Larry Summers and The Best and Brightest

The latest episode in my long history of grappling with the problem of cleverness

is my current reading of Herman Melville's “The Confidence Man.” It's a catalogue of clever ways in which people manipulate and use others. The question goes through my mind: “How did Melville know Ohio so well?"
 

Another recent episode was an article by Robert Scheer about Larry Summers' current effort to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
 

The substance of the article struck me as being accurate but I thought a lot about his reference to Summers as “stupid.” I can see why Scheer says it. It's true in a fundamental sense, in that Summers misses obvious, fundamental, realities despite being brilliant. Just consider his proposal to use poor countries as dumps or his remarks on women's minds while president of Harvard or his remarks promoting financial derivatives speculation by touting the maturity, sophistication and sense of Wall Streeters. You wonder how he could be so stupid as to believe such things or where has he been all his life – on what planet - how it is possible. He is astonishingly stupid in that sense, I suppose, but I see it more as a case of being astonishingly clever.

Larry Summers and Bob Rubin

The Viet-Nam War now seems quite “stupid” yet it was given to us by “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam put it. Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Cheney and Powell and many other very bright people gave us what is now called the Iraq "blunder."

I think it has something to do with the fact that very clever people - bright, quick, highly intelligent people - are able to escape having to deal with realities that the rest of us have to face, to know, or we die.