I’ve noticed that I’ve been kind of a Dee I See Kay lately, at least on my blog. I’ve been reacting strongly to strong stimuli, but I’ll not cop to over-reacting. I have grown exceedingly impatient with people’s dismissals of things they don’t agree with. Isn’t that what I do?

No, it is not. Thought-through reactions and gut reactions are not the same thing. While one may certainly disagree with someone and do it strongly, I don’t think one could claim that anyone can type fast enough for long blog posts that get thought about before being typed up, revised before and after being published and sometimes sit in the que while I make sure I still want to publish them count as gut reactions. The whole point of a gut reaction is that it comes from somewhere else than our rational brains.

Having a gut reaction like, “You’re wrong,” or, “I disagree with that,” or, “No!” to something that is actually thought-through is irrational and foolish.

And it’s insulting. Say that Julie tells Billy that she’s upset with the way that he, I don’t know, gives in to his controlling best friend too much. Julie thinks it through, formulates it and expresses it as clearly as she can. Billy gets mad at being told he’s wrong, and he reacts with a, “Fuck you! You’re a bitch!” Gut reactions to reason are something animals can do, you know.

Someone I know and see every single day (!) likes to tell me that “it’s hard to disagree with [me]“. I try to shut up if I haven’t thought yet. I try. I often fail. Reactions that pass from the outside world right back out without running through the filter of our rational faculties are unintelligent. Am I claiming to be smarter than my just-as-educated interlocutor? Certainly not. Am I claiming to put more….consideration into my “position” than gut reactions to the contrary? Yes.  They could, too, but they don’t.

And that’s what’s so fucking frustrating about semi-universal gut reactions. While I know some backward people (SHIT!), for the most part, the people that surround me personally are intelligent. So when we react stupidly, it’s frustrating precisely because we’re not stupid — we could and should do better! And I’m sure I do it, too, because I am a stupid ass and can fall into the same stupid patterns of behavior as everyone else, likely more so if you really wanna know. I’m not claiming to be perfect. Ask my wife; I can be a huge asshole and often. Seriously. As if you haven’t picked up on that already.

Thinking about one’s response/reaction, well, that’s not a gut reaction. When people disagree with us intelligently, we might see that we’re wrong and grow. Or, they might. Gut reactions don’t help anyone, not even the reactor. We just spread stupidity.

Smart people believe what is true.  I mean that in a Jamesian sense, as in, what works — what is true because it works and what works because it is true.

Most people believe what they want to believe — because living in the world is difficult and so we all need little lies to keep us sane.

Very stupid people believe the last thing they heard — because they don’t even think; they don’t even mimic other people’s thoughts; they just ape people’s words.  And I caught myself doing this once tonight, waiting for the bus after I was at work for over nine hours.  I forget what it was about.  Still.  Scary.

I don’t want to be on par with the ignorant, racist, rat bastards I sometimes come into contact with.  No thank you.

I want to smack everyone who throws around the term “Book Smart.”

Usually such folks are either not “book smart” and feel the need to justify their inability to understand books, or they are only “book smart” and feel the need to justify not being good at other things.

Guess what?  If you can ONLY do one thing, you’re not SMART at all!  Animals and machines can be good at one thing.

That said, I don’t actually know more than a handful of people who are only good at one thing.  Folks just pigeon-hole themselves into not exploring other things they might be good at.  A lot of the “book smart” people I know could probably master outdoor skills if they went camping and, well, had to.  And a lot of the people I know who do not consider themselves “book smart” but can rebuild things and who understand how things work would probably understand Aristotle better than some of my less giften classmates over the years, if they tried to read it.

Maybe we need to redefine what we mean by SMART as a culture?

In Walden, Thoreau says that a philosopher should be able to clothe and feed his-or herself better than ordinary people.  And we know how big he was on leisure time for walking and writing, though perhaps he might not call it “leisure” like those “really” industious folks among us might.  (What?)

I would contend that, if you are mentally…robust (and bored) enough for philosophizing, you are smart enough to do the things you have to do (like poop, eat, cook, travel, etc.) better than other people.  Whether you do is another matter, and I never knew a whole lot of philosophers who were also very competent people. I pride myself on my own expediency in personal matters and efficiency in practical ones.  This is, of course, because I am very lazy and value my leisure, no?

If you get good grades but can’t do anything practical better than anybody else, you might just be mis-using your own intelligence.  Pretend that the laundry or cooking breakfast is school.  You’ll learn to apply your brain to things that don’t get you grades but that get you something better, like a tasty egg sandwich and enough time to read spy novels to boot.

Or, you might just not be very smart at all.  I resent people who claim, “I am booksmart,” when it turns out that they are fucking idiots and/or morons and/or dumbasses.  If all you can do is school, despite really and actually and honestly trying to do other things well and intelligently, you are probably not as smart as you think you are.  I have known a good number of scholarly folks of this kind who turned out not to be any kind of smart.  They excelled academically only through excessive studying and concerted effort.

Not that I am down on academic excellence in itself and certainly not down on effort.  Anyone who knows me knows how weak-willed I can be when it comes to work I don’t see a point in doing.  But I want to start throwing bitches off of buildings when such over-glorified memorization and regurgitation masquerades itself as actual intelligence.  I had a metaphysics professor at BC who I admired very much.  And he contended in his book that intelligence begins with reflection.  I joked with him that, under his definition, the whole fucking world is stupid.

He just laughed.