Doltification Tables

Why Deal With Low Things When High Ideas Are Available?

I don’t mind justifying myself. But the stories may change.

I want to consider a question that seems to me always important, but that nobody asked: Why shoot fish in a barrel?

I don’t think you should. But one will in the world of ideas eventually encounter ghouls in high-ideas garb. One doesn’t piece them apart merely for sport.

So a few thoughts on which morons to engage, and why, while maintaining your “I’m a Very Serious Person, Indeed” identification card.

I’ll give what seem to me reasons, and then I’ll describe what seems to me my mode, which we might call, I don’t know, the psychology.

The Reasons

A thoughtful reader wrote with adult advice contained in a question. Why take on dolts?

I like this, not least because the question implies I can do better. I’d like to believe I could. But I think the adult perspective, or call it serious, also misses something. The serious person wants ideas and wants their best representatives, the best current articulations of those ideas, and the voices that do best at conveying them.

Well, I want to be serious, too!

But I want to argue that such seriousness might amount to social or political detachment, which can be lovely. Call it a luxury. If “detachment” is too strong, call it “distance.” It seems to me, then, that at times such social or political distance–lovely and innocent in the abstract, perhaps–means looking away. Looking away at certain moments, say, as students are arrested or disappeared for their opinions, appears to be less impressive, as it happens, less serious than stepping out into the world, however one might.

This doesn’t mean abandon the world of the ideas, or risk being a political dummy or coward. Far from it. Engage the world, and you’ll see soon enough how ideas are deformed out in it. You’ll see those ideas dragged around like clubs to beat up images of enemies, or you’ll see the same ideas degraded to a simplicity to please a mass with other motivations, like resentment.

Say, then, that there are something like family lines from high ideas in philosophers to decrepit devices in influential trolls with a regime’s ear. That’s one category of “dolt,” to use the thoughtful reader’s term. Dolt with big influence. I want to suggest it’s the massive influence that makes a dolt worth considering, even if you think you’re better than all that. Call this the Category-One Dolt.

Other dolts you take on a come-as-they-go basis. There’s Plato (not a dolt). There’s the Plato scholar (it varies). And there’s the bro out there vibing with Plato on his own (it’s the goddamn Wild West). Each is fine. I’m especially fond of Plato. But it’s the Wild West I want to talk about. Out there, you don’t know what you’ll come across. Well, so far, I guess I do. Mostly little flies to swat. I guess I’m trying to say that I can’t let go of them as material. But I have a serious point.

The second category of dolt, of dolts still worth engaging, might emerge out of this muck that thinks it thinks high things. It’s a crowd whose members don’t tend to rise to prominence. But it’s the very beating heart of the audience of the Category-One Dolt. And some do emerge as captains of little orc armies. Some of them might prove worth exploring as specimens, then. Whatever the case, there’s an active interplay between a brute among Category-One Dolts and his base, which will contain some few that rise to Category-Two Dolt status.

I’m mostly interested in the Category-One variety, but that interplay between dolt varieties means I can’t promise not to deal with some Category-Two Dolts here and there. As a rule, though, trolls are to be avoided. To reiterate: we’re just dealing with those who have influence and the ear of power, and some of their most successful fans.

I believe that that can all be justified as a task worthy of one experienced in the history of ideas. How you do it, if you do it, is up to you.

A few words on what turns out to be my mode in dealing with dolts. I’ll call it my psychology because we start with an orienting frame: Who am I?

The Psychology

Ever so often, I’m an eagle! “I ain’t no I goddamn son of a bitch, you better think about it, baby,” as the Misfits song goes.

Most days are different. I’m never a sheep, but I’m certainly not the eagle. I can’t let go the eagle’s perspective, though.

From up there, I am a donkey. But that’s not bad material! A donkey brays, but knows what he’s about. He’s stubborn, which is to say he also "ain't no goddamn son of a bitch."

Where Donkeys Dare, if you will.

Let’s admire the donkey. The donkey doing his donkey thing will notice other donkeys who are somehow different, a bit off. These are donkeys who think they can fly. These donkeys are asses, let’s say. I believe I’m violating some classification rules, so I’ll abort metaphor presently.

Let me just say I’m a donkey that can spot an ass.

In that mode, then, I go about thinking on things. I like the high things my reader who, in some way, wants me to do better likes. I just don’t think I’m in a position to calmly step away into a thinking-on-thinking, which I’ve always left to Aristotle’s god, anyway. But neither am I in a position to reflect at a distance, feet up in a figurative Epicurean garden.

So what we get so far is pantsing rooted in the history of ideas, donkey-on-donkey violence.