A Short History of Stupid Read online

  Tammy went on to quote a verse of the New Testament that hazily justified the accumulation of sweet, sweet cash. But the Bible never did so well in its holy rationale for wealth and property ownership as Locke. In chapter five of the Second Treatise, we begin to see how America was made both so godly and so rich:

  God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational . . .

  It is not just our right but our holy responsibility to better ourselves and, in so doing, better the world. To be frank, Locke makes Greed is Good sound like a greeting card. The guy developed a rationale for ownership that would be offensive were it not so compellingly written.

  When we think of the ‘inalienable’ ‘truths’ and ‘natural’ ‘rights’ expressed in the Declaration of Independence, we see them as the foundation of all that is good. We see them as pure and self-evident not, as Marx would have it, the self-interested ideas of a dominant class. But it’s there in Locke and it’s there in the nation he inspired: we are gods who need to own property. And this idea of the individual has stayed with us if not unchallenged, then certainly undefeated for centuries. Growth, production and the mastery of natural resources are what individuals were put here on earth to accomplish.

  You can’t read Locke and you can’t look at the liberal democracies for which he provided an instructional manual and ignore this idea of property that will be owned and worked by the most moral men. The Treatise is no Magna Carta in that it never explicitly passed into law, but it is still an influential charter of rights that extends to a limited number of individuals. It offers the sense of morality required by a new middle class for its growth; growth that depends on a hierarchy.

  Locke ostensibly confers these rights on all humans. You are a god. You are an ‘individual’. Now, go ahead and prosper. Those of you who don’t are clearly less godly. In other words, if you fuck up and don’t accumulate property, it’s not because you were denied it; it’s just because you are less of a human. It’s your fault you haven’t claimed your rights.

  Some critiques of the Treatise argue that Locke’s theory of liberty survives without God and some insist that God is central. Either way, Locke introduced to us the idea of an individual whose highest achievement was the accumulation of property and while Locke may not fall apart without God, he certainly falls apart without property.

  Liberal democracy, of course, falls apart without property. It is Locke’s suggestion that property is consonant with morality that stays with us—even though God doesn’t—and informs the very idea of our individuality today. And what I want to urge is that to continue to assume that morals can be made into property is, if not actually Stupid in itself, a real barrier to life beyond Stupid.

  If we cannot get past the view of ourselves as mini-gods who express their morality by the accumulation of wealth, then, I suggest, we are not thinking clearly.

  •

  By the year 2000, my memory of Locklear had begun to dim. Fade-resistant dye brought it back to vivid colour. Appointed to say ‘I’m worth it’ by cosmetics giant L’Oréal, the California gal hit screens with a campaign based on self-esteem.

  I remember being shocked to hear the boast ‘I’m worth it’ when it aired for the first time in Australia. I was more recently shocked to find that this catchphrase, conceived by a young copywriter, had been airing since the 1970s.

  L’Oréal’s historians proudly recount the circumstances under which this Lockean catchphrase was coined. One of Locke’s latter-day makers, a then twenty-three-year-old woman by the name of Ilon Specht, captured ‘a new spirit of feminism’. A social revolution’ prompted the I’m Worth It slogan in the time of Female Enlightenment.

  I’m hardly the first to express my disappointment with a feminism that had but one critique of liberal democracy. To wit: women weren’t terribly involved in it. That’s not the problem with liberal democracy. The problem is that it sees morality as the same as ownership. You are worth it.

  You’re worth it. This is a pure expression of liberal democracy. But this was a pure expression of popular feminism, too. It is unreasonable to suppose that women had not come to believe that it was only natural to want to accumulate goods, wealth and property just as much as Locke’s male mini-makers had. You are a mini-goddess. Your loftiest moral goal is to accumulate wealth. Your liberty inheres in mastery over capital. Your moral value is gauged by your net worth. Ergo, you’re worth it.

  In a detailed-but-uncritical piece on L’Oréal, Malcolm Gladwell sought out the I’m Worth It girl for the New Yorker in March 1999. Called ‘True Colors’, the piece reads like character notes for Peggy in Mathew Weiner’s Mad Men. It’s the inclination of advertising creatives to see themselves as the vanguard of social change; and to be fair, in Locke’s world, where property is moral heft, they probably are. Specht is no exception as she recalls the lack of freedom she experienced in her industry. She was particularly cranky, she tells Gladwell, on the day she was assigned the L’Oréal job and could see but not directly experience the liberty of America. In a fit of anger, she wrote the ad with the tagline first brought to my attention by Heather Locklear. Suddenly, she made her own declaration of independence:

  I use the most expensive hair colour in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the colour. I expect great colour. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m . . .

  And Gladwell reports that Specht, who is reciting the copy from memory some twenty-five years after she wrote it, pauses to beat her own chest.

  . . . worth it.

  Locke’s work was, in time, gratefully and greedily received by a people hungry for a moral justification for wealth, and with L’Oréal, we see the same rationale used for consumption. This new, mutant and female Enlightenment justified its freedom to spend just as the founding fathers justified their freedom to own.

  In later decades, when the undisguised avarice of Locke-Lear had become unfashionable, there was a slight shift in selling hair dye. Thomas Jefferson concealed it. L’Oréal, with newer spokesmodels, would too. The persistent stain of liberal democracy keeps refiguring itself subtly and we go from unabashed I’m Worth It to the kinder promise from Beyoncé that You’re Worth It.

  These days, people like to dress things up in the drag of compassion. In the seventeenth century, John Locke donned the robes of a priest to sell his idea of the individual to whom greed is a genuine moral good. The individual writes others out of its charter of rights and we accept, thanks to Locke and a lot of hair dye and several seasons of Melrose Place, that this is natural. It’s as natural as Preference by L’Oréal. It is as useful to a new way of looking at ourselves as changing the colour of our hair.

  I am not saying here that property ownership is intrinsically bad. I am saying that we should question the idea that it is intrinsically good or intrinsic, in any way, to our character.

  The very idea of our character is not built on art or ads; it is built on bricks and mortar. If we don’t take the time to at least examine its foundations, then we are at high risk of maintaining the Stupid. Think about the idea of the individual and how we see her morality so bound up with what she owns. Think about a way out of the ‘individual rights’ that are expressed only in ownership and are made no more moral by virtue of the fact that they have been extended from nobles to career girls. Think about how the idea of the individual implies exclusion. Because you’re worth it.

  HR

  2

  Suffer the little children: Enlightenment and denialism

  Measles—Called ‘Gift from a Goddess’ in Sanskrit, measles can help to mature the immune system
, may help prevent autoimmune illnesses such as cancer,* asthma and allergies in later life.

  —Someone on the internet, later repeated by the ‘Australian Vaccination Network’

  The WHO’s newest measles summary in the Weekly Epidemiological Record reports more than 26,000 cases of measles in 36 European countries from January–October 2011 . . . These outbreaks have caused nine deaths, including six in France, and 7288 hospitalizations.

  —World Health Organization

  Something odd happened among Australian voters after the 2013 federal election, in which the conservative Coalition defeated the Australian Labor Party: progressive and conservative voters swapped economic mindsets, as if they’d opened up their skulls and handed each other their brains. A week after the election, according to a poll conducted by Essential Research, 68 per cent of voters who backed the Coalition believed economic conditions in Australia would get better in the subsequent twelve months. By contrast, just 16 per cent of Labor voters thought they would. They were more likely to believe conditions would get worse: 59 per cent of Labor voters thought the Australian economy would deteriorate.

  But barely eight months earlier, when Labor was still in government, it was the reverse: 50 per cent of Labor voters thought the economy would improve in the subsequent twelve months while only 21 per cent of Coalition voters thought it would. Instead, 51 per cent of them thought it would get worse; just 21 per cent of Labor voters agreed.

  The Australian economy hadn’t changed much in the interim. It continued to be a low-inflation, low-interest rate, low-unemployment economy with a much-envied triple-A sovereign credit rating. By the standards of most of the last thirty years in Australia, the economy looked good. What had happened? With their side in power, conservative voters dramatically changed their view of the economy, seeing sunshine and prosperity when, merely months earlier, all had looked dismal. With their side out of power, Labor voters went from bullish to bearish in a heartbeat. It was like a body-swap comedy as imagined by economists.

  Partisanship even affected how voters saw their own personal finances: if your side of politics is out of power, you’re more worried about your financial situation; if your side is in, your affairs take on a much rosier hue. It’s one thing to view the economy—a nebulous entity that frequently produces mixed signals—through a political filter but, weirdly, voters even do so about something they have first-hand knowledge of: their own money.

  This has been demonstrated in other countries as well as Australia, particularly the United States, where independent voters can provide a third viewpoint for pollsters on economic and financial matters in addition to Republican and Democrat voters.

  This is a specific kind of Stupid: denialism, a refusal to change one’s viewpoint even in the face of indisputable data.* Denialism isn’t scepticism, not even, per Descartes, radical scepticism; scepticism implies a willingness to accept evidence if it meets a certain standard. Denialism is a refusal to accept any evidence, no matter how good or epistemologically sound—unless it says what you want it to say.

  Australia went through a fascinating period of economic denialism from 2010–13, with conservative voters and business figures refusing point blank to acknowledge the strong performance of the Australian economy because it was a progressive government presiding over it. Conservative voters thought the economy was in trouble, and even disagreed with economic data that showed how well the economy was doing; business leaders insisted the productivity of Australian workers had gone into reverse under Labor, whereas official data showed strong growth in labour productivity; conservative politicians warned of a wages explosion even as data revealed slowing wages growth for the country’s workers.

  It’s less clear whether the same flip-flop occurred when the Australian government last changed, in 2007, but the Australian economy was much stronger that year than in 2013, and the Coalition still lost office. When conservative prime minister John Howard channelled Harold Macmillan and told Australians—with perfect accuracy—that they’d never had it so good, his comment instantly became a potent weapon for his opponents, as if Howard had uttered some unspeakable heresy. He lost not merely government but his own seat in Parliament, only the second Australian leader ever to do so.

  But, interestingly, this kind of denialism doesn’t necessarily flow through to consumer behaviour. The same polling shows conservative voters made consumption choices at similar or often higher levels than progressive voters in 2012. That is, despite professing to view the economy and their own financial circumstances more dimly, conservative voters reported making major purchases, such as new cars, new homes and overseas holidays, at rates higher than progressive voters, who viewed the economy and their own circumstances more positively. So, thankfully, economic denialism seems to have little real-world impact. It’s more accurately seen as an footnote of human nature revealed by our obsession with opinion polling, but without any consequences—unless you’re a professional pollster.

  But that’s just your starter for this particular form of Stupid. There are other forms of denialism, and they have a lot more impact than voters seeing the economy through brown-tinted glasses because the party they support is out of power.

  Climate change denialism

  While refusal to accept anthropogenic climate change shifts a little over time and reacts to temporary things like extremes in weather, broadly it’s been the same across Anglophone countries for some years: a small minority outright reject that there’s any global warming, a sizeable minority refuse to accept any human contribution to warming, and about half or a little more of people accept what the world’s climate scientists have been saying for a generation about human-caused global warming.

  In Australia, the numbers haven’t shifted much for some time—in late 2013, just over half of Australians believed in human-caused climate change while 36 per cent believed it was entirely natural. In 2012, a Yale/George Mason University poll found around 54 per cent of Americans believed global warming was caused by humans and 30 per cent thought it was natural; in 2013, a poll by UK specialist outlet Carbon Brief found 56 per cent of Britons believed humans were responsible and 33 per cent said it was natural. In Canada, the numbers were a little different—58 per cent and 20 per cent, according to an Angus Reid public opinion poll, with another 13 per cent rejecting it entirely.

  So, overall, in English-speaking countries there’s a solid chunk of people, between a fifth and a third of the population depending on where you are, who acknowledge climate is changing but refuse to see that humans have played any role in that change, in addition to a small number who refuse outright to accept what even some aggressive climate denialists now admit: that it’s warmer than it used to be.

  And we know who these people are. Data from Australian polling shows that there is a perfect correlation between age and a propensity to believe global warming is natural, rather than human-induced. The key age is around fifty-five; after that, people are more likely to dismiss anthropogenic climate change than accept it. Climate change denialists are not merely likely to be baby boomers, but are more likely to be male than female, and tend to be politically conservative. UK data suggests British denialists are older, conservative and male. Data from the US shows they’re usually old, male, conservative and white. If greenhouse emissions also caused erectile dysfunction and prostrate problems, climate change would have been stopped dead decades ago.

  These are, not coincidentally, the very people most challenged by social and economic change. Older white males grew up in a world that gave them social, economic and political pre-eminence, a world in which they could legitimately expect to have their own needs perceived as a priority by society, even if they were blue-collar males. They now live in a world that accords them less and less priority, whether it’s politically, economically or sexually, a world in which they’re expected to compete like everyone else. Climate change denialism is thus partly an angry reaction to a changing world—not one with a warming
climate so much as a more inclusive society, a more diverse political class, a more competitive economy.

  It also means that institutions traditionally controlled by older, conservative males, such as corporations, political parties and mainstream media outlets, are more likely to be climate change denialists than the rest of Anglophone societies—which is one of the reasons why in the West we’ve done so little about climate change despite so much evidence of the damage it will cause. Large corporations have channelled vast amounts of funding into anti-climate change science campaigns. In the US, Republican politicians have been strongly hostile to climate action; in Australia, the conservative Coalition threw out a leader committed to climate action and replaced him with a denialist who claimed climate change science was ‘absolute crap’ and who, once elected prime minister, set about dismantling a successful carbon pricing scheme established by the previous government.

  The strong correlation between political conservatism and climate change denialism is likely the result of several factors: conservative political parties have stronger links with business, and particularly big business, many sections of which have a strong interest in preventing action to address climate change; and government intervention of the kind required to address climate change, even if via a market-based mechanism, is inconsistent with the small-government rhetoric of modern conservatives. But it also appears to derive from the conviction that climate change is a political rather than scientific issue. Framing it thus requires conservatives to oppose the existence of climate change and any action to prevent it because to acknowledge its existence is, they believe, to hand a win to their enemy: progressives. That kind of Stupid lies behind the death threats and savage abuse directed at climate scientists, who are perceived as political opponents by denialists, not researchers dispassionately explaining the evidence before them. That’s despite the fact that climate action is fundamentally a prudential policy, that preventing uncertainty associated with dramatic environmental and economic change is an intrinsically conservative position and that a conservative icon like Margaret Thatcher (a scientist, perhaps coincidentally) advocated climate action more than two decades ago.