Functional stupidity and the modern knowledge condition: Martin Davies on cognitive psychopathology

Martin Davies’s work offers a valuable dissident account of history and the humanities, critiquing orthodox and critical movements of recent decades. Movements such as postmodernism and multiculturalism, according to Davies, too often merely expand academic specialization whilst failing to tackle modernity’s central problematics.

This article focuses on the psychological aspects of Davies’s work, exploring his argument that academic knowledge intensifies modernity’s innumerable interlocking crises by perpetuating the collective psychopathology which underpins them.

For example, historical knowledge, in Davies’s view, provides an-aesthetic discourse, which numbs people’s capacities to feel moral horror when confronted by modernity’s most appalling failures and excesses. One way history does this is by passing off modernity’s failures as simply “inevitable”. At the same time, modernity’s technocratic knowledge regime ruthlessly prioritizes commodifiable knowledge over personal judgment, which further serves to undermine people’s innate capacities for ethical discernment.

Higher education places ever increasing value on technical skills over ethical and aesthetic discernment. But when a civilization becomes as imperiled as ours – ecologically, and otherwise – then ethics and aesthetics, conscience and imagination, may need to be re-prioritized more urgently than ever. Davies’s work provides important clues to how we might begin such a cognitive reversal and academic re-prioritization.