A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  The radical philosophes weren’t always consistent—for example, they were often disgustingly anti-Semitic—but they went much further on the journey that Reason took them than their more conservative opponents and colleagues. That’s the crucial lesson from the Enlightenments: accepting where Reason takes you, rather than allowing money or power or the source of an idea to derail that journey. And the long list of men and women who have embarked on that journey, to which we’re just two minor names on the most recent page, is as close as you’re going to get to a solution to Stupid. The nineteenth-century philosopher, scientist, semiotician, mathematician and more Charles Sanders Peirce wrote:

  Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

  Peirce is also known as the father of Pragmatism, a much-misunderstood approach to philosophy that rejected the radical scepticism of much of Western philosophy, especially the Cartesian tradition, in favour of a more practical approach to knowledge and truth. It emphasised reason as an instrument for dealing with perceived reality and solving its problems.

  Pragmatists like Peirce, William James (brother of Henry) and John Dewey rejected the Cartesian idea that everything must be doubted and knowledge painstakingly built up using only perfectly verifiable blocks (the first of which, for Descartes, was his own existence). Pragmatists instead suggested that doubt is only relevant when it has a real-world significance, and that an understanding of reality can be developed using scientific method and utility (thus, the misinterpretation that Pragmatism is about believing whatever serves your purposes). This approach is a fallibilist one, accepting that our understanding of what is true may change, but what works for now will serve until that point.

  And in particular, in contrast to the individualist approach of radical sceptics, who won’t accept that anyone other than themselves even exists until rigorously established, Pragmatists (especially Peirce and Dewey) emphasised the collaborative, community aspect of the search for truth. ‘The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community,’ Peirce said. For Dewey, the concept of shared inquiry was fundamental, and informed his groundbreaking work on education reform in the US. For Pragmatists, the search for truth was an exchange of views within an intellectual community, perhaps using different techniques and operating from different perspectives, but sharing a respect for scientific method and what could be demonstrated to be consistent with reality.

  Pragmatism has had mixed fortunes since the late nineteenth century, but re-emerged via the likes of Richard Rorty nearly a century later. Even if Pragmatism doesn’t float your particular epistemological boat, there is much to like about its rejection of radical scepticism and, by implication, other dismissals of external truths: for the Pragmatist, there is truth, and it can exist both within and outside the text, and the search for it is a collaborative one. It’s not that sexy a philosophy, really: it lacks the relativism that so entrances first-year philosophy students delighted to discover that nothing is real or true, it has none of the Gallic panache of deconstruction, the Left Bank cool of existentialism or the high Teutonic rigour of classical German philosophy; it’s just the product of some rather doughty New England and New York part-time philosophers, focused on the practicality of establishing working solutions to problems.

  But it carries within it the reason why Stupid still plagues us, and how we can continue to fight it like so many generations of grumps, curmudgeons and annoying sceptics before us. In societies in which old forms of Stupid live on, while new ones are being constantly created, it can serve as both a methodological approach and maybe even a rallying cry: that we be carried not where we wish, but to a goal foreordained by the rigour of our thought.

  * Of course, applying that logic to Wilentz himself, no progressive should heed anything he has to say because his Rise of American Democracy is not far short of propaganda for the genocidal slave-owner Andrew Jackson (Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is far superior, in any case).

  Appendix—Top ten Stupids

  Top ten enemies of Stupid

  1. Moveable type

  (circa 1040)

  As the western world was instructed by means of the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, it was not Gutenberg that first gave the world mechanised printing in 1450, but an eleventh-century guy called Bi Sheng. China and not Europe first reproduced ideas on paper.

  Whenever and by whomever literacy and literature is distributed, though, the results remains the same: freaking awesome.

  Sure, the printing press and now the internet disseminates unspeakable idiocy. But it also makes possible the synthesis of thought that can change the world—even, sometimes, for the better.

  True and broad engagement with ideas written down with great care is something we can, perhaps, refuse to see as anything other than a universal good. And you can’t say that often.

  2. Aristotle

  (384–322 BCE)

  Just thirty-one of the guy’s some two hundred written treatises survive, but these were sufficient to carry his influence through the millennia. And to really give his snotty teacher, Plato, the shits right through the ages.

  The granddaddy of formal logic, the great Greek whom Aquinas simply called ‘The Philosopher’, looked to argument as a foundation. This is a great shift from the Platonic idea that there is a perfect Form that is a blueprint for all reality.

  Aristotle dragged thinking into matters of the everyday and did quite a good job of convincing some of us that essential ‘good’ was a bit of a crock.

  3. Doubt

  (Classical antiquity–present)

  In our age of super-smarm, where negativity is seen not as a force for good but nastiness, it is difficult for us to remember the importance of doubt.

  Socrates wasn’t particularly positive and neither was Descartes, whose methodical doubt forms an important part of all scientific method and discovery. In fact, anyone who ever eliminated ideas and hypotheses by looking at them and testing them is a doubter, and thank goodness for such grumps at laboratory benches who are the sine qua non of useful innovations from vaccination to genuine justice.

  Doubt, let it be said, is quite different from kneejerk scepticism or denialism, which simply reject ideas without examining them. Doubt is a tedious process that brings forth the best of history, whereas denialism is enormous fun and just requires that one sticks one’s fingers in one’s ears while shrieking ‘La la la what is even science.’

  4. Immanuel Kant

  (1724–1804)

  There is so much that is wrong with this bourgeois thinker but even an incorrigible pinko like me has to acknowledge that we owe him a great debt.

  Okay. So his preoccupation with the idea of a universal good will is an enormous problem. His idea that individual reason is somehow so peachy-keen it can defeat all unreason, or cannot itself become unreason, is wiggety. The guy’s not practical.

  But, Kant’s failure to engage with social forces that causes some reason to die and some reason to rule notwithstanding, his urge to those who read him to think was, and remains, pretty compelling. His instructions for thought may not in themselves be anything approaching workable but his passionate belief that thought must be undertaken is a great moment.

  5. Western liberal feminism

  (1792–present)

  The most annoying thing a
bout the many annoying features of liberalism is its failure to see how it rests on an idea of inequality; even and especially those who advance the idea of a ‘meritocracy’ are all still banging on about a natural hierarchy.

  Feminism, which remains for the most part very liberal, also has this problem, and it comes to us first and most compellingly in the form of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

  Like most of her present-day daughters, Wollstonecraft sees the arbitrary social division of labour and of opportunity by means of gender as total pants. And this, despite the fact that it is founded on an idea of ‘free’ enterprise and has a limited political imagination, was, and remains, a courageous and entirely non-Stupid idea.

  Using half-arsed ideas of biology and ancient history to justify social organisation is ridiculous. Gender, or biological sex for that matter, is not a foundational truth. It’s just a bit of a shame that liberal feminism could see some forms of inequality as ‘unnatural’ while letting others persist. Like liberalism.

  6. Karl Marx

  (1818–1883)

  There are those who snigger at this great philosopher for what they perceive as his naiveté, and then there are those who laugh a little more kindly at the impossibility of his project. There are very few, however, who actually bother to read his ideas, now mushed and consigned to the insinkerator of the past.

  While it is true that Marx’s predictions about revolution may have been a tad wrong, his Hegelian idea of history as conflict may now be more or less useless, and his hope that one day we would not need intellectuals is probably impossible, this is no effing excuse not to read him.

  Whether you are inclined to Left thinking or not, the first volume of Capital is an extraordinary document which shows us how, as foretold in The German Ideology, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ and explains how the material organisation of the world makes Stupid.

  7. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

  (1917)

  At the height of the anti-art movement known as Dada, the French-American brat Marcel Duchamp and his genuinely batty collaborator the ‘Baroness’ Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven took a urinal and entered it in an art exhibition. Where it was, in fact, held from view.

  They had not made the lavatory and they did not affix their names to it and in this rejection of both the idea of an artist and the fundamental ‘truth’ of art, they flushed some very dearly held ideas about art and purity down the drain forever.

  Even if the idea of art seems to you insubstantial or, at most, a matter of beauty, this radical move was utopian. To interrogate our most fondly held ideas about greatness in a swift and naughty moment was marvellous.

  Of course, now some artists continue to tediously examine this idea of meaningless nearly a century later and have turned the idea of a readymade toilet into an affront to something that can be collected. But we shall not forget that the disappearance of pompous ideas down the drain is occasionally possible. Viva true punk.

  8. The unconscious mind

  (Mid-nineteenth century–1970s)

  Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are some of my favourite guys. They are often known respectively as idealistic pinko, Nazi and pervert. This is hardly fair.

  One of the things I initially liked and continue to like about each of these authors is their explicit and vitally important understanding that we’re not as bright as we like to think we are. Or, more to the point, that our actions and responses are dominated by forces we do not fully understand but think of as natural.

  Marx examines ‘ideology’ as the invisible thing that dominates our action, where Nietzsche calls it the ‘will to power’. And Freud, of course, brings us the transformational idea of the ‘unconscious’.

  These are people who reject the state-of-nature account such as we might read in Rousseau, Hume or Locke, and who continue to influence the way we do things in the west.

  The idea that we don’t know what we are doing pretty much died with the radicalism of the seventies. I’d like to see it back.

  9. Black Power/African American civil rights

  (1950s–1970s)

  There’s a tendency these days to remember Martin Luther King, Jr as a nice guy who just wanted all folks to sit at the same lunch counter after they went to church together. And while it is true that the guy was a Christian minister and is fondly remembered by liberals as a force for polite reason, he happened to be a greater and more radical force than he is usually remembered.

  When King was assassinated, it was not just his opposition to segregation and the extraordinary forces of racist Stupid that did it. It is worth remembering that he was talking to a group of sanitation workers about their labour rights. The man, just like the great Malcolm X and the Black Power movement which followed these leaders, wanted to change the entire system. It is not just shared swimming pools and the attitudes of tolerance he wanted to transform.

  He called for a great change in thinking and rejected namby-pamby strategies for social change. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, he cried out for opposition to the white moderate, which he saw as more invidious than the Ku Klux Klan.

  It is not just the will to justice that informs African American civil rights and international Black Power leaders; it is the intelligence of this moment from which we can all learn.

  10. Love

  (1975)

  Courtly. Christian. Romantic. Like just about any other human endeavour, love has its history formed in society and ideas. It has been as unnatural and without essence as any other damn thing, and as a contemporary notion it bolsters some pretty crappy practices, such as marriage, normative sexuality and terrible films.

  But, in his 1975 work Born to Run and in more or less every recording since, Bruce Springsteen describes the powerful victory of violent love that can exist, just in instants, outside the alienation and the ultra-rationalisation of the everyday.

  ‘Together we can break this trap,’ he says to Wendy, and talks of that strange exclusion that chooses love for one person over the rest of the world; it’s a feeling that can overcome the broken cars and closing factories of New Jersey and temporarily infuse us with a hope that has nothing to do with the world and all its upward mobility, but is a force of sheer passion.

  It is the possibility of this passion for the other, even if it is short-lived, that can deliver us momentarily from the world or New Jersey or whatever disappointments or aspirations otherwise inform us.

  While it is probably true that love for the other is some kind of terrible by-product of early childhood, it is also true that it has a logic that precedes most forms of everyday reason. The insanity and the exclusion of love has nothing to do with empathy or morality. In fact, that it delivers us temporarily from these everyday principles into a state that might not be natural, but is certainly as liberated as we’re ever going to get, is probably quite useful.

  The insanity of affection is not Stupid.

  Top Ten Friends of Stupid

  1. John Locke

  (1632–1704)

  There can be no doubt that this Oxford physician and philosopher had a brain at least so big and shiny as a Megachurch—or a shopping mall, if you prefer your references secular. But it is Locke’s cleverness in conflating humanism with material wealth that makes him so useful to Stupid. This guy made property ownership seem like a moral imperative and America seem like a great idea, and it is his compelling view on the loveliness of greed that continues to make it so difficult for us to think beyond liberalism and building enormous blocks of luxury apartments, as though stainless steel European appliances are somehow an ethical birthright.

  2. Oprah Winfrey

  (1954–)

  Like so many of history’s influential Stupids, Oprah herself is clearly not thick. What she does, though, in so effectively popularising the You Can Do It If You Try view of individual achievement, is blind us all to social structures and replace them with arse-hat affirmations about
bending the universe to our will. She has popularised that shitty book The Secret, the tough-love inanity of Dr Phil and that unmitigated twit Eckhart Tolle, who bangs on about something called ‘the emotional paidbody’, which holds that we are each responsible for our poor fortune. However nice and liberal Oprah might seem, she has done her very best to promote the idea that it is only laziness and a lack of personal empowerment that makes some lives worse than others. In this world view, global poverty is all the fault of starving people themselves. Do some yoga and you’ll be right. Fuck off.

  3. Richard Dawkins

  (1941–)

  He who was formerly one of the more effective science communicators of the twentieth century has turned from a guy who can force even idiots like me to truly understand evolution theory into a dangerous shit. By positing science and the idea of pure logic as a panacea for all the world’s ills, he has become as fanatical and perilously simple as the new politics of anti-science he seeks to undo. Let us hope he returns to the important work of explaining difficult ideas of good science to a broad audience and away from the humanist pseudo-philosophy of screaming ‘god isn’t even real!’

  4. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

  (1999)

  There is a good deal to loathe about Lucas’ clumsy prequel, not least of which is Jar Jar Binks, who is less a being with a character arc than an expensive merchandise puppet. But the real problem here is midi-chlorians.

  For decades, the pleasant Buddhism-lite of the Star Wars franchise caused kids and grown-up kids to consider harmless ideas like being a decent person. A Jedi was someone who devoted themselves consciously to good. Like the worst of evolutionary biology or ‘state of nature’ accounts of How We Really Are, midi-chlorians reduced the Jedi to health and the Sith to a sickness.