazz as an authority for this thesis, while Shabazz in turn praises Muslim fundamentalist David Muhammad on his radio programme — and so the network of ignorance grows and grows.

If all these levels are interlinked, then the main hope for stemming this sea of stupidity is to stop playing fast and loose with our education system. Instead, however, I see that the Education Ministry will be handing over control of its new Early Childhood Education Centres to denominational boards — thus planting seeds for ignorance and insularism that will, I suspect, bear poisoned fruit within 20 years.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh