A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Nonetheless, the most effective ways for controversial authors to evade the personal consequences of censorship in early modern Europe was either to await the arrival of a friendlier regime—John Locke published his major political works after returning to England in the wake of William of Orange’s invasion, which drove out the Catholic James II—or to die: much of Diderot’s non-Encyclopedié work and Spinoza’s most significant treatise, which influenced generations of scholars and alarmed governments across Europe, were published after their deaths.

  While Diderot was in prison for his views on religion, London was undergoing the first drug panic in history. Mid-eighteenth-century British governments, spurred by an outraged upper class (which voraciously consumed alcohol itself), launched an assault on gin consumption among poorer English people, which had risen dramatically off the back of trade protectionism, other forms of paternalism (heavy beer taxes) and inept regulation. The poor, British elites felt, drank too much and didn’t work hard enough. Attempts to regulate and tax gin out of the reach of poorer people were, it was felt, justified not merely by moral righteousness but on economic grounds: consumption of gin caused poverty and idleness in an economy struggling to compete with its European rivals, as well as fuelling riots and crime and degrading Britain’s military capacity.

  As with twenty-first-century public health moralising—and, for that matter, Stupid generally—the evidentiary basis for the campaign against gin was flawed: consumption of gin dramatically increased up to the 1750s, but despite a rapidly growing population, London’s crime rate per capita remained about the same. And just as even the smallest level of drinking by pregnant women is now seen as bordering on criminal behaviour, gin was said to damage the capacity of English women to produce the healthy children required by a growing imperial power competing against continental powers such as France. But even contemporaries questioned the demonising of gin, pointing out that social conditions in London and the rioting of a growing lower class had more to do with degrading poverty and wretched living conditions than alcohol.

  Alcohol isn’t the only paternalistic obsession that keeps coming around again and again despite the passage of centuries. The wave of Stupid engendered by the arrival of the new medium of the printed book was replicated repeatedly as new media emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Catholic groups led the charge against the morality of movies in the United States in the 1920s (partly because a number of studios were headed by Jews) and the result was over thirty years of self-censorship by Hollywood. Of particular concern for movie censors was—wait for it—the impact of movies on children, whose ‘sacred . . . clean, virgin . . . unmarked’ minds might be corrupted by films, although early efforts to find any evidence for this foundered. There was also evidence, suppressed at the time, of a Mae West effect: boycotts by the Catholic Legion of Decency increased ticket sales for controversial films. But even in the 1920s, complaints about films were already well-established—the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had lamented the effect of films on youth as early as 1906, and in 1914 blamed them for violence and delinquency.

  The new technology of radio, too, was seen as damaging fragile young minds, discouraging healthy activities like reading, and driving children to delinquency through exposure to radio serials like The Shadow. Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? Paternalists knew—despite, yet again, the dearth of evidence of any negative impacts. Then it was television’s turn to desensitise children, encourage violence and undermine morality: by the 1970s an entire academic industry existed dedicated to charting the impacts of television on children, while morals campaigners like Mary Whitehouse in the UK demanded censorship of sex and violence on the box. Alas, the evidence for the negative impacts of television, like that for radio and movies, was hard to track down.*

  Meantime, music had become the preferred target for hand-wringers. Indeed, music had long been the target of Stupid: the waltz had caused a remarkable scandal in the early nineteenth century, when it was regarded as indecent and fit only for prostitutes and adulteresses. First African American music in the 1950s (insert racist stereotyping here), then white versions thereof, then drug and anti-war songs in the 1960s, all caused alarm among concerned paternalists, until rap and hip-hop generated full-blown moral panics in the 1980s and 1990s. The American Academy of Pediatrics mused in 1996 that there were few studies of the impact of explicit lyrics in ‘heavy metal’ and ‘gangsta rap’, and no link proven between sexually explicit or violent lyrics and adverse behavioural effects. This was partly because, the study found, many teenagers had no idea what the lyrics of their favourite songs were—although sadly the opportunity for a doctoral thesis on the link between mondegreens and youth crime doesn’t appear to have been taken up. Eighties hair metal band Judas Priest even found themselves in court in 1990 facing claims their alleged backmasked message of ‘do it, do it, do it’ in a song had driven two men to attempt suicide.

  And by that stage, music was already losing its menace to video games, first in arcade form (remember them?) and later on home consoles, which became the new bogey, encouraging (yes) delinquency and, later, warping young minds with sex and violence.

  Paternalism goes online

  Printing, movies, radio, music and TV all prompted paternalist responses; in fact, about the only new communications technology that didn’t induce Stupid was the fax. But the internet was like all of these rolled into one, unleashing a new drive for censorship from people concerned about the dire impacts of new forms of content delivery. And while modern Henry VIIIs have sought to censor, block or otherwise disrupt the internet outright because of its potential to foster political disruption, any number of paternalists have blamed the internet for social problems as well. Handily, however, the internet only became widely used in the 1990s, so we have plenty of data to measure the alleged impacts of the nefarious series of tubes on society.

  Let’s take suicide, for example, and especially youth suicide. The internet—presumably replacing the collected works of Judas Priest—is often held to be a key cause of suicide among young people. It used to be online ‘death pacts’ and ‘suicide websites’ that were driving people, and especially our vulnerable youth, to kill themselves. These days that’s been replaced by cyberbullying, and more latterly the threat of ‘trolls’, phenomena held to regularly drive young people to take their lives. Indeed, a small ‘cybersafety’ industry has grown up in Australia that makes money from purporting to advise schools, governments and professional associations about online bullying, child cybersafety and moral panics like teen sexting.

  Now, true, many young people have, indeed, tragically, taken their lives in response to bullying, online and off. But is the problem getting worse? What does the data tell us?

  In Australia, the overall suicide rate has fallen in the last twenty years.* In 1996, the overall death rate from suicide was 13 per 100,000 people. In 2011, it was 11.2 per 100,000. The rate has fallen particularly for men, from 21 to below 17 per 100,000. The death rate among males under thirty has also fallen significantly, by between a quarter and a third, since 2002—despite media claims that suicide is a ‘cultural epidemic’ among young men; in 2012, the teenage male suicide rate reached an eight-year low and was at the second-lowest level since the 1990s.

  True, the decline isn’t consistent—there’s been no fall in suicide rates among indigenous people since 2001; some states have fallen faster than others, and there has been a rise in recent years in the suicide rate of teenage girls, traditionally the demographic least likely to take their own lives. But whatever the specific causes of the overall fall in the number of people taking their lives, it has coincided with the spread of the internet.

  Perhaps Australia is unusual. How about the United States? The overall suicide rate in the US is about where it was in 1996, and below where it was in 1991, at around 14 deaths for 100,000 people. Suicide among American ten- to twenty-four-year-olds peaked in 1994 and is well below that
level now. Youth suicide has also fallen significantly in the UK since the 1990s, as it has for people over sixty. Overall, the suicide rate was 12.4 in 1995 in the UK compared to 11.8 in 2011.

  But if there’s little evidence for a connection between the internet and rising suicide rates, what about the supposedly degrading effects of pornography, which is suddenly far more available than in the analogue era, when it required a trip to the local newsagent or, if harder stuff was your fancy, actual sex shops? There are plenty ready to declare that today’s ‘epidemic’* of pornography, and men with a ‘porn addiction’, leads to rape, whether they’re speaking from a feminist perspective, or a religious perspective. Others claim it is warping the minds of young men and causing problems in their relationships. Attacks on internet pornography often combine these themes and other tropes of paternalism, although it is rare to find as many crammed into one article as in a March 2014 piece, ‘Campus rape culture linked to online porn’, from Canada’s Western Catholic Reporter, about ‘the widespread availability of increasingly violent and degrading pornography called Gonzo porn on the Internet’:

  Catholic therapist Peter Kleponis, who specializes in men’s issues and porn-addiction recovery, said in an interview that he sees a ‘big relationship’ between pornography and the ‘violent, sexual aggression we see among young men today . . .

  ‘Now kids have access not only through computers, but through smart phones, tablets and various gaming systems such as Xboxes, PlayStations and Wiis . . .

  ‘. . . men are learning it’s “okay to get a woman drunk and get a bunch of guys together to rape her” . . .

  Kleponis called porn ‘the new drug of choice’ . . . that ‘it can easily come and take your life without your even knowing it . . . It’s the new crack cocaine . . .’ Except unlike crack, with porn there are no ‘gateway drugs’ gradually leading to it. First time exposure is generally to hard-core deviant porn.

  And some governments actually believe this: the UK government recently went so far as to ban online rape depictions as part of its (entirely useless) internet filtering scheme, which will at least have the fortunate consequence of preventing the online distribution of Fifty Shades of Grey.

  But the data doesn’t support claims about the impact of online pornography. Putting aside the issue of reporting rates, the sexual assault rate in Australia in 2012 was 80 per 100,000 people, roughly the same as the rate in 2000, of 85, and about the same as the rate of 79 in 1996. In the United States, sexual assaults on women declined by more than half between 1994 and 2010.*

  Has pornography led to unhappier relationships? It’s a hard claim to prove or disprove. For what it’s worth, the Australian divorce rate has been declining since 1996 (and at a much faster rate than the decline in number of marriages); the US divorce rate has been declining since the 1990s and more broadly since the 1970s, has been declining since the early noughties in the UK and has been relatively stable in Canada for the last decade.

  Whatever the impacts of the internet on Western societies, there is little evidence that it has prompted a rise in suicide, or that the ‘porn epidemic’—and access to more graphic and exotic kinds of pornography—has had any impact on sexual assault levels or relationships; at the very least, those who would censor, filter, block or otherwise play nanny to the internet have to demonstrate how falls, or even bigger falls, in suicide and sexual assaults and divorces would have occurred but for the negative impact of the internet.

  A key characteristic of this form of Stupid, whether it’s focused on reading the Bible, gin, waltzing, silent movies or rap music, is profound historical ignorance. Any attempt to link one particular phenomenon to crime inevitably founders on the fact that Western societies are dramatically less violent now than historically. The Australian Bureau of Statistics concluded that homicide in twentieth-century Australia was significantly lower than in the nineteenth century (before, presumably, Aboriginal victims of white settlement are counted as well). Estimates of the US homicide rate show it has fallen by more than half since the mid-nineteenth century and is continuing to fall, notwithstanding government-engineered surges in homicide rates caused by paternalism (Prohibition and crack cocaine) in the twentieth century. Similarly, European data shows big falls in homicide rates compared to earlier centuries. But data, of course, is no match for anecdotes: you might be able to point to long-term declines in rates of violent crime, but I know some guy who got punched when he was out drinking one night, which demonstrates how the world is going to hell in a handcart and something must be done about gin/video games/heavy metal/waltzing/reading the Old Testament.

  Comparing not merely drug laws but health-motivated ‘soft paternalism’ to religious persecution and censorship may seem a stretch to nanny-state types, but while differing in methods, all reflect the same logic: that the powerful have both the superior knowledge and the right to make decisions for the welfare of the less powerful, and to impose those decisions on them or use resources to seek to influence them in the desired direction.

  This is why the same paternalist targets, themes and rhetoric repeat throughout history in a recurring cycle of Stupid. The impetus to paternalism is the vehicle for very old elite attitudes toward ‘sin’ behaviours—sex, drinking and other drugs, bad diets, popular entertainment and gambling. It is always is the lower classes and less powerful who are the target of paternalism while elites are left alone; threats are hyped to justify dramatic action; the need to protect children is always invoked; remarkable powers of manipulation are attributed to external agencies; serious impacts (now called ‘social costs’) are asserted without evidence; women and the young are targeted for special restriction. And in their rhetoric, modern-day public health advocates are hard to differentiate from the panicked middle classes of Hanoverian England; moralists who want to censor the internet are indistinguishable from the groups who railed at silent movies; anti-pornography campaigners hard to tell apart from the Athenians who executed Socrates.

  Part of the impetus for paternalism now comes from progressives, who since the success of liberal economics in the 1980s and 1990s have embraced forms of paternalism as the primary tool of social engineering. Having, in effect, conceded the fight on basic economics in favour of liberal capitalism, sections of the left now look to achieve progressive goals not through economic reforms to restore the sort of communitarian government control lost with the economic reforms of the 1980s, but through changing the ‘choice architecture’ people face in consumption decisions. Rather than wages and price fixing, tariff barriers, high taxation and a fixed currency, we have price signals, regulation and ‘nudge’ policies that seek to amplify the impact of social norms on people in deciding how they spend their money and time.

  This was vividly demonstrated in a much-cited 2013 Lancet paper, ‘Profits and pandemics: Prevention of harmful effects of tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-processed food and drink industries’, by some of Australia’s most senior public health figures. The paper argued that large corporations were in effect deadly viruses themselves:

  The term industrial epidemic has been used to describe health harms associated with various goods including tobacco, alcohol, vinyl chloride, asbestos, cars, and the food and drink industries. In industrial epidemics, the vectors of spread are not biological agents, but transnational corporations. Unlike infectious disease epidemics, however, these corporate disease vectors implement sophisticated campaigns to undermine public health interventions.

  This is an elegant example not merely of how paternalism refracts an economic tradition hostile to liberal capitalism, but of the now-common technique of pathologising what paternalism opposes. Thus, drinking at home becomes ‘pre-loading’; pornography becomes a ‘sexual addiction’ and corporations become vast, world-straddling disease vectors that, like a good B-movie villain, fight back against the plucky heroes trying to save humanity.

  This has the effect of reasserting the role of the state back into regulating the economic choices
of low-income citizens that liberal capitalism withdrew it from, albeit via different, more subtle mechanisms. Low-income earners are perceived by paternalists to be less capable of making informed, competent decisions about their consumption than paternalist decision-makers in academia and government. In particular, they are seen as more prone to being manipulated by corporate interests—poorer Australians, apparently, are easily swayed into becoming addicted to nicotine, they’re gulls for the clubs industry which wants them to throw away their money on poker machines, they’re prone to drinking too much because of the alcohol industry’s incessant advertising, they look at the ‘crack cocaine’ of online pornography too much and they eat too much bad food sold by multinational companies. Liberal capitalism has delivered greater wealth even for low-income earners compared to two and three decades ago, and lifespans continue to increase, but, like their ancestral nanny statists warning about the wiles of Satan, paternalists believe low-income earners are incapable of navigating liberal capitalism for themselves, that they are unable to resist the dark arts of the marketing industry and thus are in need of a forceful hand to guide them in how they spend their income.

  But in arguing that we should construct ‘choice architecture’ to encourage people to be healthy, happy participants in capitalist society, maximising their productivity and capacity to consume and, in the case of women, bear the next generation of healthy workers and consumers, progressive social engineers turn out to closely resemble conservative policymakers. Much of the economic agenda of the right in Australia has been based on transforming low-income workers into aspirational, shareholding, private education-and-healthcare small business owners. They have been offered financial incentives to have their children schooled privately and to use private health care; ‘mum and dad’ investors were encouraged to acquire shares in major government privatisations; the taxation system was structured to encourage them to shift from being employees to ‘independent contractors’; they were encouraged to shift from having mere employment-based superannuation into ‘wealth management’. At the same time, the left wanted to encourage them, via regulation and ‘nudging’, to be healthy consumers who disdain the right sins (drugs, gambling, bad food), live long, economically productive lives, bear children the right way and then nurture them properly.