Terminal Humanism and the Idiot Arrogánt
The term idiot savant (French for "learned idiot”) was first used to describe the condition in 1887 by Dr. John Langdon Down, who is known for his description of Down syndrome. Idiot savant is not a recognized disorder according to the DSM and the term “savant syndrome’ is now used to describe individuals with impaired cognitive functioning but who exhibit superior skills in a few areas, usually computational or calendric. It is rare, with only about one in a million persons affected. Today, there is a much higher incidence of a social disorder I would term “idiot arrogánt.” They are the people George Burns had in mind when he quipped, “Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.” Our tolerance of such people leads, I say to a form of terminal humanism, a collapse of the very compassionate culture that was too nice to tell them they really are idiots.
On the front lines of those suffering the attacks of such people are teachers, and the assault usually comes not from a cabbie but from a parent who is certain their child has superior intellect and is just not being taught well enough. It used to be only elementary school teachers who had to confront this sort of nonsense, but now it has become common at secondary schools and even universities. And they now have the additional ammunition of “trigger words” that will send these sensitive little intellects into panic attacks or just plain offend them. To ask that such dithering protesters actually use the conventions of the English language in their essay assignments and observe the agreed-upon due dates for those assignments will be taken as evidence of high-handed disregard for their unique form of intelligence. It all started out so well in the Age of Enlightenment but has gone maddeningly, even dangerously off track.
Erasmus and Voltaire and other humanist philosophers could see the end of the divine right of kings and they advocated for a rule of “rational sentiment” or social responsibility over blind adherence to church doctrine or royal whim. Well at some point that “sentiment” became the new religion and the new ruler, and the school of humanism became a terminal affliction. Sentiment has been perverted into the valorization of mere “feelings” such that what one “feels” to be true is more important than the evidence of reason and science. Our own John Ralston Saul has chronicled our fall from grace and graciousness in his Voltaire’s Bastards, but the lesson didn’t take.
Terminal humanism is is my descriptor for one particularly cowardly type of media response by these idiot arrogánts to recent evil events. Humanism now does not mean that “the proper study of mankind is man” as Pope would have it; rather, it suggests that anything one deems significant to oneself, really is or should be, significant to all in society at large. I call it “terminal” because of where it leads, individually and collectively. The Facebook posting of yesterday’s restaurant meal may get a few “likes” from people not yet “unfriended” but at least the desire for recognition behind the post causes no harm beyond a slight lowering of societal IQ. Other acts are more serious, often deadly.
Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo Corporation in Paris were massacred by gunmen claiming to be acting as agents of Islamic retribution for drawings created at that establishment and deemed blasphemous of the prophet Mohammed and the religion of Islam. Editorialists in a surprising number of western newspapers gave the opinion that publications and cartoonists who displayed such work were agents of their own calamity. They advised doing nothing that would incite such heinous acts. Others criticized the cartoonists themselves for the crude humour and tasteless quality of the cartoons. No western newspapers reprinted any of the offending work in question. It was left to a commentator from a middle-eastern university to chastise the editorialists for “the shameful burkha of silence that has descended over the free press of the western nations.”
Yes, I thought the cartoons were crude by my personal standards — and I saw them all, posted on bulletin boards in Paris. Affronts to my aesthetic even spiritual taste, however, do not excuse murder. When visual art becomes justification for killing, and media gatekeepers advise media producers to acquiesce to the agents of that slaughter, we have reached a point as a society where the shallow “tweet” or Facebook “like” have become the standard for value. And, we in North America are not exempt from manifestation of this extreme need on the part of the idiot arrogánt to achieve at all costs some form of media fame, and for some that is the only kind of fame in today’s world.
It was a thirst for fame that motivated a gunman who, in 1982 waited for John Lennon to exit his apartment and then killed him because as he said, he wanted his name to go down in history as the man who shot John Lennon. His name has come up six times since then in parole appeals, all of which have been denied. Two commentators on the event managed to write thought-provoking articles on his insane behaviour without ever mentioning his name. His clipping file in his cell must be the only reminder of his life’s brief intersection with fame.
Today, Q’anon with all its reawakened anti-semitism, anti-feminist, anti-communist, anti-everything-we-don’t-like distortions and lies is the most recent dangerous influence insinuated into our information, data-driven society. Well, fact-checking can also be done at the speed of fingers on a keyboard and the effort to track down original sources is worth the effort. Humanism is not dead, only perverted for shallow purposes by shallow people who can, with today’s technology, be producers of their own news. Media literacy has never been more important in a world where our reputable sources of print and broadcast news must be rigorous in their fact checking, but social media knows no such restraint and where the most egregious lies can be retweeted thousands of times before breakfast and “travel halfway around the globe while truth is lacing up its boots.” And if you think Mark Twain coined that expression you have been as misinformed as I was until I checked to discover its attribution to Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels or more to the point of this topic, “A Modest Proposal.”
Still, humanism, that belief in the ability of homo sapiens the sentient to use the evolved power of both sides of his thinking organ to temper logic with intuition and power with compassion is being sorely tested. It needn’t be terminal if it pulls itself out of the slop of emotional trivia that drives so much of the bombast and fear of this time and reaffirms its roots to initiate a new age of reason. Although I can hear the tone of the zealot in my own language there, I hope and work for a world where we live in some harmony with our planet and all of its creatures and the idiots may be left to gibber and boast and complain among themselves.