Wise or Wise A**: Which Comes First?

by IlanaSimons 10:42 PM

Categories: literature & life

A line in The New Yorker recently hit me as true. "Smart-alecks make bad pupils but excellent students of human nature," it said.

That's right, I think. I'm a college teacher--and I often think that the students who sit in the back of the class, rolling their eyes or falling asleep, are simply "onto me."

They know I'm working too hard to please people in the class. Or they sense I don't know as much as I pretend to know. The wise asses are wise about human nature, so roll their eyes at human nature.

Go further: There have been great examples of rebel-but-wise psychologists in literature. There was Holden Caulfield, for one, who considered everyone a "phony" and--for his adolescent pose--really did penetrate our exteriors. There was also Tom Sawyer, who didn't want to do any work--so (like a behaviorist who'd done his research) could manipulate his friends into whitewashing a fence for him. There is T.V.'s Bart Simpson, who breaks the rules and is the most popular kid in school (which reveals at least some innate sense of psychology).

So today I'm wondering which comes first: the smart-aleck'ing or the psychological wisdom.

Maybe the smart-alecking comes first. That is: Maybe some people are born with a desire to break the rules, and so, as life goes on, they learn the fine skills of manipulation. After all, if you're the guy who really doesn't want to do his homework, you get good at inventing excuses that work. You learn what others think, and how to change their minds, and how to get them to do or say what you want. That's called being "an excellent student of human nature."

Or, maybe the process goes the other way around. Maybe some people are born with fine insight into the human interior. And that insight weighs on them like depression--like a magnified image of our nuances and flaws. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, these people simply see, from the get-go, that human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This bristling wisdom about human existence leads to a cynical or "smart-aleck" take on things. These people know we're all fakes and fools anyway. So, why try? They sit at the back of the classroom, rolling their eyes.

I wonder what you think. Is it true, as I read, that "smart-alecks make bad pupils but excellent students of human nature"? If so, why?

Message Edited by IlanaSimons on 06-18-2009 08:33 AM

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by on - last edited on by

I wrote a response discussing the correlation (or lack of a correlation) among "book smarts," "common sense" and being a wise a**, but I couldn't figure out where I wanted to go with it. It's commonly accepted, isn't it, that there's no correlation between "book smarts" and what we call common sense (and at times it seems there's an inverse correlation, although that's certainly an exaggeration). And although it's difficult to define exactly what comprises "common sense" (although, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart trying to identify what distinguishes illegal pornography from acceptable works of art, we like to think we "know it when [we] see it" ), isn't it the case that a wise a** typically has a particularly keen common sense? That got me to thinking whether being an "excellent student of human nature" really defines what it means to have common sense, and that perhaps it's not that smart alecks make excellent students of human nature, but that excellent students of human nature make good smart alecks. Does that make any sense (common or otherwise)?

Message Edited by IlanaSimons on 06-18-2009 08:26 AM

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Thanks for the post Lurker. I took out your emoticon, because I know you and I both hate emoticons. That's because we have common sense.

One thing I hear you saying is that a smart aleck has street smarts. Or maybe "street smarts" is another word for common sense. So: excellent students of human nature know how to maneuver in the world. They trust their "guts," or have a seemingly innate strategy for dealing with others, a less than fully conscious sense of how to talk well with people.

now I think we've officially talked our way into a knot.

Back to small talk: It's a nasty day in NYC. It's pouring.

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Thanks for your response, Ilana, which reminds me of Frank Michelman, a professor I had at Harvard Law School. No matter how stupid of a comment I made in class, Professor Michelman would always be so kind to rephrase it to make it sound, if not brilliant, at least intelligent: "What I hear Mr. [Lurker] saying is ...."

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Confucius Jr. say~

She who thinks as Wise A**, thinks wiser than "Smart A**

Edited: Either way, makes no sense.

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BTW: Two Laurels for effort! I'm not sure if that's an A- or a B+

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Wise or Wise A**: Which Comes First?