The Mittens have got me thinking. That would be Shirley and John A. Mittens, of Brooksville, Fla.:
Shirley Mitten, 64, a volunteer at a pregnancy center and a resident of Brooksville, Fla., … said she does not know if Mr. Obama is a Muslim. "He says he's not, but we have no way of knowing," Ms. Mitten said.
Her husband, John A. Mitten, 64 … pointed out that Mr. Obama's father was a Muslim.
The middle name Hussein, he said, added to the suspicion. "I guess Obama was named after Saddam Hussein," he said.
So yes, obviously, John A. and Shirley Mitten of Brooksville, Fla., are both A) bigots and B) really, really dumb. But what, exactly, is the relationship between those two things? What is the nature of the relationship between racism and stupidity?
To the extent I'd thought about this before, I think I may have had it backwards. Let me explain. Here is the data, of sorts, with which I've been dealing:
1. I have never met a bigot* who wasn't also stupid.
2. I have known many, many stupid people who were not bigots.
If we were to draw this relationship as a Venn diagram, bigotry would be a smaller circle entirely inside the larger circle of stupidity. The temptation, then, is to think of racism as a particular subset of stupidity, but I think that leads us astray.
The conclusion I had drawn from thinking about this relationship in this way was that stupidity was a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of bigotry. I was thinking, in other words, that stupidity was the precondition — that it was the starting point from which one might go on to become a racist.
That seems like a logically sound explanation for the data above, but I now think it's backwards. I think cause and effect flow in the other direction. I think, instead, that bigotry is a sufficient, but not a necessary, cause of stupidity. In other words, I think that bigotry is the precondition — that it is a starting point from which one inevitably and inexorably goes on to become stupid.
This, I believe, is the dynamic we are seeing at work in the Mittens and in all those terrifying videos of the angry mobs at Sarah Palin rallies. We are not seeing a crowd of naive simpletons being led astray by demagoguery. We are seeing a crowd of people who have chosen to accept unreal ideas, and who are therefore forced to embrace The Stupid.
Racism, bigotry and xenophobia are immoral, of course, but they are also, just as fundamentally, untrue. They are unreal. They provide a theory and a framework for living in the world that cannot be reconciled with the reality of this world. The person who chooses to accept that unreal framework is thus constantly forced to choose between unreality and reality, between the theory and the facts. To hold onto the unreal framework, they must continuously reject reality. And every time they do that, they get a little bit dumber.**
I don't mean for this to be an entirely abstract discussion. I'm interested in the relationship between stupidity and racism because I want to know which is the root cause. This is a matter of both diagnosis and prescription. And I believe there is a prescription. The Mittens may be stupid, but they do not have to remain so. I believe there is hope for them.
The truth is that unreality is simply unsustainable. Maintaining one's belief in an unreal and untrue theory takes too much work. The vigilant rejection of reality has to be, on some level, exhausting. Even the elaborate support structures provided by Fox News and AM radio cannot wholly shield one from the constant intrusions of the world that is. Denying the existence of that world requires more help than even the voluminous right-wing echo chamber can provide.
This, I think, is part of why we're seeing such desperate vehemence at the Palin rallies. The crowd realizes that the unreality it has chosen cannot long survive if the majority of their fellow citizens and neighbors refuse to play along. As long as the entire crowd is choosing to "see" the emperor's splendid new clothes, then it's relatively easy to go along with that choice. But once the crowd reaches a tipping point, once the majority are choosing reality and the truth, then the emperor's nakedness become impossible to deny. For those who have chosen bigotry, racism and xenophobia, this election represents just such a tipping point. They're watching unreality slip through their fingers and they're trying, desperately, to grasp it even tighter.
After this election, part of our task — yours, mine and our new president's — will be to find a way to gently invite and welcome these folks back into the real world. My suspicion, or at least my hope, is that eventually, once they are unburdened by the need to constantly choose unreality and therefore stupidity, they will find this a great relief.
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* I'm not here discussing more structural or institutional forms of racism, nor am I talking here about the more general self-justifying mythologies that every privileged people repeats to itself as an apologetic. Set aside here the question of whether or not bigotry is a pervasive, endemic reality in American culture. For the sake of this discussion, let us recalibrate our tools to discount for whatever pre-existing base level of bigotry there may be so that we can here focus on the exceptional bigot — the sort of person who stands out as more bigoted than the surrounding/underlying culture as a whole.
** At this point you may be suspecting that this post is little more than an elaborate attempt to repackage the argument of the book of 1 John in non-sectarian terms. Well, yeah. Did it work?
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