by Helen Razer
Historical digression: one of the most successful rent-seekers in history was the London printing oligopoly, the Stationers’ Company, which long, and successfully, argued for strict censorship of printed material by the Tudor and Stuart regimes of England. That system of censorship also enabled the Stationers’ Company to enforce exclusive copyright and block competition for its members from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries—in the same way that the copyright cartel of the movie and music industries now support aggressive internet censorship and anti-privacy laws to support their oligopoly. The Stationers argued that unfettered printing was a ‘dangerous innovation’, like a ‘field overpestered with too much stock’, and that the ‘public good of the state’ was linked to the ‘private prosperity of the Stationers’ Company’; what England needed was not printing but ‘well-ordered printing’.
The Stationers may not have been history’s first rent-seekers—religions have long understood the benefit of good relations with secular powers—but they are a splendid model for so many who have come after them. It is true that no industry lobbyist, academic or peak body would now dream of so bluntly associating the national interest with private interests; former General Motors executive Charles Wilson spent years living down his famous quote that ‘what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa’. Instead, there would be modelling produced to demonstrate the additional jobs, or higher economic growth, or lower social costs of measures that just so happened to benefit those urging the measures. But their matter-of-fact insistence that censorship was good for printing and good for England prefigures so much of the casual Stupid to which private interests and governments have subjected us for so long. When money talks, it does so in fluent Stupid.
Of similar long duration is the connection between Stupid and money’s close relative . . .
Preservation of power
As with money, power provides a strong incentive for Stupid. For millennia, it motivated institutional religions to insist they alone provided the path to salvation; individuals seeking alternatives were discouraged, then tortured, then killed, within an intellectual framework based on the need to support institutional authority rather than philosophical coherence.
The state—a relative newcomer in political philosophy, having been around less than 500 years (a length of time we don’t cavalierly dismiss, but which isn’t that long in the history of Stupid)—has long since replaced organised religion as the primary practitioner of Stupid-for-power, particularly but not only through national security laws: in many respects it replicates the intellectual framework of religions, insisting that it alone knows what is best for the safety of citizens, beyond even citizens themselves.
A possible distinction between Stupid produced for commercial purposes and that intended to support positions of power—usually state power—is that lobbyists and economists working for commercial interests often know perfectly well that their case is nonsense, but they are paid to argue it, and thus bring a certain professional commitment—‘Hello, Sam’ ‘Hello, Ralph’—to delivering Stupid. But members of state institutions are much more likely to believe the Stupid they utter, having convinced themselves that they are a critical bulwark against the threats they relentlessly hype. This explains why national security officials eventually come to see virtually everything outside themselves as a security threat—why the National Security Agency described anyone using internet cryptography (which is anyone who does online banking or shopping, for starters) as ‘adversaries’; why the head of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation complained that the internet allowed ‘individuals to propagate and absorb unfettered ideas . . . literally, in their lounge rooms.’
The terror of unfettered ideas roaming the nation’s lounge rooms (lounge rooms, by god, where you’d assume families were safe!) thanks to the internet aside, not all Stupid is self-interested. Stupid can also advance when we are . . .
Lacking the weapons to combat Stupid
It requires basic skills to combat Stupid, and sometimes new forms of Stupid, or new delivery mechanisms for it, demand new skills. The arrival of printing was not merely immensely disruptive to existing Stupid-based models of commerce and power in the middle of the last millennium, but disruptive to existing analytical techniques as well.
Here, for once, the frequent comparison of the impacts of printing and the internet is justified—just as the internet introduced us both to vast amounts of easily accessible information and vast amounts of complete garbage (sometimes the same thing), so too did printing usher in access both to the great works of Western and Arab philosophy and science and to huge amounts of rubbish. However, as Richard Abel details in his excellent Gutenberg Revolution: A History of Print Culture, Western scholars lacked the tools to know the difference between fictions like alchemy, astrology, magic, much of Aristotelian ‘science’ or ancient mysticism and more rigorously empirical content. That is, they lacked the tools to identify Stupid.
Identifying Stupid took the work of new thinkers, like Paracelsus in medicine and Bruno in cosmology (burned to death by the Catholics for his troubles), to start the process of falsifying much of the material suddenly far more widely available in Europe. Intellectually, the world owes such figures an enormous debt. For those of us worried about Stupid, they are remarkable, unsung heroes, pioneers who, to borrow an imperialist metaphor, ventured into a New World of Stupid and began trying to tame it in a way that none of us can begin to imagine. The whole idea of falsification, in a way, had to be invented by them, in the same way that a primitive kind of peer review was being invented. Before printing, there was intellectual debate, of course, but the scholastic tradition of the high Middle Ages was much more intensively an oral culture than that which followed, and not merely because of the dearth of books: the acts of both reading and writing were strongly oral in nature, particularly at those newfangled ‘universities’ that began spreading across Europe after the turn of the millennium.
Moreover, in the scholastic tradition, much analysis of new ideas was really about preservation of positions of power—for example, focused on assessing their complementarity with the Church’s power (meaning, among other things, scholars backed by a strong monastic order or secular ruler had more freedom than those who weren’t). But after printing, the size of the audience for new ideas massively increased, and, as we discussed earlier, ideas could actually be transmitted with relative accuracy rather than relying on monks acting as imperfect human photocopiers. Responses to new ideas could be circulated to a large number of readers within a (in historical terms) reasonably short time frame. The wisdom of crowds might be an overhyped phenomenon (for which evidence, Read The Comments), but it bore out in humanism and the beginnings of science as Western minds began acquiring the basics of bullshit detection.
Since then, the West has had 600 years to develop a whole framework of critical analysis, aided by the professionalisation of science and universal education in the twentieth century. Unlike our fifteenth-century ancestors, we don’t have the excuse of lacking the tools to combat Stupid. The land has been tamed; the log cabins have given way to luxury apartments; we have a vast array of anti-Stupid tools, but we keep finding reasons not to use them.
Now, true, there are aspects of internet-derived Stupid that make combating it more difficult. The internet is a far more rapid delivery mechanism of Stupid than printing ever was. Online, a lie can circumnavigate the world several thousand times and flog you a wrist band while the truth is still looking up Wikipedia. And true, things can ‘go viral’, in that term beloved of marketing types, spreading instantly in a raging storm of retweets and likes, although books often ‘went viral’ back in the day too—it’s not so long since The Secret shifted tens of millions of units to the intellectually feeble, emotionally crippled and financially desperate via Oprah.
The internet does demand certain skills more than others compared to print: we no longer need to re
member as much, as long as we can recall how to reach important information (in the same way, though to a lesser degree, that writing and later printing ended the centrality of memory in oral culture), but we need to be more sceptical because ‘authority’ is easier to fake online, whether it’s a Photoshopped picture, an invented quote or the life that facts can take on once unchained from their context and source and left free to float about, unfettered, in our lounge rooms.
The internet also strengthens another key motivation for Stupid . . .
Tribality and groupthink
. . . because it strengthens connectedness and enables us to link up with the communities with which we most identify. A sense of tribality drives the ‘piling-on’ effect of social media, in which online groups come to resemble pitchfork-wielding hordes or lynch mobs pursuing someone deemed to have egregiously offended the group. Criticising online witch-hunts is de rigueur these days; it’s forgotten that they frequently happen to those entirely deserving of such a dire fate, but it can also overtake those guilty of, at worst, clumsy expression, with careers and job prospects ruined for some type of –ism more perceived than real.
But that such behaviour is confined to online rather than the real world in the West is one identifiable area of Stupid where history demonstrates significant improvement. Whether it was Christians slaughtering Jews in medieval Europe, or burning witches in early modern England, or lynching African Americans in the US or murdering gays in Australia, the long tradition of tribal violence in the West has receded, and people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be because of it.
Even so, a related component of tribality continues to feature strongly in public debate, something we spent some time on in our Introduction . . .
Ad hominem
In the immortal words of The Onion, stereotypes save time—a principle almost all of us, no matter how intellectually rigorous, have employed at some point, in particular in dismissing the argument of someone because of who they are or whom they represent, rather than properly engaging with it.
It’s worth going through this slowly because it takes us somewhere close to the final point we want to make. The process of rigorous engagement with the substance of what your interlocutor actually says—or ‘listening’ as scientists call it—can be difficult. Most of us link our arguments to our egos: to admit that someone else’s argument, one that we have been aggressively challenging, has merit is a wounding blow to our pride; to acknowledge our errors is akin to gouging out our own eyes—especially when it relates to what we do for a living. When our interlocutor is someone whom we dislike or whose motives we suspect, our dismissiveness is redoubled. Admitting they are right is a Gethsemanean agony and you’d rather—to hopelessly mix up the metaphor—lop off an ear than do it.
So, yes, unfortunately, rigour can be profoundly annoying. Worse, just because someone is biased doesn’t mean their arguments can be automatically dismissed. The industry lobbyist touting modelling, the fossil fuel-funded think tank getting press coverage for its new ‘research’, the be-costumed cleric decrying some social innovation, all indeed would say that, but merely pointing that out doesn’t necessarily negate the requirement to demonstrate the dearth of evidence, the failure of logic, in their case.
This is not an error that is confined to the intellectual hoi polloi—all of us can do it. In early 2014, eminent Princeton historian Sean Wilentz insisted that true liberals (of which, as a close friend of the Clintons, Wilentz is a kind of éminence grease) shouldn’t support journalist Glenn Greenwald, publisher Julian Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden in their efforts to bring transparency to the national security state because each had, at some point, expressed libertarian views. That is, anything they say should be immediately dismissed because they fail to meet some Wilentz-designed test of How to Spot an East Coast Liberal.*
From this point of view, the quality of public debate, alas, has not been helped by the rise of by-lines in news reportage and commentary. Historically, journalists and commentators either used pseudonyms or, with the rise of newspapers, were anonymous—newspapers reported the news and analysed it with a kind of voice-of-God perspective that these days is reserved for editorials, which newspaper editors still like to think should be handed down carved in stone from the nearest mountain. But over the course of the twentieth century by-lines became ubiquitous, more quickly in some newspapers than others, and for different reasons in different countries (by-lined journalism, for example, is easier for governments and corporations to target for retribution). The result is more epistemologically sound journalism—it is clearly one person’s, or several people’s, view of events rather than an account purporting to complete objectivity. By-lines allow a reader to understand, at least in part, where the information or analysis or comment is coming from.
But it has also driven the rise of celebrity journalism and means journalists and commentators are easier to pigeonhole, given readers can rapidly become familiar with their work even if they don’t regularly read them. In that environment, ad hominem analysis of media content becomes routine.
However, the problem of ad hominem thinking points us towards the nearest thing you’ll get to a lesson from this book.
Where to from here, or, Fuck off, you’re on your own
Having devoted considerable length to tracing the intellectual roots from which the great flowering weed of Stupid has grown over thousands of years, it’s natural to ask what can be done to fight Stupid, what measures will arrest its progress where it’s still on the march, to expedite its reversal in those places where it is in retreat, to draw a line in the sand, to take a final stand, and say, ‘This far, and no further’?
Alas, we’ve got nothing. There are no magic solutions to Stupid, other than the accounts we’ve provided in this book. It is a fight that has already taken millennia. For over 2500 years, people in Western societies have been wrestling with Stupid, locked in Mortal Kombat with it, trying to establish intellectually rigorous frameworks for knowledge, grappling with the most basic questions of epistemology and phenomenology, developing tools for thinking logically and assessing evidence. In the West, we’ve been able to access the best thinkers from other cultures: the rich tradition of Arab scholarship and philosophy offset the intellectual doldrums that persisted in the West until after the Carolingian Renaissance; we’ve absorbed Jewish philosophy and thought even as we launched pogroms against Jews; the explorations of a more confident early modern Europe brought contact with the remarkable cultures of India and the Far East and their rich intellectual histories; imperialism, for all its genocidal and exploitative heritage, eventually permitted the filtering back of unique indigenous perspectives and thought to the West.
All of that, and yet we still click on Nigerian scam emails, fail to vaccinate our kids and read celebrity news.
Combating Stupid has been the task of some of history’s greatest minds: the Greek philosophers who first gave serious thought to the gap between what we thought we knew, and the world itself—if, for that matter, there was a world itself. And then it took over twenty centuries before the European descendants of those first philosophers began wondering not just whether there was a world itself, but about the language we were using to describe the world, and the extent to which epistemology was also about language and, never mind the world, what did using a word like ‘world’ actually mean?
Others shared the burden: Greek and Roman philosophers who first gave thought to how exactly societies should be governed; the Catholic monks in western Europe who slowly lost their eyesight and endured haemorrhoid hell transcribing key patristic works; the Orthodox Church in the eastern Roman Empire that kept safe some of Western philosophy’s most important books all the way until the fifteenth century; the scholars of the first renaissances in the eighth and twelfth centuries (as Woody Allen might say, the early, funny renaissances) and their descendants in the fifteenth century in art, science and politics; the first humanists, who began treating the Bible
as a work of literature to be investigated in its historical context; the first Reformists who puzzled over why institutional religion differed so markedly from the prescriptions of the Gospel; the early advocates for natural rights like Spinoza and Locke; the people put to death for believing in the wrong religious nuance, or in no religion at all; the English parliamentarians who fought their own monarch and correctly charged him with levying war on his own people, and their children who resisted that monarch’s son and sent him packing as well.
The Enlightenments were a culmination of all of these traditions and more besides. It needs to be repeated that Enlightenments were almost entirely elite phenomena of middle- and upper-class western Europeans, and mainly men. But the emphasis on reason, and the inevitable consequences of its application, at the heart of the Enlightenment projects was what was important, rather than the composition of its advocates.
Many more conservative Enlightenment figures—most notably Voltaire—wouldn’t accept those inevitable consequences. Voltaire’s target was, above all, the Catholic Church, rather than fundamental political reform. For more radical philosophes—most prominently Diderot—anti-clericalism eventually became just one of many facets of their work, because the consistent and full application of reason and the emphasis on individual choice led on to other targets—the repression of women; the exploitation of colonies; the power of aristocrats or any system of government that wasn’t democratic.
