A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  As Aristotle said, we are, by nature, social. Any account of our essence in biology is foolish and easy and as Stupid as that turd, Jar Jar.

  When Yoda says to Luke ‘Do. Or do not. There is no try,’ he is speaking as a pre-midi-chlorian Jedi. Post-midi-chlorian, he might as well say ‘Don’t bother trying because the midi-chlorians have already decided your fate.’

  5. Milton Friedman

  (1912–2006)

  Adviser to US Presidents, leader of the Chicago School and almost without doubt the most influential post-war economist, Milty is what you get when take the moral insanity of Ayn Rand, combine it with the naiveté of Adam ‘the market is just awesome’ Smith and give it to General Pinochet for a bit of experimental fun.

  Friedman was a libertarian and believed, apparently, in freedom for all peoples; he was an occasional advocate for same-sex marriage and believed in the state’s retreat from personal affairs. But it is perhaps this belief that creating the conditions for great wealth for the few is not only natural but has no impact on curtailing everyday freedoms of the many that makes his Stupid so stinky.

  6. Rupert Murdoch

  (1931–)

  While it is absolutely true that there are media conglomerates just as pig-bonkingly dull as News Corp and magnates so effectively unpleasant, there is perhaps no force so effective in turning journalism from a profession that occasionally told us something like the truth into a reeking toilet of ideology as Rupe.

  Throughout the western world, Murdoch continues to oversee the overproduction of the very worst in churnalism that plays to our simplest fears and the spread of half-ideas that exist for no reason more honourable than the bolstering of his business interests.

  We can only suppose that he has never been made aware of the unprecedented good of his product, The Simpsons.

  7. The American Psychiatric Association

  (1884–present)

  Once, religion slaughtered those it considered to be possessed by demons. Then, thanks to the great humanity of the Enlightenment, medical science whacked these people in institutions. They were not often murdered, just deadened and hidden.

  Then, many more of us became the liberal prisoners of the new idea of ‘mental health’.

  Thanks to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the blockbuster publication of the APA, we are now all largely off our heads. The idea of disorders, which are treated by a one-size-fits-most program of drugs, has taken what some of us see as normal reactions to life, and demonised them softly.

  Self-loathing, deep sadness and the apparently widespread urge to just give up are not viewed as responses to a complex world but, despite a complete absence of biological markers, as biology. Basically, midi-chlorians.

  That antidepressant medication might make some of us feel a bit more like tolerating the world and behaving to its requirements is not evidence that the depression the APA says one in four of us experiences is medically real. It just shows us that drugs can change our mood.

  The APA has helped to make real sadness the fault of biology. The wide acceptance of this deeply antisocial thinking is a new and happy kind of prison.

  8. Anti-intellectualism

  (Forever–present)

  The fear of book-learnin’ has a long history, and even precedes widespread literacy. In 1642, Puritan minister John Cotton, who made America his home, said ‘The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you bee.’

  It is certainly true that certain religious fundamentalists continue this idea that thinking is no substitute for being thick as shit, but it is also true that anti-intellectual takes new forms equally as Stupid although not as overt as those ideas of creationists.

  The Right these days is marvellous at taking science and making it into a matter of opinion rather than a rigorous system of doubt. But just as some tits bang on and on about climate science, which overwhelmingly tells us that Something Needs To Be Done to reverse terrible outcomes, others talk about ‘feelings’ as being more important than thinking.

  Opposition to rational thought informs progressive politics these days just as much as it does conservatives. ‘Lived experience’ and emotional storytelling is now seen as a foundation for Meaningful Social Change on all sides.

  When we take a feeling or an unexamined urge and use it as the foundation for action, we are pooping on the most decent innovations of history. Pure rationalism and absolute objectivity may be impossible. But this is no good reason to give up on it. To cry and then use one’s tears as the foundation for the future gives us nothing but soggy ideas.

  9. MasterChef

  (2009–present)

  Reality television can be held largely responsible for the oversupply of meaning. In an era where we can call an appetiser ‘clever’, ‘ironic’ or ‘witty’, as the judges on MasterChef so very often do, there can be no real hope for the survival of meaning.

  To things that obviously do not matter, such as food or video games or advertisements, we afford a great deal of attention. To the things that might truly impact our lives, such as economic policy or international relations or medical practice, we claim ignorance.

  To molecular gastronomy we afford great importance and allow complexity where there is none. We become prisoners of meaninglessness. To the real scandals of our age we give less passion and thought.

  We praise the meaningless and debate the inconsequential. We see significance where there is only pastry.

  10. History

  (circa 3500 BCE–present)

  FFS, it is about time we stop seeing history as a linear progression. This is both the single great fault of Marxism and the truest filth of liberal humanism. If we keep believing that things change in a way that moves towards either the improvement or the dwindling of the species, we are stuck in a rut that does not allow for truly ingenious thoughts of a future that is different.

  It is certainly true that we can look at ourselves and our institutions and our political past as a guide to what we have become. But to see history as an inevitable force instead of a bunch of stuff that can be broken is the worst kind of intellectual pessimism.

  HR

  Top ten friends of Stupid

  Meletus and the citizens of Athens

  Establishing a template that would be used for millennia to come by paternalists, Socrates was charged by prosecutor Meletus with corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to worship the city’s gods, found guilty and executed. It’s unlikely Socrates was the first to be convicted of heresy and leading the kids astray, but he was and remains the most high-profile victim of the classic accusations of those who would dictate how others live. While the philosopher ignored several opportunities to escape, suggesting he was relaxed about his fate, his execution also demonstrated the use of persecution and killing as official responses to both political and religious scepticism. And apparently hemlock tastes like mouse, whatever mouse tastes like.

  Sigismund of Hungary and the Catholic Church

  This was a bit like the Iraq War of the fifteenth century, only it went for even longer. Anxious to put an end to a religious split in Bohemia and settle an ongoing schism within the Catholic Church, King Sigismund of Hungary invited the leader of the widespread but heretical Wycliffite movement, Jan Huss, to a council in Constance in 1414, with a promise of safe conduct. Once in Constance, Huss was imprisoned and burnt at the stake by Sigismund, on the basis that promises to a heretic weren’t considered binding. Five separate Crusades were launched by the Church against Huss’s followers in ensuing decades, and all were repelled by the Hussites. By 1436, when moderate Hussites negotiated a peace with surrounding powers and the Church that preserved their beliefs, Bohemia was completely destroyed and tens of thousands had been killed.

  Henry VIII

  Out of the millions of examples of censorship throughout history, Henry VIII’s decision to try to protect Christianity in England by banning the reading of the Bible in 1543 has never been bett
ered—except, possibly, when a Kansas community banned Charlotte’s Web because it featured the blasphemy of talking animals. It was extraordinary not merely for its bizarrely contradictory logic, but because Bluff King Hal himself had sponsored the translation of the Bible into English to help spread the Gospel just a few years before.

  Rousseau

  Rousseau could make this list for his misogyny alone, but he seals the deal with his passionate—literally—assault on reason as a corruption of humankind’s natural, Edenic state. Rousseau’s misogyny wasn’t the standard loathing of women that characterised his age—even his readers criticised his views on women—but a more complicated, more modern affair: he portrayed women as essentially a different species, fundamentally, biologically incapable of participating in contemporary society, needing to be confined to the domestic sphere. Rousseau’s extraordinarily eccentric view of human history—primitive man wasn’t merely irrational but solitary, he believed—was a prelude to his elevation of instinct and emotion over reason, which not merely paved the way for Romanticism (which is bad enough) but for every anti-intellectual ever since. Although, in his defence, he got a bum rap for ‘the noble savage’, which wasn’t his creation—he merely thought ‘savages’ had a good thing going compared to the civilised world.

  Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson

  Eminent mathematicians and key figures in the development of classical statistical methods, Sir Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson were also the leading eugenicists of their age. While Galton laid much of the groundwork for theories of racial superiority before his death in 1911, Pearson advocated race war, argued against assistance for people ‘from poor stock’ and opposed Jewish immigration as Jews were ‘inferior physically and mentally to the native population’ of Britain. Before depriving the world of the benefit of his genetic superiority by dying in 1936, Pearson was unsurprisingly a professed admirer of the Nazis, having done much to establish, promote and give the aura of intellectual legitimacy to the idea of race war and racial inferiority.

  Andrew Wakefield

  Whether Wakefield’s manufacturing of a link between autism and measles vaccination slides over into outright evil rather than merely profoundly, despicably Stupid is debatable; certainly his actions were dishonest and have been alleged to have been motivated by expectations of financial gain from the vaccination scare he unleashed. But his actions gave a figleaf of credibility to the conspiracy theories, froth-mouthed rantings and self-obsessed idiocy of millions of anti-vaxers throughout the world, resulting in the deaths of who knows how many children, and the illness and often permanent injury to many, many more.

  Reality TV

  The carefully scripted nature of reality TV shows of all genres, from the now hoary elimination-based shows to talent shows to the cooking shows that now infest much of the Australian TV schedule, is well known. These are dirt-cheap dramas scripted and cut together by program makers and TV networks. But in foregoing the services of creative talents that are normally required for drama production, producers rely on the same limited number of narratives and stock characters over and over, rather than risk the danger of actual storytelling artistry. While few shows in the genre are outright misogynist and infantilising of women as the various versions of The Bachelor, that merely typifies the extent to which the entire genre relies for its narratives on stereotyping women and minorities under the guise of offering a glimpse of the real world. Watching reality TV doesn’t merely make you stupid—something even its biggest fans would admit—but it makes you Stupid.

  George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair

  9/11 had exactly the result intended by Osama Bin Laden: a furious America lashed out at whatever Muslim country it could plausibly attack. Saddam Hussein, a secular, oil-rich dictator opposed by al-Qaeda, was the lucky victim. The result was, literally, history’s costliest mistake, with a $4 trillion war, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead US and American troops, the fragmentation of Iraq, the empowerment of Iran and the creation of a terrorist group so brutal they were regarded as extreme even by al Qaeda. Poor Rupert Murdoch didn’t even get the $20-a-barrel oil price he predicted would result. And now Western politicians want to do it all again.

  Todd Akin

  Don’t be misled by Missouri Republican congressman Todd Akin’s notoriety as the man who, in 2012, said women’s bodies can prevent pregnancy in the event of ‘legitimate rape’. Akin is the complete package of denialism, the highest evolutionary stage (sorry, Intelligent Design stage) of conservative irrationality, the political pin-up boy of postmodern politics, who claimed in 2008 that women who aren’t pregnant have abortions (reminiscent of Sarah Silverman’s complaint that she wanted an abortion but was having trouble getting pregnant), that the arrival of spring was a demonstration of ‘good’ climate change that shouldn’t be stopped and that there was no science in evolution. Akin even linked autism to vaccination and home-schooled his children—not a guarantee of Stupid but a useful indicator. So perfect a summation of all that is wrong with the modern GOP is Akin that the Democrats actually ran ads for him to ensure he won his party primary in the lead-up to the 2012 election. In mid-2014, Akin launched a book, Firing Back: Taking on the party bosses and media elite to protect our faith and freedom, and claimed his ‘legitimate rape’ comment was merely an ‘abbreviation’.

  Top ten enemies of Stupid

  Charlemagne

  While famed for such laudable traits as incessant warfare and demanding conversion to Christianity by conquered communities on pain of death, the aptly named Charlemagne has a strong case for being the one indispensable figure of Western history. His unification of western Europe, his wide-ranging administrative and religious reforms, and the revival of learning and scholarship he actively encouraged under Alcuin of York (despite himself being unable to write and not learning to read until adulthood) had a major impact on the course of western European history. The renaissance of the late eighth and early ninth centuries that he sparked, if short-lived, was crucial in providing a link between classical scholarship and later centuries, preserving most of the key classical texts that eventually made it through to the Europe of the more economically and politically stable second millennium. Without Charlemagne, the Dark Ages would have stayed dark in the West; there would have been no future renaissances, and possibly no modern Europe as we understand it. Which you may or may not think would be a bad thing.

  Paracelsus

  Nearly forgotten centuries later, Paracelsus, who lived in the first half of the sixteenth century, is a key figure in the development of modern scientific method. He rejected scholasticism and reliance on ancient texts for science and medicine, preferring observation and experiment. This sounds like a statement of the obvious, but it was considered near-heretical at the time (he was often compared to Luther, and had his works banned). He was also a chemist and botanist, as well as an occultist, demonstrating the hazy nature of early modern science, but his work was critical in allowing the Western mind to adopt a more rational, sceptical outlook in response to the torrent of works released by the printing press.

  The sturdy beggar of Amsterdam

  Early modern Europe was obsessed with unemployment, or what they called ‘sturdy beggars’, because unemployment was thought to be a moral failing rather than an economic outcome. ‘Sturdy beggars’, as opposed to run-of-the-mill beggars who had some legitimate disability, were able-bodied and capable of working, but, it was believed, refused to. The solution to unemployment, some thought, was to force them to work—a concept that survived into the nineteenth century ‘poor house’ and, indeed graces our society still via contemporary ‘work for the dole’ schemes. The good burghers of sixteenth century Amsterdam developed an early mechanism for curing sturdy beggars of their idleness: a room set at water level that would fill up and drown the occupant unless he pumped furiously to empty the water out. This treatment, however, was peremptorily ended after one sturdy beggar, perhaps less s
turdy than he or she appeared, or keen to demonstrate a point of principle, simply refused to pump and allowed him or herself to be drowned. The story may be apocryphal, like much else in early modern Europe, but the perhaps fictional beggar deserves memorialising for treating a facile elite economic philosophy with such contempt, even at the cost of their life.

  Spinoza

  Now primarily known by philosophy students and then not many of them, Spinoza’s writings were profoundly influential on most of the key figures of the Enlightenment, even if, like Voltaire, they were hostile to his conclusions. His theology and his demonstration of the importance of religious freedom and free speech, as much as his monism and determinism, were critical in paving the way not merely for the Enlightenment but for much of subsequent Western philosophy. He also refused offers of honours and university positions, preferring to remain a lens grinder who also wrote philosophy. Sadly, this modesty was particularly costly to Western thought, since he is said to have died of silicosis from glass dust.