A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  I was troubled for several days after the exchange. I just couldn’t believe that they would compromise the health of a young oncology patient. Also, I’d had a bit of a cold and I was concerned that he would catch it. So I called them to ask about their policy (I know this isn’t how a normal human behaves, but I am a writer and therefore perversely entitled to make these sorts of queries). They told me not to worry as these paid employees were, in fact, perfectly healthy. They were just wearing the bandanas ‘in solidarity’.

  In solidarity with whom and by whose explicit permission? I was actually pretty appalled. I imagine if I had cancer to the degree it would require an immune-compromising toxic treatment such as chemo or radiotherapy, I would not want anyone representing me in fucking cancer drag. What is this? Leukaemia cosplay? What makes it okay to do near-death fancy dress and what the fuck is happening to my actual compassion when it is induced so often by imposters?

  What happens is one of two things. You either get so fucking angry about the demands on your emotion and the road to Stupid, you write a book about it. Or, you accept the totalitarian view that public compassion is not only useful but compulsory. And then you buy a ribbon, change your Facebook picture for ‘awareness’ and accept that everything in the repertoire of compassionate protest is just dandy because it ‘shows I care’.

  Now, I did this in the case of Bolivian farmers and my participation in instrumental compassion showed me that maybe It Doesn’t All Start With Me. It was a useful lesson that it is entire systems and not small, atomised practice that need revision. This was very difficult to predict while making high-end salads. But it is not so difficult to see when one is buying an awareness ribbon.

  Think about the famous pink ribbon. October is annually awash with the optimism of pink. But more lately, it is full with the impatience of some breast cancer survivors it purports to assist. Some current and former patients are exasperated with the use of pink as a disingenuous marketing tool, notably the glorious Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world tears happy-clappy pinkwashing a new rectum. Other survivors have become convinced that pink month is less about awareness than it is obfuscation; many critique what they regard as bad medical information. Growing medical opinion has it that mammograms, which pink month encourages, are a poor diagnostic tool.

  But even if they’re not, pink month doesn’t encourage women to get them. One 2013 study released in the Journal of Marketing Research set out to examine the pink campaign’s effectiveness. Researcher Stefano Puntoni unexpectedly found that the pink brand made women perceive their risk of breast cancer as lower and tended to dissuade them from donating to breast cancer charities. While it is almost certainly true that the month affords comfort to many breast cancer survivors, it is also almost certainly untrue that it does much more than that. October is a month in which some women get to feel individually good.

  I expressed these views on a news site and was privately contacted by a friend whom I had last seen at the funeral for a lovely young woman whose life had been claimed by breast cancer. She was very angry with me and mentioned that her dead friend loved pink month and that I needed to practise greater compassion. Of course, I used the foundational compassion argument I did at the beginning of this chapter; to wit, I care about solutions and will therefore proceed only from that single moment of concern and not be distracted by my emotions, if possible, en route to that solution. She didn’t buy it.

  Even very bright people buy the idea of compassion as an essential force. When the impressive leader and soldier Nelson Mandela died in 2013, he was eulogised by quite respectable writers as a man who had shown both ‘forgiveness’ and ‘compassion’. This was surprising to me as I, as a young anti-Apartheid activist, had first come to know of this man—then classified as a terrorist by many liberal democracies, including my own—as a leader of armed resistance. Of course, he went on to become a politically astute negotiator and then a president who never quite lost his fondness for buying guns; perhaps everyone but me has forgotten the South African Arms Deal. But there was this great Oprahfication of his legacy that rewrote his life as one that was lived not in battle but in compassion. This keen politician and military mastermind is somehow the only dude in history that has shown us how LOVE can change the law. It wasn’t the threat of an unwinnable war that turned South Africa into a (still terribly uneven and violent) democracy. It was a big, cuddly compassionate black teddy bear with guns made out of candy.

  Ugh. What a horrible way to remember such an effective individual.

  But we ascribe to much-loved leaders those qualities we most value and one of those, right now, is compassion. As quinoa demonstrates before it is artfully thrown through a beet and goat-cheese salad, effective action is difficult. And, yes, people want to feel like they’re doing something. And compassion is something. So let’s do this.

  Let’s Show We Care.

  Let’s Show We Care about being seen to care.

  Okay, that’s a bit mean. I do understand the despair and have suffered the contradiction carried along in instrumental compassion many times. I don’t know what to do about the state of the world, so I choose just to document it and mock it into the possibility of change. This, I think, may be a slightly more effective technique than wearing a ribbon or lighting a candle. But I don’t doubt that anyone cares less than me; they may care more. I do doubt the effectiveness of the caring, however. And I do see that there is a certain pleasure taken in the act of care itself.

  I’m not the only one with this opinion. Of course, grumpy old Nietzsche said that compassion is the self-indulgent ‘multiplication of human suffering’; he’s basically calling compassion misery porn. In The Antichrist he said of compassion: ‘It wants to give birth to its god and see all mankind at his feet.’ I think that’s maybe a bit harsh, especially coming from a man who was so moved by compassion towards the end of his life that he famously threw himself upon a suffering horse and cried uncontrollably. I know compassion is real. I also know that it needs to be subjugated to reason. Individual will can lead us to a quinoa crisis.

  Perhaps we should look at someone with a better rep than Nietzsche. In 2014, a former migration officer who had seen first-hand the rationalised horror of an Australian offshore detention camp for refugees became a ‘whistleblower’. In an interview, she explained the horror and protest she had seen within the centre. This came days after the death of Kurdish Iranian detainee Reza Berati.

  The day before migration officer Liz Thompson’s television interview, candles had been lit in Berati’s honour. Of course, when this unusually courageous, and disarmingly eloquent, person spoke of the place where he had died, she became a hero to the many people troubled by conditions on Manus Island. She was asked to speak at another protest and initially agreed. Then she refused. She had been troubled by the lighting of candles for Berati. She was troubled by the widespread practice of individual compassion. On the blog Crossborder Operational Matters, she wrote, ‘I am grateful for the support I have received and acknowledge that people are expressing solidarity for a variety of admirable reasons, [but] there is something deeply discomforting about the adulation and the focus on me.’

  Thompson was quite Nietzschean in her impatience with those who had been so eager to show their compassion. ‘“Not in our name” is a self-referential slogan, it speaks about us, not about those behind the wire.’ She suggested: ‘If you want to close the camps, think about what you can do where you are that will be effective.’ She was very clear that lighting a candle and crying for a man who had died was not effective action.

  Of course, such critiques are always met with the question: ‘Well what can we do, then?’ The answer is: use your fucking noggin. Outrun the Stupid and instead of instrumental compassion, try instrumental thinking. Compassion will not close Manus Island, itself a deterrent ‘solution’ said to be derived from compassion. Compassionate conservatives regularly argue that their wi
sh to stop unauthorised maritime arrivals by dangerous vessels has its origin in care. And there is no argument I can think of to ‘prove’ that they might not, actually, be motivated by compassion.

  Compassion does not lead us to the best and most considered solutions. It can lead us to buy ribbons, light candles and open detention centres.

  Compassion becomes the kind of Stupid which supplants the act of giving with Facebook sharing.

  This is the kind of Stupid where one is led to ethical ends not by ethical thinking but by something more like ethical shopping.

  This is the kind of Stupid that empties us of the urge to do social good by turning social good into social capital. You give because you expect to get.

  We’ve spoken before about how the transactional nature of the market tends to govern our everyday exchange, such as it might be in the trade of ‘raising awareness’ with a ribbon and receiving plaudits for your visible compassion. It is perhaps worth remembering that ‘giving’ was not always enacted with the hope of a return.

  Charity, let it be plainly said, is not the worst product of Christian thought. There are far worse things to do than good-doing, and benevolence has been a subject for some truly great theologians. (I can hear the atheists sniggering up the back and I remind them once more: for more than a millennium, theology was the only game in town. If you wanted to think about ethics, the nature of reality or even mathematics and keep most of your limbs, you had to do this within the margins of Mother Church. Please let me mention Christian thinkers or I will turn this car around and confiscate your Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt.) The theologian Thomas Aquinas thought charity the ‘most excellent of the virtues’ (Summa: 1265). And recounted St Augustine on the quality as one ‘which, when our affections are perfectly ordered, unites us to God’ and to others. So, you could say that there is an implied reward here, but it is one that is a bit better than Facebook likes. Charity unites us to our neighbours by means of God. It connects us to humanity.

  And I don’t think Russell’s Kony video did that at all. This late-capitalist Christian had a very different view of charity. Here, charity was something that could keep funding his Stupid organisation to make more Stupid and misleading videos. Although, the SeaWorld video is perhaps less misleading. Here, a naked white man appears to be taking tap-and-kick instruction from an unseen panel of reality TV dance sadists. If you have not viewed the film, briefly imagine what RuPaul’s Drag Race might look like if shot on a sunny day at the mouth of hell. This YouTube moment is at once cruel and well-choreographed; Russell—whom we would later learn had been suffering the ‘dehydration’ diagnosed in the newly famous by imaginary doctors—may have temporarily lost the use of his mind but not of his jazz hands.

  To naturally unpleasant persons such as me, the emergence of this peculiar pornography made absolute sense. There could be no postscript more appropriate to Russell’s KONY2012 campaign than one that had its star apparently spending himself at a major intersection. One can hate the sexual and military enslavement of African children as much as the next guy. This doesn’t mean one cannot be equally troubled by a man who seemed less eager to end injustice than he did to audition for the next season of Glee. The campaign had begun and ended in self-embrace.

  Of course, this is not for a moment to say that Russell or any of the persons behind the clicks on his YouTube offering did not care for the fortunes of Ugandan orphans. It is, however, to suggest that by 2012, charity had become very non-Aquinas. These days, even Christians out to save African babies from sex slavery would rather spend time with Oprah than with God. Russell would get his time with Oprah, by the way. He talked of his ‘struggle’. As people from nice countries often do. Because feelings are important! After all they can change the world.

  They have. The primacy of feelings has made our world extraordinarily Stupid. Feelings are fine in private and sometimes inevitable in public, but it seems to me they have become the raison d’être of protest. Some things in the world need changing. Not for our own comfort. Just because they’re wrong.

  HR

  Conclusion—Final words: Towards a taxonomy of Stupid, and other wankery

  We warned at the start that we’d be offering no solutions to Stupid. To make up for that, or, more correctly, deflect attention from that, we’re going to offer a biographical note. We’ve only been friends for about two years, which is a bit odd as we went to the same university at the same time and sat in the same philosophy lectures. In that long-ago world, we drank at the same bar and liked the same dreary no-wave music. Later, much later, after at least one other career each, we would work for the same media outlet and develop the same intolerance for what we saw as craven thinking and express the same unpopular absolutism where free speech is concerned. We even got pissed off at the same people and annoyed everyone with the same antisocial willingness to tell everyone, including each other, that they were very wrong. The genesis of this book was, accordingly, a shared loathing of the sloppy thinking, shameless bullshitting and ignorant, amnesiac drivel that passes for so many contributions to rational debate, a feeling we were up to our necks in a tide of Stupid that showed no sign of ebbing, and that it was time Someone Fucking Did Something.

  But in truth, as much as we might like to paint ourselves as the curmudgeonly heroes of a War on Stupid, shaped by our intellectual upbringings to have no choice but to take up arms against a sea of cretins, we’re more correctly just two more, and rather minor, names in a long and—we think—honourable tradition stretching back two millennia and more. For the history of Stupid is a long one. And in tracing the tangled, matted, strands of human idiocy that unite the greatest of philosophers and the shrillest of pop stars, that connect the mightiest of historical institutions with the most venal individuals and link our forebears to ourselves despite thousands of years of learning, we’ve seen how the fight against it has been a long one as well.

  In many ways, it has been a successful fight: our explorations of the annals of Stupid suggest that things used to be a whole lot Stupider. Many of the most blatantly offensive forms of Stupid are now in retreat, at least in the lands of #firstworldproblems and their contiguous zones. Women are officially no longer second-class citizens, we don’t persecute and kill gay or transgender people as a matter of policy, we seek to acknowledge the impacts of imperialism on indigenous people and their prior relationship with the land if we now live on it. We live longer, healthier, wealthier lives than ever before, we place some basic restrictions on how much people can exploit one another (well, other than in the US), and many of the forms of discrimination and harassment that anyone other than an adult white male once endured as a matter of course in Western society are now illegal or considered entirely beyond the pale.

  Compared to the 1960s, let alone Enlightenment Europe or the world of the Reformation, Stupid is mostly in retreat.

  And yet, Stupid remains, always capable of surging back. It keeps on causing bad things to happen, it continues to cost lives, health, liberties, economic opportunity. People still die as a consequence of Stupid—their own, or someone else’s, and not just that of ordinary citizens, but of people who should know better, like their parents, or people who are paid, at least notionally, to be Not Stupid. You could take inspiration from one particular sub-branch of Stupid—dodgy economic modelling—and model the cost of Stupid to our economies, loading in everything from bad policy choices to people dying unnecessarily to lower economic growth, but it’s more than that. Stupid is pervasive—undermining our rights as citizens, infuriating us when we encounter it in the media or from some officious jobsworth, corrupting our capacity to sensibly debate public issues, alienating us from one another. It’s like the background radiation of society, always there, inescapable, the distant but permanent echo of some Big Bang of Idiocy.

  You might have noticed a certain philosophical basis for this book: Stupid matters because it has consequences, bad consequences, and they flow even when people seek to do good. F
ew of the people in this book were or are genuinely and completely evil, but the damage inflicted by the well-intentioned or the ignorant can be just as profound as that caused by actual malice. We’re thus professedly consequentialists—although if you tried to pin us down on exactly which type of consequentialism we each adhered to we might have to sneak a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry to be sure. We think that, so long as we’re going to live together in societies, we should aim to maximise the positive consequences of the way we interact individually, socially, economically and politically, and minimise the negative consequences.

  Of course, that sounds dead easy, but the trick is seeing those consequences clearly, a trick that proves beyond a surprising number of otherwise intelligent people—indeed, proves beyond all of us at some point or other. Who has such a cold, dead eye and such a forensic gaze that self-interest or ignorance or haste or emotion has never clouded their judgement? Not bloody us, that we can guarantee.

  So, conscious that, as Jesus may well have said, the Stupid will always be with us, with us as individuals, as groups and as societies, we must always be on guard against it, must always be examining consequences, not merely intentions. And the first step in that process is to understand that Stupid is always driven by the same things, whether it’s in the medieval church or a Facebook group about chemtrails. The same core motivations for Stupid exist in human society now that have always existed in it. The first is obvious:

  Commercial incentives

  Upton Sinclair said it best: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ From defence companies that benefit from hyping the threats they claim their products protect against to fossil fuel industries funding propaganda against climate science, from the medicalising for profit of innate human states to academics making a living peddling nanny-state solutions, the connection between Stupid and money is a strong one and has long been so.