How to Deal With Idiots (and
Stop Being One Yourself)
by Maxime Rovère
trans. David Bellos
All writers struggle with the limitations of language. Philosophers have it particularly hard; the ideas they work with are complex and often counterintuitive, easily misinterpreted or misunderstood, and the effort to be as precise as possible often ends up making things worse. Many great philosophical tomes are – let’s face it – damn near impenetrable in places. Usually the most important places.
Aware of this, philosophes down the ages have addressed the problem in various ways. Some try to divide their thoughts up into bite-sized chunks: Aristotle was perhaps the first of many to publish his lecture notes. Others have sought to distil their work into a set of handy aphorisms, while the more literarily inclined devise allegories or works of alleged fiction as vehicles for their ideas. Nietzsche famously succeeded with both these methods: see, respectively, The Anti-Christ and Thus Spake Zarathustra. More recently, Jostein Gaarder got excellent results with his philosophical novel Sophie’s World.
Sometimes philosophers attempt to leaven the heavy dough of their cogitation by expressing themselves informally, adopting the terms of common parlance or whatever they imagine common parlance to be. Maxime Rovère does this in How to Deal With Idiots, which is presented and packaged as a popular self-help book, or rather a parody of one. Though he gamely maintains the conceit all the way to the end, his material inevitably overflows the mould he has created for it as philosophical disquisitions tend to do. By Chapter Four or so the game is well up (the chapters are very short, by the way, as is the book as a whole), and we’re starting to grapple with the gnarly ethics of personal interaction, which is what the book is really about. Rovère’s speciality (one of several, it seems; he’s also an expert on Spinoza and an accomplished translator) is something called ‘interactional philosophy’. In this book, at least, a better name for it might be ‘transactional ethics’. Most of us will recognize it as a type of moral philosophy.
It is not a spoiler to reveal that the book never really teaches the reader how to deal with idiots; rather, Rovère hopes to teach us how to avoid ‘creating’ idiots, which he defines as events rather than persons, and how to minimize the unpleasant consequences when we fail, as we are bound to do more often than not. Some of the methods he suggests will be familiar to practitioners of Buddhism – not of Buddhist meditation, but of the attitudes and mental hygienics of Buddhism. The roots of his thought are not Buddhist, though; they are planted firmly in the history of Western philosophy and moral criticism, and a short bibliography appended to the book cites Kant, La Boetie and Nietzsche along with Sacher-Masoch and de Sade, as well as a number of modern philosophers whose names I don’t recognize and forebear to mention on that account.
I found the book enjoyable and much easier to read than the general run of philosophical works, though that’s not saying much. I did not think it wholly persuasive. At times I found that I could reinterpret the author’s explanations or refute them entirely just by changing the context of his words from the one he obviously had in mind into another that would fit them equally well, but convey the opposite conclusion. I think this is one of the risks you run when you try to put complex thoughts into simple language.
There was little in the book that I found entirely new, though it did make me reflect on my own attitudes and behaviour, which was clearly the author’s intention. Rovère’s advice would certainly make us all kinder, more understanding and accommodating people if we followed it, but the difficulty, as always, lies in practising what one has embraced as precept while coping with the stresses and strains of everyday life, and with the implicit understanding that the world itself can never really be made better. Idiots (as the penultimate chapter admits) always win in the end.
An intellectually and sympathetically engaging read, then, though I do wonder whether the format the author has chosen puts his case as convincingly as it could be put. It’s a strange book this, neither flesh nor fowl, and although there’s nothing wrong with the taste I am doubtful of the nutritional value.
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