Backseat Dumbasses; Or, The Power Of Hostesses

PHILOSOPHY, GIANTS, AND OTHER TOPICS

I was at a party once, and our hostess pulled me across the room to introduce me to another partygoer this way— “this is my friend Karl; he is a philosopher.”

I was immediately struck by the advantages of such an introduction.

This is because introductions have worked against me, for much of my life. I have a long history of being introduced as a songwriter, and then watching people’s eyes narrow into judgment-sized slits.

If you are a songwriter, you’re going to want to hush that up. When word gets out that you are a songwriter, science tells us that humans will rapidly cycle through the only two known ways to judge such a person:

1. If one is told the songwriter makes a living at it— this means they are a parasite contributing to the general lousiness of our popular music. If we’re being honest—this songwriter has literally ruined our civilization.

2. When one hasn’t heard of the songwriter— this means they can’t be any good.

I envy people in professions that don’t get judged in this way. When I meet an accountant, or a person who works in the banking industry, I assume that my expertise as a songwriter does not qualify me to make any sort of guess about how good an accountant is at his job, or how highly regarded a banker is in her chosen field. But— somehow— bankers and accountants feel that they are knowledgeable about my area of expertise.

I know as little as it’s possible to know about accounting and banking. If pressed, I will cautiously observe that an accountant is involved with accounts, whereas a banker is involved with banks. I would be reluctant to assume anything past those assumptions, which seem safe, even though I am aware of things in my field that fly in the face of similar logic.

For example: there is a musical instrument I learned about in college, and it’s called an English horn. This is an instrument that provokes snickering, but only in some circles. This snickering is about as specialized as snickering can get.

I once watched a professor declaiming that the English horn was “neither English, nor a horn.” The unseemly level of orgiastic pleasure he appeared to derive from this pronunciamento will give you an idea of why I don’t like to be introduced as a teacher, either, despite the fact that this is another thing that I am.

While I assume that people meeting a philosopher are not impressed, exactly, I figure they are unlikely to have a glib “take” on philosophers available at arm’s reach. Most of us think about philosophers so rarely that meeting one in the flesh is apt to throw us off a bit. We usually rely on our beloved prejudice toolbox to tell us how to feel when we’re told what a stranger does for a living, and whatever else you might say about prejudice, I think it does require you to have some superficial contact with a group before you can be prejudiced toward its members.

You must at least have seen them portrayed on television.

Every type of person known to exist is portrayed on television as a person who also solves crimes. I’ve seen a vast array of vocations on television represented among the police consultant class; bartenders, priests, and fiction writers all pop up as credible adjuncts to the trained detectives on television.

Sometimes a long-suffering cop has a wacky and unqualified crime-solving sidekick, and sometimes an unqualified amateur crime-solver simply finds herself smack dab in the middle of a crime investigation every seven days or so. Sample dialogue: “Ah, this spot I’ve chosen for my vacation looks quite restful. Except, I suppose, for that corpse right there.”

The cops in these situations are always stymied; the process of TV cop-stymieing is as common and workaday as the process of dust settling on an off-season bouncy castle. The stymieing is so widespread that the amateur sleuth can just safely assume the cops are stymied, because they always are. Cops head to a crime scene with some optimism that their skills will suffice; they don’t expect to be stymied, but the amateur knows better. TV teaches us that a smiling cop is a cop who’s about to be stymied, only he doesn’t know it yet.

But with all this business of flower arrangers, sommeliers, Chinese acrobats and so forth solving crimes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a philosopher solving crimes on TV. None of the people who greenlight TV series appear to believe that viewers would accept a philosopher rolling up her sleeves and solving crimes, and I think this is mainly because department protocol dictates that an amateur sleuth with no credentials must at least be sassy.

And a sassy philosopher would not be believable. We don’t know what philosophers are, but we do know what they are not— they are not sassy.

So, don’t try to find a copy of Immanuel Kant’s “Oooh, Girlfriend, Watch Me Critique Pure Reason.” This book does not exist, and wishing will not make it so.

What do I think a philosopher is, you may ask? I mean, you probably won’t ask this, but you certainly may.

I will begin by saying that a philosopher has to be able to say things that make people nod. These things can be fatuous, and usually are, but they have to at least sound like nodworthy ideas.

Philosophy majors, I have found, are not always able to make the jump from recipient of philosophy degree to person who says nodworthy things. My suspicion is that professors in philosophy departments are not working that hard to train their charges to develop this skill. I further suspect that your entrenched academic doesn’t want to believe that nodworthiness has become the standard.

Because it’s difficult to be nodworthy, just like it’s difficult to write a catchy pop hook. Pop music is all about the hook, because the idea is to win over civilian hearts and minds. You need a hook to do this.

The songwriter wants to get non-songwriters to nod along, and people in the philosophy game have followed suit. While we weren’t paying attention— because we were never paying attention— philosophy has morphed from a series of large dusty tomes into a sort of Billboard Hot 100 of bite-size wisdoms.

It’s fodder for an interesting philosophical discussion, this question of whether getting through a philosophy degree means you are now a philosopher. I have known people who have gotten a degree of this sort. And these people are always hamstrung, any time the need arises to communicate basic ideas in clear and decipherable language.

It must be said, though, that head-nodding doesn’t necessarily involve anything of the sort. When you see a head nodding, it doesn’t mean that basic ideas have just been communicated. Nor should one assume that the language used was either clear, or decipherable.

The only thing you can assume is that the owner of the head felt the need to nod, and used that head to do it. And while nodding can certainly be provoked by language and clarity and the like, it can also be provoked by discomfort.

Sometimes you listen to a person speaking, and you have no earthly idea what they are driving at. But you can’t fail to notice that they are driving at something, and they are communicating to you that they have full confidence in your ability to figure out whatever it is.

Now, they may never get to that place they’re headed for. But you can tell— you can’t miss it— that they are enthusiastic about how well you are following them. They’re quite pleased about it, and you are reluctant to let them down with the tawdry confession that when they speak, you find yourself at sea.

A colleague and I used to work for one of these philosophy-degree-holders. This fellow—our boss— would often launch into a lengthy explanation of what it was he wanted the two of us to do. And why.

The “why” of it appeared to preoccupy him, and the “why” of it was usually his Waterloo. He rarely got around to addressing the “what” of it, I noticed, because the “why” gave him an opportunity to open the floodgates of drivel. The opening of these floodgates always meant I had to go into extreme listening mode, scrunching up my shoulders and face in the vain hope that the scrunching would serve as an aid to drivel-comprehension.

His instructions would be delivered with an amiable bonhomie which was largely at odds with their cryptic nature; the linguistic flavor he employed reminded me of things that had been clumsily translated from one language to another, and then, for some reason, back again.

I used various strategies to indicate, fraudulently, that I was picking up what my boss was putting down. In fact, whatever he was putting down, I was definitely not picking it up. But I wanted him to think I was.

I tried smiling, I tried nodding, and I even tried slapping my leg in the manner of a white-bearded prospector attempting to animate a recalcitrant mule.

I noticed that my colleague seemed much more relaxed in these situations than I did. When the river of blather began to overflow its banks, my colleague would slip into a trancelike state, as if he were about to levitate. Once when we were alone, he explained to me that when our boss started drifting into the Zone Of Enthusiastic Horseshit, he would just stop listening.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids; one of us listened, and one of us didn’t, and we both got paid the same.

I see a philosopher in much the same way my hostess did that day— it’s a person who thinks a whole bunch about why we’re in this mess. At some point after the party was in the rear view mirror, I requested clarification from my hostess, and she said that she had great respect for my writings on the subject of why we’re in this mess, but she had noticed one small flaw. Assuming the flaw would be easy to fix for a hard-working philosopher like me, I adopted a casual tone, and asked her what it was. She said she’d never seen me offer any solutions to the problems I was discussing. And then she went further. She said that I should offer them.

I didn’t like this one bit.

These hostesses mean well, I suppose, but she didn’t seem to understand what she was asking. Solve these problems? I’m not sure these problems can be solved. Can a bell be unrung? Can a thing that’s been blown to smithereens be de-smithered? Can a vasectomy be unvasected?

Perhaps it can, but you’d want an expert for that last one.

I mean— I can advise a person not to lie down in front of a steamroller; I learned that lesson the hard way, by watching dozens of cartoons. But don’t ask me to step in after a person has been steamrolled, and make him all better. I’d be inclined to just slide him under the door to his house and then go wash my hands.

And yet—

The kind of philosopher I am is the least helpful kind— the kind that has a thorough knowledge of human stupidity, and still wants to talk about how maybe it can be fixed. But this isn’t because I actually believe it can be fixed.

It’s because I need to justify my obsession. I’m something of a connoisseur of stupidity, and while this hobby used to be fun, it’s become much less fun in the modern era.

Why is it less fun now? Allow me to explain with my Dumbass In The Back Seat Theory.

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THE DUMBASS IN THE BACK SEAT THEORY

In the old days, you’d be driving around aimlessly with friends, and a dumbass in the back seat would say something about somebody’s amorphous girlfriend, and somebody in the front seat would say, “she’s not a cloud mass that floats in the air, without substance or shape. You mean polyamorous.”

And that would be the end of it. Your dumbass in the back seat would say something dumb, and the retribution from the front seat would be a terrible swift sword.

A dumbass in the back seat of a car could only do so much damage, and it was mostly local; dumbasses were isolated in those days. There was no network connecting all the back seats of all the cars.

A dumbass didn’t have instant access to millions of other dumbasses, through the miracle of social media. A dumbass wanting to put together a Coalition Of Dumbasses was unlikely to pull this off, in the many long years before smartphones (i.e., phones that encourage you to think you’re smart). Mass organization was typically outside the skill set of the kind of person who found dictionaries threatening.

Today, the dumbass is up in the front seat. He may even be driving. And any time he’s stopped at a traffic light, he has enough time to connect on Facebook with the alarming number of people who believe gravity doesn’t exist, or that Australia isn’t real because it would have to be upside down, or that the earth is hollow and Inner Earth is guarded by a race of giants.

I have seen people on Facebook discussing plans to travel to one of the openings to Inner Earth, subdue the giant guarding it, and descend into the hole to see what’s up. Or what’s down, I suppose.

I know, you think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.

“Who’s with me?”

These words had been typed by one dumbass, and read by the lord only knows how many fellow dumbasses. It was slightly encouraging to see that very few dumbasses were willing to commit to his plan. The plan, it must be said, was light on details.

I’m not the best planner, myself. I often forget to bring crucial items on a trip. Pants, for example.

But it does seem to me that a trip to the center of the earth ought to involve at least some discussion about whether you should bring Gatorade. Or maybe a windbreaker?

So, while the sketchiness of the plan might deter you or me, or the majority of American presidents— I suspect many of the dumbasses would have committed to it, if they could have— only they just felt that they wouldn’t be much use in a fight against a giant.

There’s a peculiar blend of dumb and smart in the notion that you’re wisely avoiding a thing that doesn’t actually exist in the real world.

Let’s look for a moment at another kind of dumbass. One type of dumbass avoids a thing that doesn’t exist; another type fails to avoid a thing that does exist. These are the people who see a big animal with antlers or horns— both of which are very sharp— and they don’t back away. They move closer to the animal.

I’m told by a friend who studies the phenomenon that there are video montages of tourists approaching elk, and even bison, and these videos effectively teach us why we should not approach elk or bison.

As my friend says, you especially shouldn’t approach them if it’s rutting season.

With my luck, the first and only time I was an inch away from a bison, it would naturally be rutting season.

During rutting season, animals with antlers or horns, and surprising speed and agility (given their size and apparent density), will interpret you through a binary lens; they will either gore you, or rut you. (Goring doesn’t require a season.)

Most likely, one of these options is worse than the other, but probably not by much.

Before I leave you, in order to go to my philosopher room and philosophize a bit, I will give you an example of the kind of material for which people count on me.

Philosophers, to break into the big leagues, have to think in terms of hit singles, and not just albums. Rene Descartes was known for “I think, therefore I am,” which was sort of his “Hey Jude,” or “Last Train To Clarksville.”

Here’s my latest philosophy single, which just “dropped” last week.

THE ORANGE-YOU-GLAD-I-DIDN’T-SAY-BANANA PRINCIPLE

Imagine peeling a banana, and inside the convenient no-muss-no-fuss peel, you get an orange! That’s a huge upgrade. I think the orange— packaged in a banana peel— would immediately become THE best fruit. Moreover, I’m pretty sure I’m the first philosopher to plant my flag on this mountaintop.