A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  The Glorious Revolution

  More correctly, the Glorious Invasion—in late 1688, William of Orange successfully conquered England (Scotland and Ireland took quite some time longer), displacing the Catholic James II, who had alienated the British ruling class with not merely his religion but his growing French-style authoritarianism and policy of religious toleration. The British elite understood the lessons of the Civil War fifty years earlier and resolved not to let an intra-elite conflict turn into an open struggle that would allow non-elite forces the opportunity to seize power, as Cromwell and the New Model Army had in the 1640s. Instead, the Protestant Dutch ruler William was accepted as Britain’s legitimate monarch. The road to a genuinely constitutional monarchy stretched well into the eighteenth century for what would shortly be the United Kingdom, but the exceptionalism of English parliamentary rule was made permanent by the ousting of a would-be Catholic absolutist.

  Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach

  A key French Enlightenment figure, translator, bon vivant and atheist, D’Holbach kept an extraordinarily diverse Paris salon that was a key centre for both philosophes and mainstream cultural figures. He also wrote (perhaps with Diderot) System of Nature, a rigorous advocacy of materialism and probably the single most reviled book of the entire Enlightenment, drawing a furious reaction from both the Catholic Church (which demanded its suppression) and moderate philosophes like Voltaire. His later works developed the case for a rational, constitutional government aimed at maximising the community welfare, anticipating utilitarianism.

  The suffragettes

  As a democracy, Great Britain was hopeless in the nineteenth century—the franchise had been reduced, and significantly so, since the seventeenth century, until the Reform Acts began extending the franchise once again to a significant portion of the male population. But the sheer unadulterated Stupid of not enfranchising half the electorate on the grounds that they possessed uteruses remained fixed in place until after the Great War. It galled large numbers of women, many of whom weren’t content with ‘constitutional’ forms of campaigning: many, especially after 1912, adopted more radical, disruptive tactics, civil disobedience, self-defence and militant protest. Enduring first abuse, then imprisonment, then in many cases torture via forced feeding, the suffragettes provided a remarkable contrast between the ineffable idiocy of the British establishment and aggressive, effective street-level direct action.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Keynes would have had a sufficient claim to fame merely for The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which accurately anticipated how the Allies’ treatment of Germany after the Great War guaranteed another conflict, or his work on probability in the 1920s, or for regularly infuriating fellow Bloomsbury Set member Lytton Strachey. But his revolutionary opposition to austerity economics and advocacy and theoretical justification for fiscal stimulus, along with the Bretton Woods system he helped found after World War II, paved the way for the long post-war boom of the West. Countries with politicians intelligent enough to remember the lessons of Keynesianism in 2008—like Australia—benefited in the wake of the financial crisis, while European countries that embraced Depression-style austerity got exactly what they paid for—an extended economic slump that has ruined the lives of millions. Seldom has one man brought so much economic benefit to so many human beings across the planet. And to this day, the Right continues to attack Keynes for his homosexuality and claim that it shaped his economic theories.

  Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden

  The two most important whistleblowers in Western thought have reshaped recent history by revealing the true nature of Anglophone governments and, in particular, the US government. Taking advantage of the transition of information from a substance measured in grams per square metre to one composed purely of zeroes and ones, each released vast troves of information exposing war crimes, hypocrisy, illegality and global surveillance. The system of power they revealed is one operated by corporations, tame politicians, soldiers and bureaucrats for their own advantage, not that of the populations they ostensibly serve. Manning was tortured and jailed for her actions; Snowden has been vilified and chased into hiding for his; both are true heroes in an age seemingly devoid of them.

  Snark

  Much vilified as a symptom of the profound cynicism in the internet age, snark is in fact the antibody produced by a healthy, intelligent mind in response to the presence of Stupid. Matching the egregiousness of the idiocy that induces it, snark is offensive, wilfully transgressive and anti-social, and delightful both to produce and to consume, unless it is directed at oneself or something one values. Snark is a refusal to suspend disbelief; in fact, snark puts wheels on disbelief, sticks an engine in it and tries to run over whoever is demanding it be suspended. Like actual antibodies, on which this mess of metaphors is based, snark can become unhealthily surfeit to requirements and start attacking whatever is producing it, but on the whole we are far healthier for its presence than without it, no matter how many complaints of butthurt get aired, no matter how often the wambulance is called, no matter who theatrically takes umbrage at it.

  BK

  Recommended reading

  Introduction—We don’t know what we are doing

  In the introduction we talk a little about the great bourgeois liberal humanist Immanuel Kant. Any study of ethics must include a long initial date with Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) are arguably some of the Enlightenment’s most enlightened moments. It is easy for the new student of philosophy to be seduced by the thinker’s attempts to devise a universal way to make good decisions. It might not surprise you to learn that Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ instrument of universal ethics never quite fixed everything. Actually, it’s quite flawed. But his attempts to beat the everyday reader into a philosopher are so beautiful, it is enough to make you again believe in the possibility that we can all be reasonable. Or, at least try to be.

  I was very influenced by:

  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972, Herder and Herder, New York)

  • Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964, Beacon Press, Boston) and also Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.), which is a book that has given me a good deal of comfort. Not only does Žižek help to fill in the gaps in a less-than-classical education and let me know what might be meant by ‘Aristotelian’, or remind me what might be meant by the Hegelian dialectic view of history, he does so with a strategic passion for popular culture that keeps trashy people like myself reading.

  1. ‘I’m worth it’: L’Oréal and the fade-resistant rise of liberal individualism

  In this chapter where we discuss the emerging idea of the modern individual, our primary text is John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1680–1690). Chapters Five and Nineteen of the Second Treatise will give you a good overview of not only what Locke had to say about the individual responsibility to accumulate property, but will show you how good he was in argument.

  Here, we also look at Magna Carta, written by a bunch of Medieval barons and King John in 1215, the US Declaration of Independence written by some dudes and John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). For more on the moral justification of wealth, look into Adam Smith’s lesser-known The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). There’s also obviously some Marx here, especially The German Ideology (translated in 1932) and Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

  There is a bit of hidden Nietzsche here; it inheres in the idea that morality is largely relative to the time in which it exists. See The Genealogy of Morals (1887).

  2. Suffer the little children: Enlightenment and denialism

  In recent years, denialism has attracted increasing scientific study and media commentary, though many of the themes in its research are decades old. Michael Specter’s Denialism: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the
planet, and threatens our lives, 2009 (Penguin Press, New York), for example, explains the US context. But much good work on the sociological and intellectual context of denialism is readily available online: New Scientist, for example, now has an entire section of its website devoted to the intellectual processes and methods of denialism: www.newscientist.com/special/living-in-denial.

  The Reformation is one of the most examined and contested fields of historiography that has seen entire schools of historical thought rise and fall. Traditional Protestant historiography of a corrupt Catholic church and pat, determinist accounts of rising middle classes and the development of capitalism (thanks both to the Whig and Marxist schools for those) have yielded in recent decades to more nuanced accounts of important factors like popular piety and the role of urban political elites. Bear in mind, too, Anglophone historiography tends to focus on the English Reformation, which starts with Lollardy rather than Henry VIII and then segues into the lead-up to the Civil War in the seventeenth century; for some scholars, it doesn’t quite end until the Glorious Revolution in 1688. But the more important, and certainly far bloodier, events in Germany, Switzerland and France (not to mention eastern Europe) have received more attention from European historians, often in German and French. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation, 2005 (Penguin Books, New York) is a recent, well-regarded introduction that will serve the lay reader. Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life, 2001 (HarperCollins, London) has a thoughtful section on the cultural impact of Luther.

  The Enlightenment has similarly been a playground for determinists. The crucial Enlightenment study for our purposes is Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy, 2010 (Princeton University Press, Princeton). The work of J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, volumes 1 and 2, 1999 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) is more for specialists who know their érudits from their philosophes, but lays out the variety of different Enlightenments of the eighteenth century. Robert Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse: Ideology and social structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European socialism, 1989 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.) discusses common socio-economic factors in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century socialism and provides a useful guide to each.

  A brisk and readable guide to the western philosophical tradition, by the way, is Anthony Kenny (ed), Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy, 1994 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York); the concept of nothingness is elegantly demonstrated by how much the illustrations add to the work. It’s okay to skip the more complicated bits.

  A key intellectual–political history of the US is Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963 (Knopf, New York)—a book that plainly was strongly influenced by the Eisenhower years, but is still fresh. Three works complement Hofstadter: H.W. Brands’ The First American: The life and times of Benjamin Franklin, 2000 (Doubleday, New York) is a life of Benjamin Franklin that also works as a history of colonial and revolutionary America, including the arrival of Methodism. Two standard but excellent textbooks take the story of the infant republic forward to the mid-nineteenth century: Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A history of the early republic, 1789-1815, 2009 and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The transformation of America, 1815-1848, 2007 (both Oxford University Press, New York).

  The essential, and least inaccessible, McLuhan cultural history text is Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man, 1962 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto), but Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing Of My Work!, 2011 (Atlas, New York) offers a far more reader-friendly tour of both McLuhan’s key messages and why they’re still critical—as well as explaining why McLuhan’s remarkable brain worked like it did. More useful is the unheralded but quite outstanding Richard Abel, The Gutenberg Revolution: A history of print culture, 2011 (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ), which explains the asteroid-like impact of printing and how it changed European thinking and scholarship.

  3. Look who’s talking: Why uttering our ‘identity’ makes us Stupid babies

  This chapter is a look at the populist space currently obsessed as it is with ‘personal stories’ and the idea of a person as a narrative. I’m very much drawing on things like Oprah here and thinking less about classical texts, although there is some digression on ethics, and I again point you to Kant the deontologist and his ethical foes, the utilitarians. See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823) and John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863).

  Notable contemporary utilitarians are Sam Harris, who gives me the absolute shits so I shan’t bother further publicising his ranting atheism, and Peter Singer, whose preference utilitarianism, also known as consequentialism, gives us Practical Ethics (1979, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York), which is a must-read, even if you, as I do, find yourself disagreeing with many of its moral claims. Singer is one of those guys, like Kant, you have to engage with in order to dismiss. He’s really important.

  I also mention an autobiography that I think does serve an important purpose which is that penned by Malcolm X with Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcolm X., 1965, Grove Press, New York). Anyone interested in the radical good sense of true anti-racism should probably read that.

  4. ‘Nudge them all—God will know his own’: Soft, hard and extreme paternalism

  Australia is fortunate enough to be served by two excellent statistical institutions, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, both of which have websites with easily accessible time-series data on Australian health outcomes (www.abs.gov.au and www.aihw.gov.au). The ABS also has crime and social data as well as, of course, extensive economic data.

  Excellent background on the London gin craze can be found in Paul Langford’s textbook on eighteenth-century England, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, 1989 (Clarendon Press, Oxford).

  The comprehensive work on falling crime rates in the West is Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, 2011 (Viking, New York).

  5. The inflexible Safe Space: The injurious yoga class of the mind

  In this chapter I am, again, virtually reference-free and more absorbed with the character of popular ‘safe’ discourse than anything written in proper books without meditation exercises and pictures of goddesses in them.

  6. National stupidity: How the War on Terror is killing and impoverishing us

  The work of John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart demolishing the myths of homeland security began with the 2011 article ‘Balancing the risks, benefits, and costs of homeland security’ (www.hsaj.org/?article=7.1.16)—read that if you can’t get their book.

  Former senior US government financial officer Linda Bilmes has the best readily accessible guide to where US government spending on the Iraq War went: ‘Who Profited from the Iraq War?’, 2012: www.epsusa.org/publications/newsletter/2012/mar2012/bilmes.html.

  Entr’acte—From Dallas with Love to Moonfaker: The lost films of Stanley Kubrick

  Like denialism, conspiracy theories have attracted growing analysis by social scientists in recent years—and clearly there are significant links between the two. However, Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (first a 1964 essay, then the title of an essay collection published in 1965 by Knopf, New York) is the seminal work on the ways in which paranoia and conspiracy theory has played a key role in US politics, particularly US conservative politics, since colonial times.

  Apropos of not much, the work to read on Kubrick is Michael Herr’s remarkable August 1999 article ‘Kubrick’ in Vanity Fair (later expanded into a short book by the same name; 2001, Grove Press, New York). The only thing missing from Herr’s posthumous tribute is the famous but perhaps apocryphal anecdote about Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism: to determine where he would shoot the
(ill-fated) Napoleon, Kubrick assembled the researchers who had been investigating locations around Europe at his estate, where they would each explain the merits of the locations they had investigated. To make the process completely balanced, each would have two minutes to make their pitch, at which point a bell would be rung. However, Kubrick insisted on selecting the bell himself and, unhappy at the available selection, demanded a catalogue of bells he could pick from before, ultimately, demanding a full list of bell manufacturers. He later abandoned the whole idea.

  The 2012 documentary Room 237 documents the Kubrick-faked-the-moon-landing conspiracy in all its hilarious detail, among many other lurid claims about the flawed masterpiece that is The Shining.

  7. Reason and unreason: How we’ve all gone Stupid-mad in an age of absolute sanity

  In this chapter I make up for my lack of references in Chapter 5 with the following:

  • Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1965 (Pantheon Books, New York)

  • Aristotle, Problems, c. 300 BCE–c. 600 CE

  • American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, Fifth edition, 2013 (American Psychiatric Association, Arlington, VA)

  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930

  • David Healy,Let Them Eat Prozac:The unhealthy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and depression, 2004 (New York University Press, New York, London)