Larry Summers, and the Stupid Person's Smart Person

I have had occasion here in the past to write of the "stupid person's smart person"--someone who will seem intellectually impressive to a stupid person, but not to the more intelligent, who can see right through the impressive c.v. and the showing off and is unlikely to be impressed by what is behind them. There are different dimensions to this, but underlying them is the claims conformists make for differences in intellect being the grounds for society's extreme socioeconomic inequality, and the deference of the public to figures of the Establishment, such that the perks of position and the arrogance that goes with them are in their small and feeble minds proof positive of superior intelligence. Larry Summers is an excellent example of the latter, given his lifelong association with elite institutions, and attainment of very prestigious positions in academia and policymaking at a relatively young age--and of course, his notorious personal arrogance and contempt for other people.

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's crappy Facebook movie seems to me worth reexamining from that standpoint, because of how it presented Summers as insensitive and impatient and graceless with the students coming to him with their problems when he was President of Harvard, certainly to go by the experience of the Winklevoss brothers. Watching the scene where they turn to him for help, I think, the intelligent viewer will note Summers' lack of regard for his responsibilities as administrator of an educational institution and its students. But the stupid person will instead be impressed by Summers' being a large man behind a large desk in a large office, the more in as he is identified to them as President of the supreme object of the Cult of the Good School that is Harvard University (a cult that the deeply elitist makers of the film champion rather than challenge). Moreover, being impressed by all that they will take his impatience and gracelessness and disrespect as indicative of a man too much concerned with higher things to attend to such "trifles," not least because they have no idea what else Mr. Summers was up to during his time at this post. (Ask them who Andrei Shleifer is. They won't have a clue. Ask them about the investment of Harvard's endowment, and you will have to explain what all that means in very small words.) However, this will also be because the stupid, in spite of likely being a Facebook addict, will not make much of Summers' obliviousness to the potentials of the technology and the stakes of the conflict over what has become a trillion-dollar company. They give him a pass for an error of judgment as they would not others, and go on insisting "But He's So Smart!" to anyone who would doubt the Not So Great Man's pronouncements.