A Short History of Stupid Read online

  To stare at the idea of the individual and examine what seems so natural for evidence of life might seem a kind of madness. It can be. There are those sufferers of personality or mental disorders who report feeling a loss or a fragmentation of the self and I imagine this must be horrifying. Even the mere thought of the existence of the self is enough to bring me out in hives. I can only imagine that Aristotle with his Soul or Descartes with his Cogito or Sartre with his Being were all absolutely covered in sores by the end of their formulations.

  Fortunately, not everyone is a wuss like me. Staring at the self to see if it eventually stares back continues to be a key task for many great thinkers and scientists of the mind; if you really want your head screwed on the topic of Do I Exist?, head immediately to the work of Thomas Metzinger, who combined philosophy and neurology in his 2009 theoretical horror show, The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. This work shreds all shreds of scientific evidence for self, consciousness and ego. Personally, I couldn’t finish it as I found it at least as twice as frightening as Amanda.

  Look, the point that I am making is that I completely understand that thinking Do I Even Exist? is as gratifying and relaxing as a trip to the periodontist. You want bleeding gums? Read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. And get back to me with your notes. I couldn’t finish that fucker any more than I could watch Amanda call Sydney a two-dollar hooker while having dental implants hammered into my mouth. Heidegger lost me at ‘hermeneutic circle’ and I still feel dizzy.

  We’re not going to think about the self as a philosophical concept. God, no. We’re going to think about the modern individual as a social construction.

  It is no fun to talk about the essence of the self and it certainly isn’t necessary here. But what is necessary is to examine the idea of the self’s expensively dressed first cousin: the individual.

  So. Just to be very clear and in the ardent hope that you will stay with me throughout the Enlightenment and join me for the season premiere of Melrose Place and hang around for the after-party where we will tell rude jokes to each other about liberal democracy for being such a stupid whore, I. Am. Not. Asking. You. To. Consider. The. Possibility. That. You. Do. Not. Exist. Because, unlike Amanda, I’m not a total bitch.

  Let’s dust off this idea of individuality and inspect it for cracks. It’s an idea with a very successful and dominant history. It’s an idea that continues to inform the way we organise our nations, our morals and our shopping carts. It is possible that there are bits of the idea of the individual which are useful or even natural. It is also possible that there are bits of it that need urgent renovation if we are to move into a different era of thinking and a different, possibly better, organising principle for our nations and economies. And our prime-time soaps.

  Bernard and I have agreed that we will both look, in our different ways, at how the individual has appreciated in value these past centuries. We both believe that viewing the individual entirely as a natural fact rather than something that happened contributes to Stupid. We both think that it’s worth your time to consider the possibility that there are aspects of the individual, even and especially those associated with the idea of liberty, that may not be as natural and fair as you might suppose.

  As such, Bernard has taken a rigorous approach and employs some impressive historiographical method to describe the rise of the individual and its present-day function within liberal economies. I went to Amazon and bought the boxed set of Melrose Place.

  Before we go back to the publication of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government some three centuries before Melrose Place (by the way, I reread the First Treatise for this chapter and my advice is: don’t; it is super boring, like the first season before Heather joined the cast), we should look at a few key developments in the history of the individual. And I am going to start with the beginning of the modern period.

  Oh. Shit. But that means I have to go back a few hundred years further even than Locke to talk about the idea of rights that took flight in the Enlightenment.

  Look. We have to go back to Magna Carta. Don’t grizzle.

  As it is, I’m leaving a lot of stuff about the individual and his worth out. I’ll spare us Aristotle and his ideas of the individual man of the polis. I’ll spare us the Christian philosophers. I’ll just say that for a very long time in Europe, people identified themselves chiefly as members of a community or a city or a guild or a social class such as serf or baron. They were not individuals. They did not have rights. Rights are a new thing. And they are essential to the idea of the Amanda individual.

  For the longest time in Western societies, there was no real idea of rights; there were only responsibilities. Of course, just to hammer the point home into your head like a cruel dentist, this did not mean that there was not an idea of the self or of the soul. It does mean that people went about with no idea of a ‘right’ other than those ordained by God, such as to rule or to serve.

  Some historians might argue that the artisans of the European communes began to develop an idea of individual rights as they derived it from their labour and its product. But I’m not going into that now because we haven’t got all day. So. Magna Carta time.

  What we find in Magna Carta is the first written expression of individual rights. Now, it’s important to remember that these rights were limited to the handful of self-interested nobles with the balls and the goods to confront King John in 1215. The charter, which sought to limit the power of the monarch, conferred rights only on those rich enough to ask for them. It is not exactly a statement of universal liberty; it exists to uphold the rights of feudal barons. (Aptly, an early copy was sold to a private equity businessman in 2007 for US$21.3 million.)

  At the time of writing, Magna Carta remains on display at the US National Archives next to the US Declaration of Independence, the document that made Amanda Woodward possible and to which we shall soon return.

  So let’s agree that Magna Carta is the first legal expression of individual rights and say that the Renaissance gives us the first cultural expression of the individual.

  The Renaissance in Italy is seen by some as the birthplace of the individual. The individual would eventually become the building block of modernity that would find its most doleful expression in ‘I’m worth it’.

  We need a few words on the emerging individual of the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries before we get to John Locke, Heather/Amanda, and the contemporary idea of the liberated self and how she functions to keep us paralysed in high-heeled Stupid.

  Right: the Renaissance and the birth of the individual.

  The formative work on this idea is by the nineteenth-century Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt’s 1867 work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a radical break from previous historical method in its use of art and culture instead of just plain old stories of conflict. Obviously, someone like Karl Marx had no time for a guy who thought the history of all existing society is the history of pretty paintings. Apparently, though, there’s a bit of a soap opera that joins Marx to Burckhardt. They had a good mutual friend in Bettina Brentano; a Prussian writer, champion of Romanticism and muse to famous German poets. It is likely that the men met in Brentano’s salon and we can only imagine that Marx kept yelling, It’s the Economy, Stupid as Burckhardt countered with oil paintings of hot young individuals.

  There is an argument to be made that Burckhardt is the sine qua non of cultural studies; that without him, we would not be so accustomed to looking for evidence of the way the world works through the art and culture it produces. We wouldn’t, for example, be inclined to tolerate my proposition that through the work of Heather Locklear, we can see evidence of what the individual has become. But thanks to Burckhardt, we are able to address the slogan ‘I’m worth it’ for what it tells us about ourselves and our era.

  Of course, the method of Burckhardt was, in my view, mildly Stupid and itself was claimed by Stupid in time; i
n recent years, people have begun to see art and culture as not just evidence of the way a society works but, in fact, as the reason a society works in a particular way. For example, one can read daily that the lack of ‘real’ women on catwalks or the over-representation of white people in Hollywood cinema or the consumerism of Christmas are the starting point for particular social practices and not, in fact, a reflection of them. These are all now seen as not only proofs of the crime of injustice but the perpetrator itself. But we’ll get back to this arse-backward idea of social engineering through culture in the chapter on postmodern Stupid. For the moment, we are going to finish this stuff about the Renaissance as it was first described by Burckhardt.

  This might seem like a terrible digression; more ridiculous than the plot points in Dynasty. But in order to get an understanding of the evolving individual and how she is understood, it is best to look at her both as Burckhardt sees her in the culture and as Marx sees her in material reality.

  I’m going to let Burckhardt do much of the heavy lifting on his own account. In a much-quoted passage from his book, he says of the emerging Renaissance individual:

  [B]oth sides of human consciousness—the side turned to the world and that turned inward—lay, as it were, beneath a common veil, dreaming or half awake. The veil was woven of faith, childlike prejudices, and illusion; seen through it, world and history appeared in strange hues; man recognized himself only as a member of a race, a nation, a party, a corporation, a family, or in some other general category. It was in Italy that this veil first melted into thin air, and awakened an objective perception and treatment of the state and all things of this world in general; but by its side, and with full power, there also arose the subjective; man becomes a self-aware individual and recognises himself as such.

  This is a nice account of an individual that didn’t really exist before and came to life in this period. I just happen to think that the art didn’t create it so much as it documented it.

  Burckhardt doesn’t agree. He sees art as being as transformative as a document of property laws. The Renaissance, he says, gave the world the possibility of great personalities such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian. The idea of individual personality became possible, says Burckhardt, to those familiar with the charm of these artists. Great men not only represented realistic individual subjects in their work—before, there had only been supernatural icons—but themselves hinted at the possibility that an individual could make his mark on history.

  As mentioned, Marx had a very different view of things as they unfolded in Renaissance Europe, and if he did ever meet Burckhardt, they would have almost certainly come to blows. The historical materialist—that is, the person who sees the material requirements of life as the chief force that organises and changes societies—would have an economic explanation for this change in perception. He would have said that the art was an effect of the economic conditions that produced it just as much as the emerging intellectual idea of the individual was a result of the slow rise of the bourgeoisie. ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,’ said Marx in The German Ideology.

  To be both candid and unfashionable, I’m going to say that I mostly agree with Marx. The ruling ideas of the Renaissance age can be seen, and were not formed, in the pictures.

  It is a very individual idea to believe in the redeeming power of art and the artist. We can see art as beautiful, of course, and we can probably agree to defend it and to see it as an expression of its time. But to see it as something that truly functions to change us may be a little naive. When the great Peter Cook was asked about the opening of his London stand-up comedy club in the 1960s, he said that it would be based on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets . . . which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’. I’m not going argue that the cabaret of Weimar was not good stuff. But I will say that I think powerful ideas, like that of the individual, evolve around social organisation more than they do ladies in tights.

  You can read about the prevailing conditions of the Renaissance one weekend and come to your own conclusions about whether it was powerful art or powerful market forces that changed the world into a place full of individuals. Or you can say it was both. Whatever you decide, you can agree that powerful ideas such as that of the individual and his attendant rights aren’t simply beautiful things that just happen. They are ideas that form. They are not ‘natural’. (Hey, nothing is.)

  Let’s think about the individual and how we see her as someone with ‘rights’. Now, we suppose this to be everyone. ‘Human rights’ is a universal concept. But go back in time to the birth of rights and see that Magna Carta protects only the rights of the nobles, while its companion, the Declaration of Independence, protects only the rights of white men. These ‘rights’ are the birth certificates of the modern individual. The pictures of the Renaissance are its baby photos.

  We must remember Peter Cook’s wonderful crack about the power of art that did so much to stop Hitler. Art did no more to stop or dissuade Hitler than it did to start or encourage him. The terrible ‘approved’ art of Nazi Germany is fascism’s baby photo.

  I take the opportunity to bang on about the role of art and cultural artefacts because I think it’s worth making the point that none of this stuff can really shape history. Not like a document of property laws can. The most it can hope to do, at the time of its creation, is endorse or, less often, decry the conditions that produced it. We might see art and ideas as nothing but commentary on economics. When we see Amanda/Heather, the fade-resistant blonde, declare ‘I’m worth it’, to the casual Marxist she is declaring her value in economic terms. And her value was determined centuries ago by this chapter’s Leading Man, John Locke. And we really must meet Locke before we get to the L’Oréal commercial in which Heather once starred and of which he would have approved.

  Locke was to Thomas Jefferson as Aaron Spelling was to Heather Locklear. He provided all the ideas necessary for both the American Revolution and 1990s power-dressing.

  Locke, a seventeenth-century scholar and physician, was, by many accounts, a discreet man whose radical ideas, first published anonymously, could not be guessed. Most unlike Heather, he was, as described by the Bishop of Oxford in correspondence, a ‘master of taciturnity’. Quiet he may have been, but one hundred years after publication, his was a battle cry that won America and can still be clearly heard today. Locke is in us as surely as there is air in Heather’s hair. Or, indeed, in the hair of Beyoncé, another star of the L’Oréal campaign. It was Locke who wrote down the idea of universal liberty. It was Locke who clearly articulated the idea of our natural rights.

  The idea of natural rights now feels so, well, natural. But, like Heather’s hair, natural rights have a history and a little help. Nothing comes to us ex nihilo and there were precedents for Locke’s ideas of natural rights such as those we have already reviewed and in the work of other thinkers. Locke would never have written as he did without Hobbes; Thomas Hobbes was to John Locke as Beverly Hills 90210 was to Melrose. (There could be a good argument made that Immanuel Kant was Models Inc., actually. But even I’m not quite ridiculous enough to try that.)

  So there is a lot to say about Hobbes but you can read it in Leviathan. The short version is that Hobbes is widely regarded as the stern great-uncle of liberal democracy while Locke emerges as its sensitive dad. Hobbes devised social contract theory which relied on solving the mystery of human morality. To do this, he came up with the ‘state of nature’ to describe humans as they would behave in an imaginary, pre-civil society. What he came up with was, pretty much, Melrose Place during a season finale. We’re naturally inclined to a state of war.

  Obviously, there are problems with imagining Humans As They Really Are; Aristotle had abandoned this chore millennia before when he said that man was, by nature, social. Hobbes didn
’t think so and urged for the organisation of the just state by villains like those on The O.C. or Melrose.

  Locke also used the state of nature to describe human behaviour. He saw it more as the early relationship of Marissa and Ryan in The O.C.: faithful and governed by an innate sense of right and wrong. While Hobbes held that peace needed to be imposed by a central force—that would be Julie, in The O.C.—Locke thought it was the natural state. But he also thought that progress and prosperity was the extension of our natural state and, to achieve this, we really needed to make more stuff.

  Property is really central to Locke just as it is to Amanda, the owner of the Melrose Place apartment block. Actually, Locke was pretty shameless about the esteem in which he held property; the well-known phrase in the US Declaration of Independence ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ was originally ‘life, liberty, and estate’ in Locke’s Second Treatise. He would use the term ‘happiness’ in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But, make no mistake, Locke saw the preservation and the accumulation of property as a moral imperative. (So did Thomas Jefferson, although he wasn’t so obvious about it.)

  Locke describes property ownership as a moral imperative that comes from no less an authority than God. God, in whom Locke was at pains to believe, wants us to own stuff. Read Locke and you’ll find the antecedent of the disgraced clergy of the Praise the Lord (PTL) ministry. In 2003, Tammy Faye of PTL released a self-help book for Christians called I Will Survive . . . And You Will, Too! Unfortunately, the prophecy was wrong and she died just a few years later, but not before I interviewed her for Melbourne newspaper The Age. I asked Tammy, who had by then divorced PTL big cheese Jim Bakker—a man disgraced by extramarital indiscretion and later convicted of fraud related to the construction of a Christian theme park—if she didn’t think that her wealth, reportedly expressed in the form of solid gold bathroom taps on the PTL private jet, was not a little un-Christian. She answered me, ‘No, I don’t. The Bible says that the worker is worthy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being able to live in a nice home and drive in a nice car.’