Stupidity and Ignorance, continued
I was writing the other day about the distinction between
these two, and saying that people who make a business of presenting things to
the public — radio and television presenters especially — should never be, or pretend
to be, either, but all too often are. (Or do; I fear the grammar is going a
touch awry here; I’ve been ill.)
It happens of course in print too; more and more since the
great dumbing-down started about thirty years ago. One doesn’t even need to
look for it; it jumps out at you.
A month or so ago I was looking through the big quarter- and
half-page advertisements in the back of the London Review of Books. It has
become the favoured publicity place of organizations connected with
psychoanalysis, of which there is a bewildering variety, all of them with
confusingly similar names, and all of them at each other’s throats instead of
the throats of their common enemies. Just like socialist parties. An
advertisement for seminars on Psychoanalysis and Politics said ‘It would be
hard to underestimate the importance of Freud’s contribution to political
thought’, so I sent an e-mail to Marjory Goodall, the lady who is arranging
bookings, to suggest this might be a Freudian slip. She didn’t reply, or even
acknowledge receipt of my message, and put the identical advertisement, with no
correction, in the next issue of the LRB. So in her case we must add
discourtesy to ignorance and/or stupidity. And I happen to know she is the
secretary of the organization that, above all others in the world, is most
responsible for the guardianship of Freud’s intellectual legacy. Oh dear.
In the same two issues of the LRB The Society of Analytical
Psychology (allies? related in some way? Oh dear me no!) advertises some
courses and talks, including one on ‘T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland’. Eliot’s poem
is of course called ‘The Waste Land’, and one needs only a very little
sensitivity to language, of which poetry is the quintessence, to see the
crassness of this mistake. But I didn’t even bother to write to them: The
Society of Analytical Psychology people are Jungians, so half the time they are
off in La-La Land and cannot be judged by normal intellectual standards.
I think I should add that I have great respect for the works
of Jung himself. Anyway, here is yet another picture of Sigmund, this time with
his one-time close friend Carl Gustav:
Oh, dear: absurdly but no doubt significantly, I can’t find
a photograph of just the pair together; this will have to do:
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