A Short History of Stupid Read online

  Bernard Keane has been Crikey’s correspondent and politics editor in Canberra since 2008, writing on politics, media and economics. He was educated at the University of Sydney, where he studied history and failed to meet Helen Razer, who was there at the same time. Before joining Crikey he was a policy adviser and speechwriter in transport and communications. He is the author of the ebook War on the Internet and an incessant torrent of analysis, reportage and commentary on politics and public policy for Crikey.

  For more than two decades, Helen Razer has been broadcasting and writing her way into disagreements of various scales. For much of the 1990s she presented the breakfast program on ABC radio’s youth network with her non-biological brother, Mikey Robins. She makes occasional returns to professional broadcast but is now better known as a somewhat peevish columnist. She has been employed as a contributor by The Age and The Australian, and is now a columnist on dissent with Crikey and a gardening correspondent for The Saturday Paper. Helen has produced four previous books of humorous nonfiction, had a rest and returned to collaborate with her friend Bernard Keane to write her only serious work to date. Her frequently published thoughts on the impotence of current public debate are extended in A Short History of Stupid.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Bernard Keane and Helen Razer 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

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  ISBN 978 1 76011 054 3

  eISBN 978 1 74343 723 0

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Contents

  Introduction—We don’t know what we are doing

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

  HR

  2. Suffer the little children: Enlightenment and denialism

  BK

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

  HR

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

  BK

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

  HR

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

  BK

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

  BK

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

  HR

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

  BK

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

  HR

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

  BK

  11. Conspicuous compassion: On consuming Kony

  HR

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

  Appendix—Top ten Stupids

  Recommended reading

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction—We don’t know what we are doing

  There is no such thing as a Stupid question. Whoever said this never worked in a shop, read a celebrity interview by a Murdoch journalist or had a conversation of any length with an actual adult human. Stupid questions are asked with all the restraint a snowboarder might show in front of a bong. Which is to say, none at all and please don’t bogart my mull.

  Naive or tedious or genuinely curious questions are not the problem. Why is the sky blue? What is particle theory? When is a polite time to tell my idiot right-wing uncle to get fucked? Questions that seek an answer are, in fact, in short supply.

  If ignorant questions were commonly asked of people who know things, then we wouldn’t be writing this book. We would be living in an intellectual utopia that provided material comfort to all, a solution to climate change and a convenient alternative to dental floss. Instead, we exist in an era of blundering know-it-alls who have just one question, and they ask it of themselves: Quick, what do I say so that no one finds out I am Stupid?

  We’ve all but given up on facts, as any prominent discussion on climate change can attest. Facts do not matter. They have been eclipsed by opinion. And this is bad enough in itself. But it is not just that we feel entitled to our opinion, as nearly everybody does. We are obliged to have an opinion. Like a smart car or a nice job, an opinion—even and especially one untroubled by recourse to facts—has become a motif for strength and success.

  An opinion is empowering. An opinion is a sign of high self-esteem. An opinion is the most hotly traded currency in all social networks, a requirement for dinner guests and the thing that now fuels traditional media.

  Facts, in fact, have become a sort of optional extra. Even news providers have become candid about the departure of facts from their content. Facts are now presented as a curio at the end of broadcasts in a special ‘fact checking’ segment. This is not an encouraging moment showing journalism’s dedication to its trade but a frank admission that everything previously said was not a fact but an opinion.

  There was a time where we were not uncomfortable answering ‘I don’t know’ if asked for our opinion on the Middle East, superfoods or early childhood development. Now, we would rather say ‘one state solution’ or ‘acai berries are great for the libido’ or ‘little Harrison is showing signs of great executive function in the painting he made with his own shit’ than nothing. Because we’re all experts.

  Although. Perhaps you, like us, suspect that you are not an expert. Perhaps you don’t know what to do in Palestine. Perhaps you don’t want to pay forty dollars a kilo for dried fruit. Perhaps you think your child needs to stop playing with his own waste. Perhaps you see all this opinionated bluster as the worst kind of Stupid.

  What you know is that you do not know. What you see is that you cannot see. What you refuse, unlike the chipper and the mindful and the smug, is to believe the myth of total enlightenment. The false pleasure of easy illumination is something you can no longer allow.

  In other words, you’re in a bit of a muddle. Of course, most everybody is. But many of them believe that they have found a way to the light and, worse still, some of them don’t even notice the darkness.

  It’s perfectly fine to find yourself in the dark. It is okay to feel benighted by the bedlam moon that everyday lunatics mistake for the light of reason. So, in our look at present-day Stupid and how we got here, let’s agree that we don’t know everything.

  Let’s agree that the sun of rational thought is yet to fully rise. Let’s try to bask in its first rays as we break the illusory two-watt globe of false enlightenment. In other words, let us dare to ‘shine a light’ on our most forlorn attempts to shine a light. And then, perhaps, we can stop these ceaseless and clum
sy enlightenment metaphors. What is this, a book on the history of poor Western thought or a lighting catalogue?

  What you may happen to expect from a crabby book that tests your patience and consistently asks you to ignore its bad mood is the reward of hope; of hope for a world without Stupid. For this, we offer an advance apology as sincere as crabby authors can produce. It’s best you lose hope right now.

  Oh, come on. Surely you never expected hope, change and the deceit of the promise of wisdom? If you did, you’d be ‘setting your intention’ for the day in your lululemon Pilates pants and drinking from the well of homeopathic opinion.

  But you are not at all that type of Stupid. You do not believe that you can attract good fortune or make a better world with the power of positive thinking. You do not believe this any more than you believe you can find a cure for all this viral Stupid in a single modest book.

  Better to use imagery a bit less flowery to set our intention for this very cranky book. How about a proverb of statecraft? ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ The enemy is Stupid. And the ‘friends’, of course, are all of us. We, authors and readers, are united against Stupid in a mutual, if strategically divergent, battle for truth. Well, truth or something like it. Even if truth turns out to be impossible, we can at least look at the nature and history of its impersonators. We’ll interrogate conspiracy theorists, denialists, conspicuously compassionate capitalists and other fakes.

  We may not be particularly nice about quite a lot of people while we are doing this.

  Niceness is no more a salve for the complex world’s complex ills than are the designations of left and right. Speaking of which, your authors have made some kind of attempt to divest themselves of ideology. And this isn’t easy. Ideology is, by its classic Marxist definition, the thing that cannot be consciously known. ‘They do not know what they are doing but they are doing it,’ Marx wrote in an attempt to explain those beliefs that unconsciously produce ideas that claim to be pure, such as ‘poor people are lazy’ or ‘all right-wing people smell like Gruyere’. These are ideology or, if you like, unconscious opinion. These ideas came from somewhere. These are not pure ideas.

  Of course, we can’t hope for purity. But what we can do is offer a vulgar account of the way things like ideology and belief are formed.

  We will draw on a partial history of ideas, both Stupid and great, as they have been written down, televised and discussed in the West. We do this not only to encourage your broad reading and to legitimise our claim that The World is Fukt; we do this also in a gesture of kind desperation. In an era of despair such as ours (and every other era), it is soothing to be reminded that there are people who have written down complex accounts of the world; people who despaired and said things like, ‘They do not know what they are doing but they are doing it.’ This habit we have of doing something without knowing why is pretty much what we mean when we say Stupid.

  There is so much despair. We don’t know we are despairing, but we are doing it anyway.

  Homeopathy and past lives and plastic shamans and the promise anyone can get rich if only they work hard enough are all marks of a despairing culture. Never before in history have we so eagerly ordered so many brands of crap-in-a-cone, and we can’t even blame religion anymore for its persuasive flavour. On that note, please be warned: we have not touched on God as much as some atheists might prefer in this book because (a) He gets so much press anyhow, and (b) He’s just one more sad song in history’s great hit parade of Stupid. In this book, we don’t just wish to cruelly taunt a belief in one myth; we want to cruelly taunt belief in many.

  We should also say, in case it is not already stonkingly obvious, that we are talking about Western Stupid. The kind of Stupid that was sparked in Greek antiquity, doused in Christian tears and dried off by the European Enlightenment before it was burned to the ground by the machines of the twentieth century. This account is of a Stupid that lives in the liberal democracies of the West, so it is necessarily an account of the despair that many people dismiss as ‘first world problems’.

  While it is absolutely true that we who have licence to read books and are not obliged to walk miles for clean water should stop a good deal of our whining, it is absolutely untrue that we do not feel despair. Not to come over all emo, but there is a crisis in the stuff of ourselves. We can try to solve it with the ideology that says ‘poor people just like being that way’ or with affirmations recited in lululemon pants. Or we can try to look at the way in which the crisis unfolded. We can try to be less Stupid about many things, including the stuff of the self.

  ‘Know thyself’ was written in the forecourt of the Temple at Delphi. Socrates fancied the slogan, too. Thomas Hobbes, like Augustine long before him, was keen on the idea that to ‘read’ the self was essential if one was to make any sense of anything at all. We think, for all his faults, he had a point. Search for yourself all your life; even and especially if it hurts. Know thy Stupid self. And be liberated from Stupid. Obviously, we are paraphrasing.

  To cut a long story very short, the idea of self-knowledge holds that one can know nothing unless one knows what one knows. Or, to put it less infuriatingly: without a good grasp on one’s own critical processes, one cannot think critically.

  To know the self, then, is to take the first step towards knowledge. And to know what we are doing, even if we do it anyway. Ours is a time—we’re hardly the first to say this; the author of The Secret knows it, too—in which the self is in crisis. We despair for our own disappearance. Despair becomes a pathology that is sometimes diagnosed as mental illness and treated with drugs; that sometimes turns into a fondness for conspiracy theories and is treated by the irrational belief that refusing vaccination for your children will improve the health of the world; that sometimes leads us into the company of mystics or cults or the sedation of shopping or booze or non-stop public declarations of ‘outrage’. We’ll talk about all these things in the book. We cannot promise that we will not poke fun.

  But we will also talk with some degree of seriousness about the self that finds itself in crisis. The self no longer serves a useful social function. The self, for all the talk about its esteem and actualisation and help, that is actually surplus to the needs of a vast and ultra-rational world, one that has necessarily become one-size-fits-most. And so, as the thing we call the self—our conscious and rational minds—makes way for thousands of externally produced ‘truths’, it shrivels. It is no longer capable of easily producing its own reason.

  It should become plain quite quickly that your authors do not really agree on a single truth. And you should probably be warned: if you’re looking for a single truth about what you should do to make your life or the lives of the many better, we got zip. Our answer, over and over again, will be: think. On this, we both agree with the broad aims of the Enlightenment. We think that all individuals must dare, as Immanuel Kant said, to use their reason. This is the tricky thing about critical thinking: you have to do it yourself. It’s not something you can get manufactured offshore.

  Of course, when it comes to formulating reason on certain matters, it’s okay to outsource and to ask (non-Stupid) questions. In fact, in many cases it would be foolish not to do so. On matters like climate change, car maintenance or physical health, recourse to experts is the reasonable and the only thing. Even the more impure sciences that seek to understand market economies and social habits have something to tell us. We don’t need to come up with all the answers ourselves. Actually, we can’t. Informed cynicism is just impossible in a world that works on as many systems as ours. No individual can sit in the centre of absolute knowledge and know everything. Knowing what we do not know is the primary weapon in the war on Stupid.

  That many people do feel as though they have absolute knowledge or a single way of explaining the world is a central preoccupation of this book. What we urge, in short, is owning up to the inevitability of our ignorance so that we can reclaim the things that we know. The way out of Stupid will no
t be illuminated with a series of answers. The way out of Stupid inheres in the very exertion of understanding its darkness.

  We don’t know what we are doing. But, with this book, we refuse to continue to do it. And so, with the means we have, we will attempt to recount the history of Stupid.

  1

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

  I have longed to slap Heather Locklear for many years. This is due in no small part to her portrayal of Amanda Woodward, a hard-as-acrylic-nails Lady Ad Executive on 1990s prime-time youth soap Melrose Place, a program which, at the time of its broadcast, could not be lawfully avoided. Amanda Woodward was made of spite and capital and could very well have been the product of a motel union between Alexis Carrington of Dynasty and General Pinochet of Didn’t You Kill All Those People in a Stadium fame. I disliked her very much.

  It is not essential that you have seen the naked horror of Amanda, although, I can recommend the spectacle as a future sick pleasure. All you need to understand is that she was a lady to whom the idea of personal wealth was indivisible from personal value. If you are younger than me, think of Julie from The O.C. If you are older than me, think, of course, of Dynasty’s Alexis. If you are better read than me, just imagine Madame Bovary.

  But I, in the meantime, am delighted by this opportunity to use the work of Heather as a means to describe a particular kind of Stupid. With Heather/Amanda as our guide we will chart the birth, youth and disappointing midlife of the idea of the ‘individual’ from its Enlightenment origins to the present day. From Locke to Locklear, if you will. Yes. You’re right to groan. That was fucking awful. But not as awful as the prelude to the sort of orchestral nausea one feels when thinking rigorously about the idea of the ‘individual’.

  The Individual. Yes. It’s a difficult idea. But I don’t want you to get too panicky because we’re not coming over all What Even Is Me here. We are still going to exist by the end of this chapter and so will Amanda, Alexis and Julie. But what we might do is strip the idea of the individual down a bit. It’s off with the power suits, and back to the Enlightenment, to a time where ‘self’ as we know it was being slowly born.