“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays.... The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”
Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?
Let me start by trying to define cleverness a little more narrowly. We tend to use it in two related ways. The first is to mean brilliant, sharp, and insightful in a way that others might miss. A “clever” solution is not just effective but demonstrates imagination and a kind of a command of the situation. It arises out of and reveals a different, more imaginative way of understanding a problem. When Albert Einstein resolved fundamental problems in physics, his solution was clever insofar as it upended assumptions about space and time that people didn’t even realize they were making. We also use
clever to mean something like
witty. Like a clever solution, a clever remark reveals command and control. There is a detached, isolated composure with which the clever individual can survey the whole scene and make connections others can’t. In both instances, cleverness implies dexterity—an ability to get a grip on the world from the outside. Indeed, the word derives from an East Anglian word,
cliver, meaning “expert at seizing.”
There is, then, an affinity between cleverness and the outsider. The clever individual is often aloof, whether by choice or by circumstance, and uses this alienation to advantage. The diffusion of cleverness in modernity is, therefore, closely connected to the diffusion of alienation, as well as to the emergence of a number of alienated character types found in both fiction and reality: the private detective, the comedian, the flâneur, and, most recently, the social media poster.
The detective is clever in full, solving mysteries in ingenious fashion and tossing off witticisms while he’s at it. As many critics have noted, the detective is a modern archetype. He is an isolated mercenary, holding himself above conventional attachments. He is thrown back on himself and doomed to create his own morality or code, and he regards official institutions, especially the police, with the utmost skepticism.
More than the stereotypical scientist or scholar—whose intellectual passion and naivete make him, for all his putative rationality, quite unlike reason itself—the detective personifies the cool, analytical dispassion of rationality in the human world: He is cold and calculating. He takes measures to keep himself outside the world while analyzing it. He is never caught off guard, and he’s never wrong.
Very often, this kind of cleverness comes in the form of seeing through illusions. Take this remark from detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” It is this jaded, but realistic, irony—often in the face of visions of consumer luxury or romance—that gives rise to both the detective’s analytical ability and his clever brand of humor. (...)
Internet detectives are forever alert to scams and conspiracies. Launching deeply researched accusations against hucksters, hacks, grifters, trolls, bots, propagandists, and purveyors of misinformation becomes a tactic for legitimating one’s own idleness. These detectives turn the largely meaningless detritus of information overproduction into genuine evidence. They give rational meaning to the Internet—whose absurdity and meaninglessness might otherwise be intolerable to the people wasting away there.
Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.
by Alexander Stern, The Hedgehog Review |
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