A Short History of Stupid Read online

  For both sides, inside every working-class person is a bourgeois just like them that needs to be set free. As a consequence of their joint efforts, the average human type will rise to the heights of a healthy small business owner, a nonagenarian self-funded retiree, or a McMansion resident with a vegie patch.

  And above this ridge, new peaks of Stupidity will rise.

  BK

  * Similar logic is to be found in the warning of the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that the internet allowed ‘unfettered ideas’ to radicalise people in their ‘lounge rooms’, conjuring a nightmare scenario in which you might be relaxing watching television or enjoying some time with your family, when you’d suddenly be transformed into a jihadist ready to wage war on the unbeliever.

  * Named after Jan Huss, who was executed by the Church after being given a promise of safe conduct to the Council of Constance—promises to a heretic didn’t need to be kept, it was decided. That turned out to be probably the most expensive broken promise in history, resulting in fifteen years of war in Czech lands, the complete desolation of Bohemia and the Church forced to accepted the Hussites until the Reformation overtook events in the sixteenth century.

  * There are the kids again!

  * Older readers might remember the seventies factoid that ‘the average American child will have watched 8000 murders on television by the age of twelve’.

  * The Australian Bureau of Statistics has expressed concern about the accuracy of suicide statistics, in particular those from before 2007, but the issue relates to underreporting. That is, the likely level of suicide was even higher in the 1990s and early 2000s compared to now.

  * The reader will have noted that ‘epidemic’ is a recurring word in paternalist-speak

  * Again, this is unlikely to be uniform—women from indigenous backgrounds, women with disabilities and women with abusive partners are more likely to suffer sexual abuse.

  5

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

  Once, I had an epiphany in yoga class. It was not spiritual. It was not transcendent. It had nothing to do with the downward dog. In fact, it happened when I was upright in the foyer and it, like me at the time, was pretty straightforward: Someone needs to tell this place it’s Stupid.

  Someone did, as things turned out.

  Yes. I am going to tell you a Powerful Personal Story of exactly the kind we insisted it was Stupid to tell in our third chapter on the negative Stupid of positive storytelling.

  What was it I said? Something about how the Inspiring Journey of the TED talk and personal myth is now so necessary to the communication of a thought that all thoughts must become personal stories. Something about how the pleasure of crying and laughing along to a story is now accepted and demanded as the only effective means to receive an idea. Something about how the need to laugh, cry and identify with This One Video That Will Change Everything You Know About Disabled Kids Forever actually crushes the possibility of difficult thought. Anything that does not fit the parameters of a Teachable Moment is considered surplus and has no value and now the Oprahfication of wisdom is so complete that big ideas are cut down to shareable stories that can say nothing more than ‘the individual is so important’.

  Things haven’t changed since we read that chapter. It is still the case that our new custom of demanding a personal story—and this need is reflected in the now common use of the word ‘narrative’ to describe even political campaigns—is producing Stupid. The well-written form of This American Life might convince us of its depth and universality, but it is actually feeding our long-held hunger for the low light of false enlightenment. And so My Powerful Story—which actually happens to be about a seriously ill friend who Beat the Odds and Changed Things For the Better—is just another form of narrated chicanery.

  Well. Yes. In one sense, it kind of is a bit shit of me. I will reveal some Personal Details about my own adolescence and some Inspiring Stories You Won’t Believe about my friend at a yoga class. But I do so not only because they use the emotional shorthand of this Stupid storytelling age. I do so because our stories were, as it turned out, at odds with a world of teachable moments. And I do so to reveal the hypocrisy of the Safe Space that demands safe, edited and acceptable stories. Our stories were rejected. They were surplus and valueless in their lack of teachable moments.

  I do not wish to claim these stories, or any stories, have intrinsic value. But I do want to show how a story, or an idea, that threatens the order of things is easily rejected. And I want to talk about how the safe story is also a sanitised one.

  My friend Kylie has one of the most important-sounding diseases of which I’ve ever heard. As far as ailment names go, multifocal motor neuropathy, or MMN, is pretty serious. Not as serious as cancer, but pretty close—and even closer at the time of her diagnosis, which preceded by a year or two the wide availability of blood-based treatments on which MMN patients now depend.

  Once, MMN was a near-guarantee of paralysis; its flares were treated with steroids and its progression was the business of fate, not of medicine. I saw how Kylie’s motor nerves had begun to deteriorate when we went to The Age Christmas party together: my glamorous, pint-sized friend was unable to wear her heels.

  ‘The foot-droop I can take,’ she said. ‘But going to a party in flats is too much.’

  Kylie is now, as she long has been, a bright and stubborn journalist, and so her approach to the management of a potentially disabling illness was bright and stubborn. She was informed less by positive thinking and much, much more by evidence-based medicine. Kylie was moved by a need for outcomes and these she pursued with the bolshy expertise that serves good hacks who like good heels so well. That she did this while falling over, gripping on to hand rails and getting stuck while crossing our city’s tram lines lent real grace to her scholarship.

  A year or so after Kylie’s diagnosis, she was given a treatment that restored her to strappy sandals within a month. It was one of those research miracles that makes you want to hug anyone in a white coat. But access to the treatment was quickly dropped in a bureaucratic toilet. The blood supply needed to produce the modifying drug had been cut off due to institutional Stupidity. She cried a bit and then she acted. Kylie became something of a lay immunologist; she campaigned in the media and lobbied government to open up the blood lines. And she didn’t stop until the supply for her own and other immune diseases were flowing.

  But Kylie’s tenacity is hardly my point. Who am I, Deepak, and what is this, A Story of the Power of One? No. It’s a story, more or less, about Kylie’s bung foot and what happened to it at yoga class. (It’s also a reminder that you should give blood. Seriously. People are depending on that stuff.) But before we get to the yoga class, I need to assure you that Kylie is a very reasonable person. I do this to provide some mooring for a story which takes place in an ocean of woo; in a batty yoga class where I, in fact, am the star nutty mariner. Call me Ishmael. I made the booking for the Bikram class. Yes. It was me.

  There was a time I found shelter in ‘holistic’ (read: unscientific and flattering) ‘healing’ (read: rip-off bollocks with a whale-call soundtrack). There was a period I spent a lot of time in ‘spaces’ described as ‘safe’. In fact, if you care to check my youthful oeuvre, you might even find me using the term ‘Western medicine’. And you could, if you looked hard, find me publicly defending the right to a ‘safe space’ for women at Sydney University. I badgered the union for allocation of a Women’s Room that, I can tell you with absolute and embarrassed certainty, was frequented by no more than a dozen women. All of whom were my friends. Three of whom I had sex with. In the ‘safe space’.

  Once, I sought ‘safe spaces’.

  Is it any wonder Bernard Keane used to anonymously troll me on a nasty blog calling me (although he denies this) ‘The most intellectually empty cunt to emerge from Canberra since Margaret Reid’?

  He had a point. I recently looked at an old boo
k I had written which contained a dreadful chapter recommending cranberry juice for the treatment of bladder infection. Like many people who frequented the ‘safe space’ of alternative medicine, where queries about scientific method are forbidden because UNSAFE, I believed that fruit drink could save you from renal failure. This canard was so widespread that the US National Institute of Health reviewed all studies on the effectiveness of cranberry juice as a prophylactic to urinary tract infection in women and found that it tasted very nice with vodka. A 2012 meta-analysis found that cranberry products ‘cannot currently be recommended for the prevention of UTIs’.

  The safe space of my naturopath’s suite, where faith and acceptance were privileged over science and deduction, was not only Stupid but unsafe.

  Safe space. If it is not a safe space, then it should have a ‘trigger warning’.

  About ten years ago, I began seeing the term ‘trigger warning’ at the beginning of news stories. At first glance, this just looked like a new version of the old courtesy that gave you warning of carnage in case you were a ‘sensitive viewer’. There is no problem with this old technique at all; in some cases, it is just plain evil not to offer your audience the chance to look away. Take, for example, the case of suicide. In Australia, the matter of suicide has been studied with some care and it has been found that the description of a suicide—its method, its perceived ‘causes’, its location—causes a spike in suicides in the weeks following its report. The thing called ‘suicide contagion’ is real and measurable and the public discussion of suicide should be appended, if not preceded by, a warning that this discussion might be troubling and here is the number you call if you’d like to get help.

  That kind of ‘trigger warning’ is good sense. There are other cautionary notes we see in the electronic culture that also seem utilitarian. Pictures of war or detailed descriptions of pain should, if they need to be made at all, continue to have their extreme violence heralded. There are some stories so brutal that we can assume their public telling may not be in the best interests of some of the people subject to their unfolding. This is a simple practical measure. Your children might be watching the news with you when Chelsea Manning’s video of atrocity in Iraq airs. You deserve the chance to change the channel or get them out of the room. Our most vulnerable citizens are surely entitled to the chance to avoid the extreme. But now some of our most powerful citizens are demanding a safe space as well.

  In 2014, student politicians at the University of California passed a resolution to institute mandatory trigger warnings on class material. It was reported that a student who had previously been a victim of sexual assault felt threatened by the screening of a video that referenced this crime. The student felt that the stress triggered by this viewing not only compounded her distress but impeded her ability to learn.

  In 2013, staff at Oberlin College, Ohio, were advised that potentially ‘triggering’ material should be removed from the syllabus. Again, it was held that depictions of injustice, especially those which could potentially remind students of the ‘racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression’ to which they may have previously been subject, was an impediment to learning.

  These may be sincere attempts to protect the right of the socially maligned to learn. They could also turn out to be an inadvertent attack on the possibility of learning. And, perversely, learning, in particular, about social injustice. You can’t understand conflict without having it described. To learn about the French Revolution without a potentially troubling account of the Terrors makes about as much good sense as learning French without access to its verbs.

  Look. I am not an ultra-con nutbag who thinks everyone should just harden the fuck up. I don’t think your kids should have unfiltered access to violent things they don’t yet understand. I don’t think victims of sexual abuse should just ‘get over it’ and accept the prurient coverage of rape as news media entertainment to which they are so often subject without warning. I am ardently opposed to irresponsible discussion of suicide and I am in the regular habit of reporting guideline violations. Free speech must be a right, but its broad exercise is a serious responsibility. I will fucking tell your boss or the press council if you fuck up because I believe one of the best traditions of top-down journalism is the responsible recognition of one’s power. The mass-media worker should know by rote those things likely to trigger stress on a large scale. But the academic must never be subject to these sorts of constraints.

  There’s a time and a place for serious discussion of abuse and conflict. It is not on your television at 6 p.m. It is in your universities. Electronic media is indiscriminate in its reach and so must be discriminating in its framing of material. Anyone could be watching. An academic lecture, on the other hand, addresses a very particular audience who are there to develop their own powers of discrimination. In other words, university itself functions as a ‘trigger warning’. The study of humanities in particular is an elaborate attempt to frame all the pain of the world. I couldn’t get out of bed for a week when I first learned about the systematised rape deployed as a weapon in the Balkan wars. It was Very Triggering. But all stories about conflict are triggering and unsafe. You could call a first-year module in international relations Trigger Studies, I suppose. But the pain of learning about the world, I think, is inferred by all decent students.

  I once expected trigger warnings and frequented safe spaces: places where the price of admission is to agree. Well, agreement and twenty-five dollars for fashionable yoga. Plus an extra dollar for losers who did not have their own yoga mats.

  ‘This is a safe space,’ said the young, belligerently calm white woman whose inner glow was offset with a bright artificial tan the colour of chicken tikka. ‘Welcome. This is a safe space.’ And we signed the form indemnifying the safe space in case it killed us.

  I hadn’t heard the term used since the early nineties. But here it was again in a new century. And it has subsequently re-emerged in contexts for which it was never intended. Yoga classes. Speaking events. I even saw it used in the window of a beauty salon once.

  You know the place; one of Enya’s bastards continues a wilful tradition of pan-pipes. There’s a Buddha next to an oil-burner next to a display of take-home ‘botanicals’ as used in the ‘Goddess Array’ facial which promises to balance your oily T-zone and chakras as never before. There are almost some ornamental references to Bali, here. And Japan. Definitely India. There is a treatment named in the honour of Deepak. Probably. I don’t know. I didn’t go in.

  I remember thinking I’d prefer a guarantee of hygiene and tepid wax temperature over one for safe spiritual space any day. I had my labia groomed elsewhere. But, I’d learned my lesson by then and have become perhaps only the second or third most intellectually empty cunt to emerge from Canberra since Margaret Reid. I went to a literary afternoon in 2013 where one of the writers said she felt confident reading out her awful work because organisers had assured her it was a safe space. In 2011, I was asked not to attend a homosexual arts festival on the grounds that it was a safe space. (To be fair, I had written an editorial asserting that a festival promoting homosexuals in the arts was about as desperately needed as a festival promoting white privately educated men in politics.) If art feels the need to call itself safe, it should not also be entitled to call itself art.

  Art is not safe. Thinking thoughts of consequence is not safe. And neither, as it turned out, was the yoga class. We had an unsafe afternoon.

  There is, of course, sometimes a civic need for safe spaces. I should make a point about what I recall as the etymology of the term because it didn’t always mean ‘an assembly of dills committed to say nothing even mildly provocative lest it disrupt the circle jerk’. These days, the term is used to advertise readings of awful feminist poetry and end-of-year performances for remedial circus arts graduates. Back in the eighties, a ‘safe space’ quite specifically meant refuge for kids turfed out of their family
homes due to queer orientation or a women’s refuge.

  Leisure-progressives, including myself and my girlfriends at Sydney University, stole ‘safe space’ away from homeless people and used it as a way to describe ‘a room full of people who will uncritically applaud reeking word turds’. Leisure-progressivism has the habit of co-opting a sense of terror; it needs to in order to justify itself. For the endurance of, say, a poem by Maya Angelou, fear of something worse than the poem itself is necessary. I mean: Maya. This woman was the go-to laureate for all sorts of progressivism-tinged major events from Clinton’s inauguration to Oprah’s last show. Goodness, the occasional verse she wrote for Oprah was especially awful. She may as well have just said ‘Everyone gets a car! Everyone gets a car!’ in that gravitas-enriched stateswoman voice. I know why the caged bird sings too, Maya. It was trying to drown out the sound of your vile retching, like: