A Short History of Stupid Page 5
Moreover, Reformed churches quickly learned the lesson the Catholics had long ago learned: that letting people go their own way on religion fragmented and undermined organised worship. Institutionalised Reformism thus copied the Catholic Church in repression. Calvin executed the intellectual Michael Servetus, who had outraged not just the Catholics with his biblical interpretation, but the Lutherans and the Calvinists as well, a trifecta that saw him burned alive in Geneva. And the flames in which he perished were just a warm-up. Elizabethan England was tough on Catholicism and tough on the causes of Catholicism, with what would later be called a zero-tolerance policy for Romish priests: they were assumed to be spies and were tortured and executed virtually on sight.
Or there was the Thirty Years’ War, an epic of sectarian bloodshed between different rulers (the idea of wars between states, rather than monarchs, was still developing), the numbing brutality of which Bertolt Brecht sought to re-create by making us sit through Mother Courage. That conflict was eventually settled on the basis that people would have to accept the religion of whoever was ruling them at the time, and if they didn’t like it, they’d have to move somewhere else. Somewhere else, as it turned out, often meant the afterlife—if, for example, you were a Huguenot in France in 1572, or one of the tens of thousands of women killed after being accused of witchcraft (the witch crazes peaked at the end of the sixteenth century).
For others, elsewhere meant another continent. Many Protestants were so disgusted both at the persecution they endured at the hands of their rulers and at having to live in the same country with people who didn’t share their religious views, that they left Europe altogether, sailing west until they reached North America, where they set up their own colonies. There, fulfilling the fears of endless division of the early Reformers, some split off to form yet more colonies over ever narrower doctrinal differences. We’ll come back to them.
Back in Europe, the Holy Spirit was out of the bottle, too. Handing individuals a personal link to their god drove a proliferation of faiths that even savage crackdowns couldn’t halt. The availability of the Bible, and other texts, fuelled this proliferation—thus we first start to see censorship in the Reformation context; among the first books banned was the Bible itself, by Henry VIII.
The humanist impulse contributed to this ever-fracturing process of religious evolution. The remarkable seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza (strictly speaking he was a lens grinder who did philosophy in his spare time) contrasted religion as developed by churches, almost entirely without the Gospels, with a close study of the Gospels themselves. Spinoza, in the humanist tradition, argued that the Gospels should be treated as literary texts composed by many authors, rather than divine revelation (and anyway, Spinoza argued, God was an infinite substance who was everywhere, not a single being). Treating the Bible as holy writ meant, for Spinoza, worshipping paper and ink. Close study of the Bible, he said, would reveal the simple, uncluttered message of religion, which was limited to loving the deity and loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
For Spinoza, it followed from this that no one had any business dictating a person’s interior faith, a view fundamentally at odds not merely with the Catholic Church, but with much of Reformism: both gave themselves the right to dictate faith and remove from society (well, remove from life, in practice) anyone who disagreed with them. Spinoza wasn’t the first to urge toleration, but he provided an intellectual basis for it that, along with his reasoning that democracy was the most effective form of government and his argument that there was no point trying to regulate free speech, were to prove profoundly influential in the eighteenth century.
So, okay, what does all this have to do with Jenny McCarthy’s autistic flatulence, apart from Martin Luther’s famous claim he could chase Satan away with a fart? It sets the scene for the critical clash between reason and sentiment, in the Enlightenment.
To understand this better, we have to understand there were, like multiple renaissances, multiple Enlightenments, and not just those in individual countries (your Scottish Enlightenment, your French, your German and so on—please say them in the appropriate accents); the term ‘family of Enlightenments’ has been used by historian J.G.A. Pocock, while Jonathan Israel has, crucially, divided it into ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ Enlightenments, which is the more important distinction for our purposes.
The moderate Enlightenment is the one we all know—Voltaire, salons, wigs, epigram-ready table talk and so on—which was primarily reform-minded and anti-clerical in nature, rather than genuinely politically radical. There was even Enlightened Despotism, an early example of ambush marketing by some eighteenth-century monarchs who wanted to distinguish their particular brand of kinder, gentler tyranny from run-of-the-mill absolutism.
But the radical Enlightenment fully embraced the application of reason, no matter where it ended up, and its adherents didn’t stop at wanting to turf out the Church. They eventually argued for fundamental social and political reforms, such as democracy, women’s suffrage and anti-colonialism.
Both these Enlightenments were, crucially, elite phenomena—a characteristic their critics wouldn’t forget. Those being freed from the grip of the Catholic Church and absolutism were mainly middle- and upper-class, educated Christian men. Voltaire famously told dinner guests to stop discussing atheism in front of the servants unless they wanted to be murdered in their beds, because religion was all that kept the lower orders in line.
And despite the famous role of women in hosting salons, barely a quarter of women could read in eighteenth-century France. ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,’ is how Immanuel Kant commenced his 1784 pamphlet ‘An answer to the question: What is enlightenment?’ and he wasn’t merely following personal pronoun convention. Kant was, per Monty Python, a real pissant when it came to women: they were, the philosopher considered, ‘timid, and not fit for serious employment’. Rousseau, who sits apart from the French Enlightenment but who was a hugely influential figure, was deeply misogynistic and convinced that women had to be kept controlled and domesticated. And Voltaire and the encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, like Luther, shared Europe’s rich history of anti-Semitism and poured out bile about Jews that could have been used by the Nazis.
But Diderot stood apart from Voltaire and particularly Rousseau in extending Spinozism to fundamentally more radical ideas than Voltaire, who was a friend and faithful correspondent of despots enlightened or otherwise. In an intellectually aggressive phase at the end of his life, Diderot called for wars of liberation of oppressed peoples against monarchs, aristocrats and clerics, attacked colonialism and supported the education and liberation of women. And Voltaire and Rousseau were infuriated by their inability to defeat the radical philosophes and Spinozists through argument.
Rousseau’s objection to Diderot and the more politically radical philosophes was one that is at the core of the tension between reason and sentiment: he criticised reason itself. Reason, for Rousseau, was a corruption caused by civilisation, the faculty that had led humankind (or more accurately, for Rousseau, mankind) away from the simplicity of the natural state in which it had been happy, into an age of misery. Rousseau’s attack on reason, drawing on two centuries of ‘noble savage’ stereotyping induced by Europe’s contact with the New World, was a key moment in anti-intellectualism. Reason wasn’t merely useless but corrupting; it had all gone wrong once humans—sorry, men—began using their brains logically; until then, they had existed in a state not of Hobbesian brutality, but of simplicity and instinctive bliss. McLuhan’s ‘split between head and heart’ caused by printing had now been articulated clearly.
This Edenic soft primitivism of Rousseau, by the way, is echoed in the thinking of many denialists: the anti-science views of climate change denialists (former prime minister John Howard declared in 2013 that his ‘instincts’ told him climate change wasn’t real) and the bizarre argument of anti-vaxers that a disease like measles is a benign coming-o
f-age process visited upon lucky children by Nature (portrayed as a maternal, nurturing female deity) with which the unnatural—and male—forces of science and medicine shouldn’t interfere. Rousseau couldn’t think of any arguments to counter those of Diderot and other radical philosophes, but he knew they were wrong in his heart, he said.
Rousseau had a fan in a political figure who emerged in the French Revolution: Robespierre. The Jacobins condemned not merely moderate Enlightenment philosophes but the whole Enlightenment project, and particularly radical Enlightenment ideas of free speech and a free press. Those philosophes still alive by the time of the Terror were hunted down and executed or, like Thomas Paine, forced into hiding. And the greatest Jacobin charge against the radical Enlightenment was, echoing Rousseau, its elevation of cold rationality over emotion and the sentimental simplicity of common folk.
Orality and literacy
Robespierre was a devastating orator, and his rise to power was partly built on his rhetorical gifts. And the conflict between reason and sentiment was also partly one between literacy and orality, which echoes the bibliocentric–Bibliocentric distinction between humanism and Reformism. This is a key theme of McLuhan’s in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the supplanting of oral/aural culture by the homogenising, specialising, hierarchical culture of the printed word.
This literacy–reason/orality–sentiment tension can also be observed in the American history of religion. While the French Revolution was underway, across the Atlantic, the American colonies—by now liberated and federated with the help of pre-Revolutionary France, the genocide of native Americans and some signally inept British statesmanship—had begun developing their own anti-intellectual tradition.
Fifty years ago, in Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter argued that it was the American evangelical tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century that created an actively anti-intellectual form of religious expression in the United States. The American churches established by the Puritan refugees we saw earlier in this chapter were, if not overtly humanistic, still scholarly in nature—Harvard was established less than twenty years after the arrival of the Mayflower, at Cambridge, a town named after the university (famously, the more Puritan of the English universities).
But with the American Revolution and the growth of the new republic, the established colonial churches found themselves fighting a losing battle against uncontrolled, populist frontier evangelicism. This time, the disruptive technology was the human voice, not books: Americans were voracious readers and would soon create a massive newspaper market, but books themselves could be few and far between in many American communities, particularly on the ever-moving frontier (although novels were frequently serialised in magazines and, occasionally, newspapers). Preaching—particularly of the fire-and-brimstone variety—was central to the second Great Awakenings that swept the new nation from the middle of the eighteenth century.
Preaching had always been a key part of the Protestant tradition. English Protestant Reformers demanded, and got, a graduate clergy in the sixteenth century, and the university curricula of the time remained focused on the profoundly oral medieval scholastic tradition of the trivium and quadrivium, aimed at delivering a graduate skilled in oratory and verbal argument. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritans expected sermons lasting three hours at a minimum when they attended service, and sometimes complained when that was all they got; ministers who failed to occupy the pulpit for such heroic lengths were mocked as ‘dumb dogs’. The preaching of the Great Awakenings and of Methodist preachers also saw Herculean feats, not in duration but in volume: preachers such as colonial-era Methodist George Whitefield could, Benjamin Franklin reported, address unaided 20,000 people at open-air gatherings.
This literacy–reason/orality–sentiment distinction keeps reappearing. The spoken word delivered by a gifted orator to a group is personally engaging, an unrepeatable performance that delivers a communal emotional experience, one that engages both aural and visual senses. The written word is visual only, more detached and analytical, less emotional, homogenising, capable of constant repetition, consumed alone.
Hofstadter suggests that in the febrile environment of nineteenth-century American religion, Darwinism and then industrialisation and urbanisation (in which the South conspicuously trailed the rest of the United States, and still does) elicited a backlash against modernity and provided the historical antecedents for twentieth-century Christian fundamentalism. Where Rousseau had accused intellectuals of being unwilling to lift a finger to save the lives of their fellow citizens, early-twentieth-century American fundamentalists declared college graduates were going straight to hell. A similar mindset was to be found in the Ku Klux Klan, whose ‘Imperial Grand Wizard’ in the 1920s contrasted emotion and instinct with what was ‘coldly intellectual’—the former ‘have been bred into us for thousands of years’ (presumably 6000 years maximum), ‘far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain.’ Rousseau could not have expressed it better.
The Scopes Trial in the 1920s encapsulated the pure form of American anti-intellectualism, as articulated by the unusual figure of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, aka ‘The Great Commoner’, had been a three-time Democrat candidate for president in a remarkable populist political career (in his first run for president in 1896, he was, and remains, the youngest-ever major party candidate, at just thirty-six). Bryan’s political success had been powered by—here we are again—his prodigious oratorical gifts: he routinely spent several hours a day delivering long speeches, and his ‘cross of gold’ speech against the gold standard that secured him the Democratic nomination in 1896 remains the, um, gold standard of US political oratory.
Bryan, who had personally campaigned against evolution both for religious reasons and because he believed it promoted conflict and had helped cause World War I, argued in the Scopes Trial that evolution should not be taught in Tennessee public schools not merely because it was ‘condemned’ in the Bible, but because few Tennesseans believed in it. Teaching evolution amounted to the undemocratic imposition of the rationalist views of a small number on ‘the views entertained by the masses’. In other words, Bryan wanted science by ballot box. Bryan won the case (the result was later overturned), but was humiliated by his opposite, Clarence Darrow, on the stand and died soon after, thereby becoming an unlikely symbol of Southern fundamentalism.
A different, if only partial, resolution of the reason–emotion tension had been proposed by late-nineteenth-century New England philosopher and psychiatrist William James (brother of Henry). We’ll return to James later in another context, but in the late 1870s, in his essay ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, he made the point that rationality can incorporate characteristics of sentiment, such as aestheticism. As per Ockham’s Razor, we prefer simplicity—or, as James put it, ‘parsimony’—over complexity and lack of clarity in explanations, and a coherent and satisfactory explanation provides intellectual comfort in a way something less satisfactorily rigorous does not. James, perhaps unfortunately, never taught in Tennessee, and remained a Harvard man all his life.
The United States isn’t the only country to be labelled anti-intellectual (either from the left or the right: critics like Allan Bloom have charged American universities with fostering irrationality). In fact, the lament, that ‘_____ is the most anti-intellectual country in the world’ is routinely applied to their own country by Australians, New Zealanders and the British as well as Americans, although Vichy France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain all displayed a strain of anti-intellectualism.*
In the US and Australia, the reason–emotion tension has been channelled into a standard conservative attack on progressives, with a powerful, out-of-touch liberal ‘elite’ alleged to be somehow controlling governments in opposition to the needs of ordinary people. In this myth, which echoes the Jacobin hostility to the philosophes, the average voter invariably possesses ‘common sense’ (although that doesn’t get celebrated s
o much when they throw out conservative governments or re-elect progressive ones) while elites are always ‘intellectual’, ‘sneering’ and ‘technocratic’—a term that encapsulates the entire charge of cold, unfeeling rationality. The elevation of personal experience—which we discuss later—to the apex of sound argument in public discourse is another form of privileging sentiment over reason: facts and logic are no match for the real emotional experiences of people; to know is one thing, but to feel is better.
In a culture where rationality is contrasted negatively with the instinctive pragmatism of ‘ordinary folk’, in which ‘intellectual elites’ are characterised as a kind of public enemy, denialism, whether it’s the killer kind peddled by the anti-vax crowd, or climate change denialism peddled by old white men, or ordinary refusal to acknowledge how the economy is performing, is enabled. If our institutions have changed since the early modern period, we’ve retained much of the Stupidgenic environment that the humanists and the philosophes faced.
In such an environment, data and logic, carefully compiled and written down, become suspect, the tools of manipulators, or simply irrelevant and elitist, compared to the emotional life of ordinary people. How can it make kids healthier to put diseases in them? And ‘I heard of someone whose little girl got sick after being immunised.’ ‘It was hotter in summer when I was a kid.’ ‘How can the economy be doing well when I know someone who lost his job?’ Instinct and anecdote, in a manner that would have delighted Rousseau and Robespierre, remain more credible than written evidence. Denialism remains as easy to embrace as it has ever been throughout history, driven by our urge to reason our way to what we want to believe, not what might be true regardless.