A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  • Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder, 2007 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York).

  I would also say that Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison (1997, Allen Lane, London) was quite important. Because even though this is about technologies for controlling criminals instead of the ‘mentally unwell’, it is a lot easier to read than his stuff on psychiatry. His view of ideas and how their development can be traced through our social institutions is bracing. Foucault was a radically ‘unnatural’ thinker and he continues to make my head hurt.

  8. Political arithmetic, or, Slack hacks lack facts when flacks stack the stats

  There’s only one book that provides a proper history of statistics and their political significance: Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A history of statistical reasoning, 1998 (originally published in French; an English translation was published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.) although readers are advised to familiarise themselves with the basics of statistical methods before opening it.

  9. Postmodern nausea: Derrida, vomit and the rise of relativity

  This chapter is a postmodern soup featuring:

  • Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1976 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore)

  • Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928

  • Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

  • Plato, The Republic, c. 380 BCE

  • William Shakespeare and George Peele, Titus Andronicus, c. 1590

  • Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1994 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor)

  • Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991 (Duke University Press, Durham).

  10. Hyperreality, authenticity and the fucking up of public debate

  Much of the history of pre-twentieth-century media is available in works previously cited: Langford on England; Brands (Franklin was one of colonial America’s most successful printers and writers), Wood and Walker Howe for the US (the last in fact ends with the first successful use of the telegraph in the US, the dawn of the new electric media). Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires, 2010 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York), is a brilliant account of the development of US media and its regulation since the telegraph that has many parallels with Australia in the immense power of incumbents. Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 2010 (Reaktion, London) recounts, in terms accessible to lay readers, the development of the internet.

  Sideshow: Dumbing down democracy, 2012 (Scribe Publications, Brunswick, Vic.), by former senior Labor figure Lindsay Tanner, is an imperfect but honest account of some of the deeply unhealthy feedback loops between politicians and media practitioners in Australian public life in the last decade. At the time of writing, a number of books from veterans of the Rudd–Gillard years were being published.

  11. Conspicuous compassion: On consuming Kony

  This chapter gives us:

  • Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world, 2009 (London, Granta)

  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895

  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, c. 1270

  But I was very influenced by Marcuse and Adorno also, listed above.

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

  On William James, the book to skim is Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life, 2001 (HarperCollins, London).

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to all of those in the Arts faculty at Sydney University 1986–1993 who taught me to think critically; most especially the late Iain Cameron and Alastair MacLachlan, without whom . . . BK

  Thanks to Beth Cole, Dr Gary Foley, Dr Shakira Hussein and Erik Jensen for their kindness in discussing ideas. To Sam Quigley for similar generosity and efforts in amending my poor punctuation. Thanks to dear Kylie Miller for allowing me to use her wonderful yoga story. To Carlene Colahan for her stubborn ability to research ridiculous facts and to Annelise Magee for providing the feminine leisurewear in which I wrote this book. Particular thanks to Bernard Keane and to the very great force of publishing Jane Palfreyman, to whom I have been accumulating a debt of gratitude for some time.

  Finally FUCK YEAH to my friend Nadine von Cohen. HR