Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This, I anticipate, is something of a foundation piece - a few provocations on what we mean when we talk about foolishness.
There is an old Buddhist story about a monkey trap1. A coconut is hollowed out and attached by a rope to a tree. Inside the coconut, some sweet food is placed. There is a small slot that the monkey can reach through to get the food, but the slot is designed such that while a flat palm can reach in, an enclosed fist cannot come out. The monkey smells the sweet food, reaches in, and grabs it — but finds it cannot withdraw its enclosed fist. When the hunters come, the monkey grows frantic. It struggles against the trap, unable to escape, and yet there is nothing keeping the monkey captive. All the monkey needs to do to become free is to let go of the food.
We might say in such a situation that the monkey is acting foolishly. It is trapped, primarily, by its own desires. Desire is what distinguishes fools from idiots, imbeciles, morons and the merely stupid — each of which are loaded, slanderous terms which historically referred to people with low IQs. A fool, unlike an idiot, can be intelligent. Intelligent beings are just as prone to be tricked by their own desires as are the stupid. It is no accident that the Buddhist parable is about one of our most human-like animal kin.
An alternate version of the parable teases out this idea of being trapped by our own desires. In the alternate version, the trap is replaced with a pool of viscous quicksand. The curious monkey reaches in and finds its hand stuck; struggling, it reaches in with its other hand to pull out the first and finds that hand stuck too. It then tries to pull out its hands with its feet, and, with all four limbs stuck, plunges its own head into the quicksand and suffocates. The monkey’s desire to escape is the cause of its death.
Foolishness, it seems, is something we do to ourselves. This is why we can, and do say that someone is fooling themselves, but we cannot say they are ‘stupiding,’ or ‘idioting,’ themselves. When I fool myself, the ‘I’ who is doing the fooling is the desiring ‘I’ - the I who wants to eat sweet food. The ‘I’ who is fooled is a more numinous ‘I’ whose interests are bigger and less immediate. This ‘I’ wants to carry on living in the forest. Foolishness, for humans, is the late-night TV binge, the “just one more” donut that becomes six more, and the hastily booked Contiki tour on a particularly dreary Thursday afternoon. Wanting, it seems, is a particular kind of stupidity. When wanting eclipses sound judgment, we call this kind of poor judgment foolishness.
Dumb and Dumber, with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, is a film primarily about stupidity rather than foolishness. Harry and Lloyd mistake poison for medicine, a hitman for a hitchhiker, and florescent suits, coattails and top hats for fancy dress. The one exception to Harry and Lloyd’s stupidity, however, is the animating arc for the entire film — Lloyd’s desire for Mary, which even Harry recognises as particularly foolish. Lloyd — who can’t hold a job, drive, or hold his bladder — only really appears foolish to us in a sombre, call to adventure scene in which he confesses his desire for Mary to Harry. The comedy of Dumb and Dumber comes from stupidity, but the drama comes from foolishness.
Garden-variety idiocy or stupidity is about a lack of intelligence, or what psychocrats call general intelligence2. A person who is poor at checkers is also likely to be poor at chess, crossword puzzles, navigating cities, solving murders, selling blenders, and making people laugh. By contrast, foolishness is domain specific — we are stupid in general, but foolish in particular. An intelligent, considered boss may turn into an absolute tyrant when stuck in traffic. Disciplined athletes often choke under the weight of competition, and a star employee may crumble to pieces when asked to present on their work. This is why we often describe people as a fool for something, like a fool for love, or a fool for chocolate-covered pretzels. It’s why we have Fool’s Gold, but not fool’s nickel or fool’s coal. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd was stupid in general but a fool for Mary in particular.
In Buddhist mythology, the monkey trap parable is about attachment and greed. Buddhists recognised that wanting is a kind of foolishness, and they considered the root cause of wanting to be ignorance. This isn’t ignorance in the sense of lacking knowledge, which is what we might call the ignorance of the stupid. The ignorance of the fool is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of wisdom. The monkey, after all, knows its own hand. It knows a flat palm can pass through the slot. It knows no food is worth its own life. It is not stupid. However, this knowledge doesn’t add up as we’d expect — it’s like assembling IKEA furniture and having a result that looks nothing like the picture. In Buddhist thought, ignorance is not ignorance of facts, it is ignorance of our own nature (such as our tendency to skip over IKEA instructions because we think we know better). The monkey knows everything except how it behaves when it really wants something. It is ignorant of itself. It knows the facts, but not how to make use of them.
If we think of general intelligence as relatively fixed, inherited and immutable, we can think of wisdom as the judicious application of intelligence. In order to apply our own intelligence, we must know ourselves and our desires at all sizes, in all kinds of dress — our wants, needs, fears, aversions, inklings, tendencies, habits, proclivities, mild aversions, habituated sensitivities and all manner of various, low-grade addictions. We need to know what we are fools for and when. Knowing the ways in which we are foolish is like having access to our own operating manual. Intelligence is fixed, but wisdom can be nurtured. What you have is less relevant than what you do with it.
The Experience of Insight (Goldstein, J., 1976, p. 94)
There are theories of multiple intelligences, but research shows that even these correlate highly with general intelligence. See Neuromythologies in Education (Geake, J., 2007)