From: "Bruce Biermann" 

I'm an Idiot, You Moron
The Greeks, at least, knew the value of an entertaining opinion

By Stephen Bayley (L.A. Times 12/21/03)

Dude, who stole my brain? It's a question that needs answering.

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a deadening conformity in matters
of opinion. In politics, the ritual responses of right and left are wearily
predictable. Academic discourse is numbed by dual constraints of peer-group
review in truck with the stifling nostrums of correctitude.

In business, governance principles of excruciating probity along with
diligence requirements of baffling exactitude gag corporate chieftains,
reducing our 21st century hunter-gatherers to bland ciphers treading water
in very deep pools of mediocrity. At home with friends, we mumble lazy
platitudes.

Research at the University of Chicago has shown that extroverted lab rats
live longer than politically correct ones. Yet we are under daunting
pressure to conform, not to be too exciting.

But intellectual life should be a battlefield: a combat zone where
hostilities are legitimized and turned into conversation. Take the dinner
party. Too often it is a costive, strangulated, squirm-making
conversational graveyard, a danse macabre where personalities die on the
job and wit withers before it takes root.

People should be discussing the relationship of sodomy to earthquakes, or
the belief that evolution occurred because God was disappointed with
monkeys.

More than a century ago, the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert was so
incensed by the dreary platitudes of his dinner companions that he
satirized them in his "Dictionnaire des Idees Recues," an ironic
guide to the lazy conversational tropes of his day. If Flaubert were alive
today, he would have written a thicker volume.

Then as now, rare is the occasion when wit flourishes or booming ideas
resonate around the table. Locked in a delicate and passionless quadrille
of misguided politesse, guests trace a blameless path of non-confrontation
while the angel of silence hovers above, leaving the dining room mute as
the quenelle travels from plate to mouth.

Why is this?

It is simply because people do not have enough interesting opinions. We
have a bias against them. The dictionary defines an opinion as a
"judgment resting on grounds insufficient for complete
demonstration." If we are honest, that means an exciting and
interesting idea, because there can be few things more stultifying than
"complete demonstration." As the French know, "le secret
d'ennuyer est de dire tout" ("the knack of being boring is to say
everything").

Much better to take a conceptual risk and struggle to give birth to an
idea. What we need are more daring demonstrations; ideas need to be
launched long before their design has been finalized or their journey fully
mapped. But the suggestion is always that to be "opinionated" is
an unattractive quality. What a condemnation of our slack ways! Surely, to
be opinionated is to be in possession of the juice that lubricates the
moves of civilization.

Not everyone agrees. Discussing the value of opinion with a desiccated
philosopher on the BBC, I discovered the density of the opposition. The
philosopher believed that sensory data alone were adequate for the
formation of ideas. I argued that something else was required to make the
world interesting and gave the following example: My sensory data tell me,
I said, on air, that you are sitting there in a beige sweater. My opinion,
however,is that I wish you were not. And that you have terrible taste.

And I think I won the argument.

It is exactly the same distinction that binary pioneer Claude Shannon made
between data and information. Data is measurement, or what Donald Rumsfeld
would call "known knowns." But information is altogether superior
because it is data with the added value of meaning and direction. Data
records facts, information changes ideas.

The Greeks, of course, had a word for it. That word was idiot." Only
lately has it come to suggest intellectual impairment; originally an idiot
was a person of strong and independent views who was unafraid to air them.

In this sense, idiocy is immensely important. "Let's invite a lot of
idiots to dinner," far from being a recipe for disaster, is the
specification of an entertaining evening.

The risk is surely worthwhile. Risk and error are handmaidens of authentic
idiocy. As Henry Ford knew, making a mistake is just an opportunity to
start again more intelligently.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said if people never did silly things, nothing
worthwhile would ever happen.

The consequence of discouraging well-meaning idiocy was perfectly
understood by humorist O. Henry, who once said, thinking of the dinner from
hell, "I drink to make other people amusing."

As, in desperate search of entertainment, you raise yet another glass, just
meditate whether you might not be (even) better off with some chewy
opinions than another large glass of spicy Napa Pinot Noir.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5