Would You Rather be a Fool or a Tool?

by Dr. James Alexander

Another way of making sense of everything that has gone on explicitly in the last three years and implicitly, perhaps, in the last 50 years, is to say that we have seen the rise of a world-historical clash between the FOOLS and the TOOLS.

I shall come back to this. My original idea was to write something in praise of Giorgio Agamben: the first philosopher to come out against the protocols of the elders of COVID-19 in early 2020. […]

Agamben is one of those odd figures who used to look like part of the boring and obscure 1968 brigade of post-Marxist leftists: the sort whose books are endlessly published in small and handsome editions by Verso, Stanford University Press or even more prestigious presses. Here we are talking about Foucault, Derrida and all the successors: Zizek, Butler, Badiou, Bourdieu, Nancy, Ranciere, Laclau, etc. These are the figures whom Roger Scruton taught us to dislike, first in his Thinkers of the New Left published in the 1980s, and later in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, his updated version of the same book, published in 2015. Well, Scruton was right about much: but he was wrong about Foucault; and he was also wrong, alas, to use the word ‘fools’ in his title. Because, as I shall show, to be a fool is a good thing, and Agamben, like Foucault (who spent his dying year lecturing on freedom of speech), is one of the FOOLS – not one of the TOOLS.

FOOL is an ambiguous word. It can mean someone who is fooled. But it also means someone who deliberately engages in folly, someone who is a fool either deliberately or conscientiously.

Obviously, it is not good to be fooled. But it is good to engage in deliberate or conscientious folly. This is made clear in an old book, which was published by Faber and Faber in 1935, The Fool: His Social and Literary History by Enid Welsford. In this book, Welsford compiled a history of buffoons, clairvoyants, mascots, scapegoats, court fools, lords of misrule. If she had written the book in our time, she would have added stand-up comedians. At the end of the book she tried to theorise the significance of the fool. Her verdict was that the fool was a believer in spiritual freedom, someone who saw that living in Leviathan was necessary but that such a life – though safe – was costly to human spirit: so the fool engaged in deliberate folly in order to show that the world was worthy of mock, and that escape was possible.

Two things Welsford said stand out, even in this analysis. The first is that “the fool is wiser than the humanist”: the “fool in jest” is wiser than the “revolutionary in earnest”. This may remind us of St Paul who in the first letter to the Corinthians said that Christ crucified was to the Jews a “scandal” and to the Greeks “foolishness”. In part, what St Paul was doing was pushing back hard against centuries of Greek philosophers who had praised wisdom. “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” (1 Cor. 1.27.) The logic here is: “If wisdom = Ferguson, Lineker, Hancock, etc., then I choose folly.” Credo quia absurdum, as Tertullian used to say. Translation: “I believe it because it not based on a computer model.”

The second thing she said was that “the fool makes the sage look silly”. If we, again, adapt this to our own times, and modernise the word ‘sage’ by capitalising it, we have the wonderful formula that it is the fool who makes SAGE look silly. Consider how criticism of government in our time has depended on comedians. The philosophers, scientists and other professors have all kept well away from folly. Except for Agamben, they have refused to be fools. Therefore, they have been fooled. In addition, they have been what we could call TOOLS.

I’m not “complaining” about anything/anyone.

I just don’t do bullshit. From anyone.

Why? Because I don’t give anyone shit.

My writing is my own commentary on the state of things, nobody has to read it, I’m not in anyone’s face.

And the jabs I do post here and there?

Those are hit & runs for public consumption in order to draw readers to my online writing.

I’m not doing this for fun or sport. It’s part of the way I make a living.

As we know, COVID-19 ushered in a very stark situation in which the TOOLS attempted to set fire to the FOOLS, destroy them, cancel them, send them into exile. It should come as no surprise that a philosopher like Giorgio Agamben, whose entire life’s work is about how the state is nothing more than a state of emergency (sometimes suspended to give us a short-lived sense of normality), would take the opportunity afforded by COVID-19 to say, “I told you so.” His obscure, elaborate and recondite theorising is found in many books, and would lead most readers of the Daily Sceptic to reach for – their Bibles again. (This time, Ecclesiastes 12.12: “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh” – which, incidentally, was my father’s favourite line from the Bible, and was often quoted at me when I was at my books.) But if one ignores all the philology and pedagogy the idea is basically that government has always been a conspiracy against us.

It is a foolish argument.

It is the equal and opposite of the toolish argument, made my almost everyone in the last three to 50 years: which is that government can deliver diversity, inclusion, equality, if not also equity, plus carbon zero, high speed rail travel, comprehensive education, good internet, all 17 sustainable development goals, identity cards, lockdowns and just wars.

Some time ago Sinead Murphy in the Sceptic asked why academics failed us so badly during the pandemic. Her answer was polite. The less polite answer is that academics are, by and large, tools. For many years, Eric Weinstein, who is one of the great figures of our time and who is a typical fool in that he speaks better than he writes (which, in his case is a bit of a shame, as one would like to see his positions clearly written out), has been saying that the universities should endow difficult and brilliant scientists and leave them alone. He makes the absolutely correct point that many great men, and indeed women, in the past were objectionable. Take Gödel, say. Or Feynman. Or James Watson. Take almost any famous professor from between 1870 and 1970. But they did their work. Now such figures are unlikely to get past Human Resources. Their instinctive foolish inclination not to buckle before inclusivity or sustainability precepts would doom them to deletion.