A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Once this approach is teased out, however, its problems become clearer: experience isn’t necessarily a guarantee of authenticity. Experience must be interpreted, and can be misinterpreted (thus, ‘false consciousness’, not to mention anyone who has ever enjoyed Nickelback) and subjected to dictation by others; most experiences central to identity politics are either innate or imposed, but some are a matter of choice, and increasingly so as the internet provides greater opportunities for interconnectivity for people who in analogue times might have been cut off by geography or culture from others with whom they identified. Nonetheless, this sort of thinking is part of the logic behind politicians’ Shopfloor Chic—how can you announce an industry policy if you don’t look like you’ve worked in a factory? And it’s immensely appealing to the media as well, because individual anecdotes and personal opinion are automatically more appealing than hard data.

  When you elevate lived experience to centrality in your socio-political critique and politics, you delegitimise the contribution to debate from other perspectives; if the traditional logical fallacy is appeal to authority, since the 1990s appeal to experience has come to rival it, creating a hierarchy of analysis with lived experience at the apex of authenticity. Moreover, as the phrase ‘check your privilege’ implies, it is not merely that a non-experience-based contribution to a discussion lacks legitimacy, the possession of other forms of experience creates an illegitimacy that is impossible to overcome: the scoring systems used to allocate ‘privilege points’ can be neatly flipped into a ‘how illegitimate is your opinion’ scale, depending on the colour of your skin, your sexual preference, your income and your gender.

  The result is a further fragmentation of public debate on issues, with fewer voices heard and greater unanimity among those voices given the imposition of dominant narratives even within sub-groups. The result is also a lesser willingness among generalists, and particularly media practitioners, to genuinely engage on policy issues arising from or including identity politics, for fear of being labelled racist/misogynist/homophobic/middle class/transgenderphobic/ableist/fattist/perpetrators of rape culture. They live in fear of fatally missing some critical nuance that would reveal them as inauthentic, or worse.

  So, we may no longer be atomised as we were in, say, the 1980s, but we control which communities we now cluster into and control the information we receive. In the smoking remains of the single media space of the twentieth century, an ever-shrinking number of journalists perform rituals mimicking the behaviour of their ancestors, with little of the content the old mass media produced, or waging war on whoever has been identified by their company as this week’s target. In politics, the incentives are increasingly structured to discourage complexity, empiricism and nuance, and encourage simplicity, inconsistency and negativity. In discussing complex social issues, we deem experience to be more potent than logic or evidence.

  The consequence: informed public debate as a whole of the kind that was, with all its flaws, a feature of the analogue era is becoming difficult to achieve. It has been replaced with a fake environment, a stage backdrop painted to resemble a vast landscape that no longer exists, populated by actors playing roles that once may have held meaning but which are, increasingly, empty and ritualistic. In such an environment, the propagation of Stupid becomes ever easier, because Stupid isn’t playing pretend. Stupid is for real.

  BK

  * The level of vituperation some of the most eminent Founding Fathers directed at each other in the press might give pause for thought to anyone who thinks the tone of modern-day politics is unusually rancorous. Dick Cheney might have shot someone but no one has ever matched the achievement of Jefferson’s Vice-President Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton dead for a perceived smear.

  * Of recent Australian political figures, only former senior Labor figure Lindsay Tanner and Liberal Malcolm Turnbull routinely spoke like both they themselves, and audiences watching them, have IQs above room temperature and are capable of grasping nuance and complexity.

  * It was also on talkback radio that one of the most famous policy moments in post-war Australian history occurred: Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ warning in 1986.

  * In particular, me: I fearlessly predicted Abbott would in effect destroy his own party.

  * While prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd (who actually grew up in poverty in a Queensland country town) tried to demonstrate his working-class credibility by robotically uttering phrases apparently randomly selected from the films of Chips Rafferty, like ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’.

  * One of Bjelke-Petersen’s staff, Clive Palmer, now a mining magnate and politician himself, uses similar techniques.

  * Shopfloor Chic seems to have at least momentarily supplanted the passion for ‘noddies’ at politicians’ media events, where colleagues, staff or anyone who could be roped in would stand behind or beside a politician at a media conference and furiously nod in agreement as they spoke, as if that would somehow convince viewers watching the footage of the veracity of what was being said. Whether this actually worked, and what the cost of treatment for the resulting cervical spine damage was, is unknown.

  * A phrase stolen/plagiarised/paid homage to by British deputy PM Nick Clegg, who briefly and worryingly claimed he was standing up for ‘alarm clock Britain’.

  † A minor oddity there is that the Greens are even more aggressively protectionist in their attitude towards manufacturing than Labor itself.

  * Often claimed by Thatcher’s defenders to have been misquoted, or taken out of context, betraying a nervousness about the bluntness of Thatcher’s message rather inconsistent with that prime minister’s boots’n’all political style. But as we noted above, Thatcher’s rhetoric was often a poor fit with her achievements in government.

  * Or, as they may become, English, Welsh and Cornish values, depending on whether Scotland elects to depart the Union.

  11

  Conspicuous compassion: On consuming Kony

  Jason ‘Radical’ Russell is probably not the only Evangelical Christian father-of-two ever to have had unprotected sex with concrete. He is, however, one of the very few to provide us with a demonstration video of the act. Shot on a San Diego street corner in the days that followed its subject’s elevator ride to fame, this film is useful in understanding an emerging kind of Stupid.

  Which is to say, compassion has become no more effective but every bit as pleasurable as a sex act with oneself. Compassion, which many people will argue leads us to the light of understanding, increasingly leads us to the darkness of public self-embrace.

  And no further.

  I appreciate it might seem cruel and unreasonable to declare compassion unproductive, and even unconsciously self-serving. Do understand, however, that this is an observation that itself derives from thinking that could, at a pinch, be seen as compassionate. This argument may be more palatable to you if you believe it is foundationally compassionate. If one believes—and I do—that the billions of people in the world who do not enjoy what could be reasonably called a good life are deserving of better, then one could be said to be compassionate. Of course, there are arguments, and one is made by Immanuel Kant and another by Nietzsche and others still by Peter Singer, that this is not a conclusion to which compassion necessarily draws us. But let’s allow ourselves to pretend that it is; if only to agree that a foundational compassion informs this critique of compassion itself.

  Compassion could be said to be a fairly atomistic thing. Which is to say, it works fine in the individual mind, but when it attempts to move towards actual social solutions—and its presence is certainly demanded daily as a political tool in news editorials and Facebook feeds which scream ‘Why doesn’t my government have more compassion?’—it actually slows and even impedes the process. Compassion can even become a bit totalitarian. Yes, I know that is an outrageous claim. But some things that work well when one is alone start to function quite differently when they are applied on a broader scale than ‘m
e’. Compassionate reason is one of these things.

  The practise of my individual and ethical reason might lead me to an individually reasonable conclusion that ends up gainsaying all of my ethical and reasonable intent. Say I want to eat the pseudo-cereal quinoa. I want to do this because it is one of the very few protein-rich vegetables in the world and its consumption diminishes my meat and dairy consumption, which in turn supports an industry that is both unsustainable and inhumane. Further, I want to support new and non-corporate growth in a nation like Bolivia because, as a consumer, I am tired of giving my dollar to major agribusiness. So, I buy quinoa for these informed reasons. But, everyone else with my compassionate reason has come to the same conclusion. Within months of the birth of the quinoa craze, the revenue of farmers has soared.

  However, consumption in Bolivia of this Incan crop which has been a staple of Bolivian diets falls 34 per cent in 2011, the year I said goodbye to cracked wheat and brown rice. Although foreign aid organisations had worked with Bolivian farmers to make this food-fetish item such a regular feature of my compassionate dining, its nutritional benefits were no longer available to many Bolivians. According to a piece in the New York Times, malnutrition among children in quinoa-growing areas had escalated.

  Now the sort of tosser, such as myself, who stocks their larder with protein-rich ethics must face another problem. Since news of this disaster brought about by what we’ll call instrumental compassion—I’m stealing this from critics of what is called instrumental reason; if you want to learn how this idea of individual reason turned into collective Stupid, go to Heidegger or Horkheimer—the West’s ethical cooks withdrew some of their custom. And then, OMG, many Bolivian farmers were sent spiralling into financial chaos.

  It was an entirely reasonable decision to buy quinoa, which actually tastes pretty good for a ‘super food’. When the decision is individual, it is a good one. When it becomes instrumental and happens on a massive scale, it ends up being pretty shitty. I rather imagine Bolivians make justifiably nasty jokes about me, my cooking and my instrumental compassion.

  The quinoa example is a fascinating one that has drawn wide attention. An entire series of good, ethical and compassionate decisions produced a crap result. ‘Radical’, however, is a far less nuanced matter. His was an entire series of crap decisions that produced both crap and Stupid.

  Not to be all I Told You So—after all, I have three kilograms of quinoa in my pantry—but I saw pretty much from the start that this Kony thing was a load of shit. I watched it unfold on Twitter when a prominent self-described humanist said something along the lines of ‘This has to be a good thing.’ I watched this dude contrast vision of his own happy, healthy white kid with jump-cut horror endured by African children. It was all very ‘we are one’ and ‘why can’t we see these poor dark children as important?’ You know the deal. One world. All that shit. Set to a sort of empty and hysterical soundtrack that was kind of the depressed relative of the sort of thing you might hear spouted by a ‘new age’ therapist, this video made me feel like I was being manipulated by an especially bad chiropractor. And just as I suspected that the spine of my charity was about to be snapped by a self-important wellness practitioner, there was KONY, his face in the frame as the centre of all evil.

  Seriously. Mate. Are you telling me that by tut-tutting at one dude, we are going to solve all the problems in Africa? And, yes, I know that Africa is a diverse continent that contains more nations than Uganda. But the Stupid who made this video didn’t seem to share my basic knowledge of maps. Perhaps it was the great grain controversy of 2011 that had me on high alert. Or perhaps I just don’t have enough ‘compassion’. But it was pretty plain to me that this was some discount Stupid.

  Compassion is a requisite thing in private interactions but it is no longer a useful thing in public discussion. Its everyday personal exercise, of course, is essential and inevitable between adequately social human adults. But the broadly accepted idea that compassion is a necessary and foundational practice in any policy discussion is total pants. Moreover, its public expression has become a total wank.

  Before we saw this YouTube video of a guy apparently flogging his log on a California sidewalk outside Sea World, that same guy had just attained nearly 100 million clicks and saturation news coverage in less than a week for his campaign against a warlord. His video was very, very compassionate.

  Jason ‘Radical’ Russell (yes, he really calls himself that) was the guy who gave us one of the world’s most apparently effective moments of activism. Appended with the social media hashtag #KONY2012, this awareness-raising campaign was a remarkable moment in the history of, um, awareness-raising campaigns. The object was, according to its chief architect, to ‘Make Kony Famous’. Because he was, like, the most evil guy.

  Actually, Joseph Kony is the sort of man to whom the descriptor ‘total dick’ could be effortlessly applied. Or he was. At the time of writing, it is reported that Kony is gravely ill. Strangely, his poor health and subsequent inactivity has not changed all the shit that goes on daily in his home country of Uganda. The fact that he had left Uganda some years before Radical’s exercise in ‘awareness’ does make this harder to measure. But we can say that people are still dying of malaria, AIDS-related illnesses and ethnic and government-endorsed murder. It’s a horrible place that produces some horrible people.

  But Russell’s focus was not on drawing Uganda systematically out of the many large problems it continues to face. Medical, economic and political disaster were not his thing. Instead, he wanted to ‘get Kony’ by means of an emotional video and related merchandise sales. Which would go on to fund more emotional videos.

  Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a strange and violent cult, believes himself to be an instrument of God. Call me an old-fashioned atheist, but I never think that’s a good thing. Kony was sort of like a Charles Manson–Jerry Falwell amalgam. Except with even more guns and in a nation already rogered by seventeen kinds of devastation. Worse kinds of hell tend to produce more cartoonish devils and Kony, known to recruit children into his militia and said to endorse rape, was a pretty colourful demon.

  A Radical angel came to vanquish him. And the world watched on, for a day at least, in rapturous approval. ‘Let’s make Kony famous,’ said Radical. Within hours, he really was.

  Russell had himself become very, very famous in a very short time for his work in highlighting the atrocities committed by this loony thug. To say that Russell’s immensely popular promotional video was politically naive is bit like saying the early work of Britney Spears was lyrically simple. Which is to say, oops, not only had Joseph Kony fled Uganda several years before Radical dived in to save the children, but, oops, the International Criminal Court had indicted him for war crimes in 2005, the United States had decried his army as a terrorist organisation in 2001 and the Ugandan government, itself known to soak in the odd luxurious bloodbath filled with the limbs of dismembered children, had declared him a wanted man. (Russell was working with the approval of the Ugandan government. Perhaps, like most of the people who saw and were moved by his YouTube video, he hadn’t bothered to type ‘Uganda State Sanctioned Death Abduction Horror Show’ into Google.)

  But some really strange Stupid began to unfold when Radical—a man who is far better suited to making Christian musicals than he is instructing the world in political action—released his video. I have never seen a more ‘shared’ item on social media. Normally sane people of my actual real-life acquaintance seemed compelled to offer up their endorsement for a video that was as artless as it was politically naive. I don’t know if we can say this is instrumental compassion; it was just too Stupid and crap for such a careful account. Maybe it was false consensus. Maybe people just like to see evil personified. Or maybe there are just more fans of amateur Christian musical theatre than I had previously thought.

  Maybe it was more a case of what is called pluralistic ignorance; that thing where people might privately disapprove
of something—and again this video was so bad I don’t know how they couldn’t smell its central cheese—but are too afraid to say it in public. I have begun to suspect that there is a real terror of being seen as less than compassionate. In a time that produces complex problems that exceed even quite considered individual ethics such as that which fuelled the quinoa craze, I think there is a romantic return to ‘feeling’.

  NGOs and charitable organisations are plainly aware that this need to be seen as compassionate fuels an awful lot of giving. Recently, I was asked by a young man in a shopping centre for a donation to an organisation that funds diversionary activities for teenagers with cancer. I actually don’t mind the organisation and I understand that diversion is an effective way to deal with pain. But I was shocked by the strong compassion-producing visual technique he employed, which was to appear as though he was a cancer patient. The chap was wearing a printed bandana of the sort we broadly associate with chemotherapy patients. My immediate thought on seeing him was: ‘You shouldn’t be in a shopping centre with such compromised immunity.’ My next thought was entirely compassionate and I gave him some money.