A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  We also have a gender-based hierarchy of paternalism: men are subjected to less intervention than women, who are forced to endure both hard and soft forms of paternalism in relation to their bodies. In particular, women are constantly pressured to moderate their behaviour and consumption of drugs because they have uteruses. Such paternalism infantilises women: in 2013, an Australian public health body ran a campaign to encourage men not to drink while their partners are pregnant, as if women are easily influenced into unhealthy behaviours by partners. And this gender-based paternalism hierarchy is at odds with the high correlation between having a penis and poor health outcomes, like dying younger and the likelihood of becoming a victim or perpetrator of violence or inflicting costs on society via the criminal justice system.

  Paternalism is also, as the word suggests, particularly directed at young people. Despite falling levels of alcohol consumption, less violent crime and less binge drinking, the young men of Australia are the object of perennial lamentation about their out-of-control alcohol consumption (and consumption of *insert current object of media drug panic here*) fuelling an epidemic of violence, while young women are portrayed as binge drinkers constantly placing themselves at risk of sexual exploitation, or worse. This, of course, is an eternal cycle that each generation is doomed to repeat as the reckless, drug-abusing youth of today become the concerned parents of tomorrow, poised to criticise their offspring for the sins they committed to worse degree.

  Discussions of paternalism are most commonly complicated by the fact that many ostensibly paternalistic actions by the state prevent an individual not merely from damaging themselves, but also from inflicting economic or social costs on others or the rest of the community, something which a state is entirely justified in preventing. Laws against drunk-driving, and police enforcement of them (for example, via random breath-testing) are now widely accepted, not merely because they reduce the numbers of drink-drivers who kill and injure themselves, but because they reduce the number of other motorists and pedestrians killed by drunks.

  We also have laws requiring the wearing of seatbelts by vehicle occupants and helmets by bicycle riders. These are ostensibly aimed only at individuals, but in fact they reduce the broader costs of individuals’ poor decision-making: if a driver decides to not wear a seatbelt or a cyclist prefers not to wear a helmet, the costs of a subsequent accident in terms of healthcare costs will be greater than if they had been better protected. Outside of a strict user-pays healthcare system, this means those additional costs will be borne by the rest of the community—so seatbelt and helmet laws are justified purely from an economic standpoint and on the basis that individuals don’t have a right to inflict costs on the rest of their communities.

  In a RonPaulistan libertarian utopia, the sort of place where men are men and bureaucrats are nervous, there could conceivably be a system in which you may elect not to wear a seatbelt, but in doing so agree to pay all healthcare costs beyond that which would have accrued if you had been wearing one. But such a system would be an administrative nightmare, and in any event what civilised society (well, outside the United States) would leave, say, a brain-injured non-seatbelt wearer who could not afford rehabilitation to rot? It’s also hard to see how to apply such an arrangement when individual decisions contribute to a systemic cost, like higher crime and suicide levels across a whole society because of widespread gun ownership. Firearms have a form of network effect in which, no matter how safely and responsibly an individual weapon is used and stored, the greater the number of firearms in a community, the greater the number of firearm crimes and deaths.

  Australia also has a compulsory superannuation system that forces all workers to save for their retirement. Unlike other forms of paternalism, there are significant medium- and long-term economic benefits from the large national savings pool generated by compulsory superannuation: Australia’s one and a half trillion dollar-plus superannuation pool, for example, was an important factor in mitigating the effects of the global financial crisis on Australian financial institutions. Most particularly, compulsion (as opposed to the generous tax incentives that are also intended to encourage retirement saving) will provide a significant saving for future budgets as the population ages and there is less reliance on aged pensions than would otherwise be the case.

  Another example is tobacco excise. The mere use of tobacco causes health problems, and unlike alcohol, which can be consumed in safe and indeed healthful doses, it has no offsetting health benefits for the range of illnesses it inflicts. Tobacco users therefore inflict greater costs on the healthcare system than they otherwise would. It is thus not paternalism to charge smokers a tax on tobacco sufficient to cover the significant extra costs they impose on the health system (as happens in Australia); nor is it paternalism to make smokers puff away from anyone who may breathe in second-hand smoke, especially children. But any additional tax beyond that level, or restrictions such as curbing advertising, retailing and packaging, are mere revenue-raising and a form of paternalism, imposed purely because society believes it can make a better decision about tobacco consumption than individuals.

  The extent to which you can apply this argument, however, can be difficult, because calculating net social impacts of behaviour is complex. Opponents of compulsory bicycle helmets, for example, argue that requiring helmets reduces the incidence of cycling, and thereby reduces the overall health of the population, a cost that may be sufficient to offset the benefits of reduced head trauma. Such calculations of the social costs of an activity targeted by paternalists forms an increasing part of campaigns to regulate certain behaviours, because policymakers are more likely to accept the need to override individual decisions on the basis that economic welfare will thereby be improved than if paternalists simply argue that they don’t like particular activities.

  What never features in estimates of costs is the harm from interfering in people’s rights—that is, the social costs of Stupid. Merely because the infringement of individual rights is a nebulous kind of wrong, one hard to pin down or adequately cost, doesn’t mean there aren’t real-world consequences. Soft paternalism in time can lead to hard paternalism, as has happened with tobacco, which is now heavily restricted and which could plausibly be banned once consumption rates drop into single digits; the demonisation of alcohol and junk food by public health lobbyists has the same goal of creating a climate for ever greater restrictions. And as the array of proposals put forward by public health lobbyists suggests, they view surveillance and infringement of privacy as a small price to pay for the perceived benefits of imposing their own priorities on people.

  History’s perennial paternalists

  This connection between the tools of governmental control—surveillance and curbing of basic rights like privacy—and paternalism is no accident. The longer history of paternalism shows how fundamentally it is a tool of social and political control as much as an expression of communal interest in the individual targeted.

  For example, religious persecution is mostly a form of paternalism. That’s not to dismiss the role that other motivations, such as old-fashioned bigotry, play. But religious persecution in Western cultures has been persistently justified by the conviction that a heretic or non-believer was in danger not of poor health outcomes but of disastrous spiritual outcomes, as they faced eternal damnation because of their views. If you actually believe those sorts of superstitions, religious persecution is entirely logical. Forget John Stuart Mill’s example in which a damaged bridge risks a pedestrian’s life—one’s physical existence is nothing compared to an eternity of hellfire, and anything in this world is justified in saving your soul in the next.

  As with smoking or gambling or other modern sins, the role of external agencies is also important in religious paternalism—Satan, like tobacco companies or advertising agencies, was said to possess remarkable powers of manipulation and persuasion that further justified taking action to prevent his misleading weak human minds (noting that paternalists
naturally possess superhuman powers of resistance to the wiles of Satan and marketing companies).*

  Moreover, such people risk leading others to damnation as well as themselves; that is, there was believed to be a spiritual form of social cost in allowing heretics to communicate with others. It’s hard to say what those social costs of heresy would be without the appropriate economic modelling, but they are probably $∞, given Hell is forever, which, even using Net Present Value, is an awfully long time.

  By such logic, torturing heretics is a mere nudge in the right direction; outright killing, a kind of spiritual public health measure, a religious quarantine. Killing an unrepentant heretic was unfortunate, as it would dispatch them to Hell, but better that than their taking others to Hell with them. See the logic?

  Now, it’s incorrect to suggest the Christians invented the killing-heretics-as-spiritual-sanitation form of Stupid; recorded history gives that honour to the Greeks, although one imagines the invention of religious persecution was contemporaneous with the invention of religion. But it was the Greeks from whose philosophical traditions the Christians took so much. Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenians for both impiety and ‘corrupting the minds of Athenian youth’—the first recorded use of what would become a favoured paternalist justification, protecting the kids. On the other hand, Roman persecution of Christians appears to have been motivated mostly by reasons of state: Christianity was, unlike Judaism, a new, non-traditional superstition, and adherents of other superstitions like Jews and pagans strongly resented them, threatening the pax Romana.

  But institutionalised persecution didn’t receive a full-blown treatment until Christians were able to take over the Roman state apparatus and use it themselves. Even key Christian thinkers who still get good press centuries later, like St Augustine, were enthusiasts for the spiritual equivalent of hard paternalism. ‘It is wonderful how he who entered the service of the gospel in the first instance under the compulsion of bodily punishment, afterwards labored more in the gospel than all they who were called by word only,’ Augustine declared in the fifth century (and don’t you love his New York Times–like euphemism for torture?).

  But Augustine’s ‘Lord, persecute me, but not yet’ approach was too timid for some, such as thirteenth-century cleric Arnaud Amalric. When faced with the vexing problem of sorting out Catholics from Cathars during a Crusade in 1209 (for those playing at home, the primary difference is believing Satan was an evil version of God), Amalric declared, ‘Kill them all, God will know his own,’ a mentality that suggests, had he been born several centuries later, he might have become one of those serial killers the media ends up inventing an exotic name for, or, at least, a senior Bush Administration official.

  It was in response to the Cathars that the Inquisition was first established by the Catholic Church; it survived, in different countries and in various forms, into the nineteenth century as one of the premier organs of Stupid. The last victim of the Spanish Inquisition was a schoolteacher executed for teaching deism in 1826, by which time the United States had had four presidents who were deists. By the time of its abolition, the Spanish Inquisition could look back on a job well done—it had overseen the execution of at least three to five thousand people and the condemnation of hundreds of thousands more, a huge number of them Jews or Jewish converts. (Forced conversions of Jews and Muslims was common as Christian rule was re-established on the Iberian peninsula up to the end of the fifteenth century.)

  But the Catholic Church’s zero-tolerance approach to heterodoxy didn’t always work, and heresies of one kind and another routinely cropped up around Europe. Even as Martin Luther was indulging himself by vandalising the door of a Wittenberg church, there persisted in England a sect called the Lollards (chiefly celebrated today as the first internet meme) with a sort of Central European subsidiary called the Hussites.*

  By that stage, however, the Church had a new problem, and it ushered in a new era of paternalism. In an earlier chapter, we looked in detail at the role of printing in the schism between reason and emotion in the European mind after 1500. But printing was also rocket fuel for paternalism. The medieval Church didn’t have a problem with books, beyond the dearth of them—it was difficult enough storing and distributing them and making correct copies of key sources for scholars. The arrival of printing fundamentally changed that, making the sheer number of books a problem, because books could spread ideas. While the Church and individual rulers had previously suppressed certain inconvenient sacred texts or ones judged inauthentic, the role of printing in the spread of Reform ideas prompted the beginnings of modern literary censorship. From the 1520s, national Catholic churches began issuing indices of banned books, and the Vatican itself issued its first Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the 1550s.

  Such lists only had moral force; it was secular rulers who ultimately implemented censorship. In England, Henry VIII, whose outcomes-oriented take on religion meant the state church varied depending on whom he wanted to marry and how he was faring financially, decided to add a particular entry to the list of banned books in 1543: the Bible itself.

  Many arrogant and ignorant persons had taken upon them not only to preach, teach, and set forth the same by words, sermons, and disputations, but also by printed books, ballads, plays, rhymes, songs and other fancies, subtly to instruct the people, and especially the youth of the kingdom,* otherwise than the Scripture ought to be taught.

  Thus, in one of the great moments of Stupid, to protect Christianity, Henry banned reading and discussing the Bible, despite funding and distributing an English Bible himself just two years previously.

  Individual English translations of the Good Book had been banned before, but now reading any Bible was outright banned by the Act for the Advancement of True Religion—banned, that is, if you weren’t part of the ruling elite, because this was another example of paternalism with a hierarchy. ‘Noblemen and gentlemen’ and ‘noble and gentle women’ were permitted to read the Bible. For the lower orders, the penalty was one month in prison for reading it, aloud or silent, in public or private. Similarly, anyone who publicly discussed the Bible could be locked up for a month.

  How many people were prosecuted for having a quick squiz at Genesis or reading the Lord’s Prayer is unknown; it was unlikely to have been very many; within four years Henry was dead, but his example of absurd, and hierarchical, paternalism would live on. Governments naturally banned more than religious books. Early modern governments understood the threat posed by the new technology of printing, and controlled it through printing licences and copyright regulation. The Stationers’ Company became the official monopolist for printing in England, and as part of that deal supported the Tudors’ censorship regime; in the 1750s, the Parlement of Paris condemned Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedié, demanded it be submitted to theologians for approval and revoked its copyright protection, which meant the work, even though it was still published, was instantly pirated, leading to losses by its publishers. (We’ll come back to the Stationers, who demonstrated one of the eternal truths of Stupid: that the copyright industry will always support censorship and suppression in media.)

  We encountered Diderot earlier as, eventually, a radical philosophe. Diderot had been briefly jailed for his published views on religion as a young man. He was also one of the early—if not the earliest—observers to note what we now call the Streisand effect, pointing out that censorship ‘encourages the ideas it opposes through the very violence of its prohibition’. A more sensible approach, he suggested, would be to allow bad ideas to be publicly aired and ridiculed—another idea that is still with us centuries later. Diderot’s case was helped by the remarkable grabquote-laden blurb for the Encyclopedié issued by an angry Pope Clement XIII when it was added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum:

  The said book is impious, scandalous, bold, and full of blasphemies and calumnies against the Christian religion. These volumes are so much more dangerous and reprehensible as they are written in French and in th
e most seductive style. The author of this book, who has the boldness to sign his name to it, should be arrested as soon as possible.

  Putting to one side the idea of an encyclopaedia being written in a seductive style, if anything, the Streisand effect was a greater danger in early modern Europe than in the twentieth century. Prominent politicians, writers and officials kept up a high level of correspondence with each other, affording an alternative means of circulating ideas beyond books alone. Enlightenment readerships were smaller and often confined to a well-connected elite—but that meant they knew which books were being censored and banned, and often circulated copies among themselves, including across national boundaries, to see what the fuss was about. In particular, scholarly texts of no interest beyond academics risked being widely circulated if they became the subject of government censorship: Spinoza was a particular target of Enlightenment censors, and considered so dangerous that even works criticising his ideas were banned in parts of Germany—which of course merely led to their dissemination well beyond the academic elites who would have otherwise read them. Perhaps the Streisand effect should be renamed for the Dutch Jewish lens grinder/philosopher.

  Moreover, the scholars and bureaucrats who implemented censorship policies were members of the same elites, oftentimes forced to balance implementation of official policies with personal, well-informed views. The Encyclopedié, for example, was greatly helped by the indulgence of Malesherbes, Louis XV’s chief censor, who supported the project and many other officially banned books and often gave censored publishers advance notice of his own raids.