A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Unlike economic denialists, this form of Stupid has real-world consequences. To the extent that climate change denialists in Western countries are able to slow or (in the case of Australia) reverse action to halt the rise in greenhouse emissions, they inflict a range of costs on developing nations over the long term in relation to higher mortality and health impacts, and economic costs that poorer, less resilient and economically marginal nations will have greater trouble managing than Western countries.

  But those same impacts will also be inflicted on denialists’ own communities. Due to climate change, more older Australians will die in heatwaves, the impact of tropical diseases will be greater, the costs of extreme weather will increase and the economic impacts of rising temperatures on the agriculture and tourism industries, for example, will be borne by the consumers, businesses and taxpayers of the future. To the extent that eventually Western economies will have to decarbonise in face of catastrophic climate change, climate inaction also imposes greater costs associated with delay on future generations.

  Climate change denialists are therefore engaged in intergenerational economic warfare on their own societies. They won’t witness the worst aspects of climate change—luckily for them they’ll die before they occur. But their children and grandchildren will be affected by them. The refusal of older people, and particularly old white males, to accept the need for climate action shifts costs that they themselves are causing onto their descendants, all of whom will pay higher prices, higher taxes and higher insurance premiums and enjoy poorer health, lower economic growth and fewer jobs because of climate change. Denialists are a form of economic parasite preying on their own offspring, running up a bill they’ll die before having to pay. And every year of delay increases the costs that future generations will have to bear.

  Still, there’s another form of denialism that has a much more immediate and direct human impact than climate change denialism.

  Vaccination denialism

  In Australia, the US and the UK, vaccination rates for children for preventable diseases like measles are strong, at over 90 per cent. For measles vaccination, this represents a recovery from the massive damage done by Andrew Wakefield and his debunked claims of a link between measles vaccination and autism. But Wakefield still caused a vaccination gap in the UK, as a consequence of which large numbers of children over ten in Britain remain unvaccinated, thus providing a pool for the disease. In 2012, there were over 2000 measles cases in the UK, with twenty children hospitalised. Far from being a benign coming-of-age condition, as claimed by anti-vaxers, measles alone kills 150,000 people a year around the world.

  And there continue to be pockets of anti-vaccination fervour. The number of children on the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register with a ‘conscientious objection’ has gone up nearly tenfold, to nearly 40,000, since 1999. This sentiment can be found among both well-educated, affluent urban parents and alternative lifestyle communities in regional areas.

  The persistence of anti-vaccination sentiment in affluent communities is particularly strange, but seems to reflect middle-class parents who want to differentiate themselves, to demonstrate that they’re not part of any ‘herd’, the immunity of which is so important for keeping preventable diseases contained. And if climate change denialism is associated with the right, vaccine denialism is associated not merely with too-posh-to-jab bourgeois denialists, but with the left, often linked to conspiracy theories about Big Pharma (in league, frequently, with the male-dominated medical profession) pushing ‘chemicals’ on ‘our kids’.

  In reality, ‘our kids’ are the victims of this form of Stupid, and not in the long term when they become consumers and taxpayers, but now: unvaccinated children (and there are a small number who for medical reasons can’t be vaccinated) get sick and die from preventable diseases. Moreover, they can infect partially vaccinated children, thereby exposing to disease and death the children of parents who have acted responsibly in protecting their children, and babies too young to have begun vaccination.

  Vaccination denialism is thus an insidiously evil type of Stupid: Stupid with a body count. It kills and harms kids, often injuring them permanently, and not just the children of denialists, which is horrendous enough, but even those of parents who have tried to protect their kids.

  Like climate change denialists, vaccination denialists also tend to rhetorical excess; both have more rabid members who issue death threats to, and demand the jailing of, scientists who disagree with them (i.e. believe normal science). But vaccination denialists go further even than the most rabid opponent of the ‘warmist conspiracy’. In Australia, they have called doctors ‘full penetration’ rapists, called vaccination programs genocide and (inevitably) invoked Nazi Germany. ‘There will come a time,’ a prominent Australian anti-vaxer wrote online in 2008,

  I pray to God that it will happen in my lifetime—when those who have pushed vaccines upon innocent, helpless babies—doctors, pharmaceutical companies, government officials—will be proven to have lied and cheated these instruments of death into our children’s bloodstream. When that occurs, the outcry will be heard around the world and there will not be enough hiding places on the globe for these murderers to hide . . .

  Worst of all, they have harassed grieving parents who have lost children to preventable diseases, seeking to discourage them from publicly blaming diseases like pertussis (whooping cough). Australia also has the honour of having produced Ann Bressington, a now former (thankfully) South Australian MP, who managed the intellectual feat of combining climate change and vaccination denialism with being an anti-fluoridationist, a chemtrail believer and a self-proclaimed opponent of ‘Agenda 21’ and other tinfoil-wrapped causes (bringing to mind the immortal question to Shirley MacLaine: ‘Is there anything you don’t believe in?’). She has publicly claimed vaccination is in fact a tool of global population reduction—yes, this woman not merely votes, she actually got elected.

  As with economic denialism and climate change denialism, vaccine denialists are impervious to facts. Andrew Wakefield has been discredited, struck off, had his papers withdrawn, demonstrated to have engaged in fraud, demonstrated to have acted unethically towards his (handpicked) child patients, demonstrated to have planned to make money from the autism scare he unleashed, and couldn’t even get lawsuits up in the litigation havens of the UK or Texas. However, his work is still cited approvingly by anti-vax types and Hollywood Z-listers Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. * McCarthy eloquently expressed the level of scientific understanding of anti-vaxers with her memorable statement: ‘Think of autism like a fart, and vaccines are the finger you pull to make it happen.’

  There may be a small number of genuine sceptics in the ranks of economic, or climate change, or vaccination denialists, or poorly informed people who may change their mind in response to clear data, but the majority simply deny in the face of all contrary evidence—cherrypicking what data they can to support their own case, substituting anecdotal evidence for data, applying judgement inconsistently (how many climate change denying businessmen don’t insure their businesses against risks far smaller than the chance of climate scientists being collectively wrong?) and dismissing—as Wakefield’s supporters do—contrary data as the product of a conspiracy.

  Meantime, the toll of misery, suffering and death caused by this Stupid mounts. Take pertussis, a debilitating and sometimes fatal illness that is particularly dangerous for newborns, as babies can’t be fully immunised until they’re six months old. Peer-reviewed studies have compared both international and domestic US rates of infection based on differing rates of vaccination and show a very strong correlation between lower rates of vaccination or higher rates of ‘conscientious objection’, and higher pertussis infection rates—even among children who have been partially vaccinated.

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  The persistence of denialism often prompts the lament that key authority figures in a debate aren’t ‘communicating effectively’. Doctors should be better at expl
aining the benefits of immunisation, we’re told; or politicians have lost the power to explain themselves to voters, to discuss complex economic ideas, to communicate anything that doesn’t simply confirm voters’ pre-existing beliefs; scientists, more used to fussing around with their beakers and Bunsen burners than talking to actual people, don’t effectively communicate climate science—and anyway, scientific method, with its caveats and hypotheses and refusal to embrace absolute certainty, is tailor-made for cherrypicking.

  There’s some truth to such complaints, and there are always ways to package truth more effectively. For example, explaining that climate change and carbon pricing dramatically improves the economically dismal case for nuclear power is likely to garner support from conservative older males. But the complaint doesn’t address the core of denialism—no matter how well-explained facts are, no matter how compelling the presentation, they’ll be rejected because denialists are being guided by their own emotional needs, rather than reason.

  Denialism is an expression of ‘motivated reasoning’—an inability or unwillingness to separate emotion from reasoning, meaning we reason to reach a preferred conclusion, rather than to find the truth regardless of what we’d personally like. We use our core of personal beliefs, personal preferences and individual experience, rather than an objective framework, to guide our reasoning. Voters opposed to the party in power don’t want to admit the economy is doing well, given that would reflect positively on a government they loathe, so they claim the economy is underperforming even while they behave as though it is fine. Anti-vaxers prefer anecdotal evidence of the effects of immunisation and dismiss as the efforts of a conspiracy the reams of data available on its safety and benefits. Climate change denialists see climate change as a left versus right issue and thus regard it as a political argument that they and their political tribe must win, regardless of the facts, or a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy they must unmask, not an issue of scientific fact or prudent judgement.

  ‘Motivated reasoning’ isn’t just about why people tie themselves in knots trying to refuse evidence and logic; it also embodies the tension between reason and sentiment, a tension that has long, and significant, historical antecedents in Western intellectual history. The conflict between what we want to believe, and what reason and evidence tell us is true, has been at the centre of European thought for centuries, and denialism often repeats exactly the same arguments that have been used against reason throughout history.

  To trace this tension, we need to go back to the role of organised religion in Western society, and for that we have to start with a methodological note of sorts.

  There’s plenty that is Stupid in religion. And not just silly Stupid, reflecting that the primary purpose of religion is to give self-obsessed humans the illusion that their lives might have some higher meaning rather than being a mere accident of physics in an otherwise indifferent cosmos. As we’ll see later in this book, religion is a delivery mechanism for dangerous forms of Stupid—Stupid that kills and hurts and victimises huge numbers of people. But religion is also a powerful driver of non-Stupid things—of philanthropy, of aid to those in need, of education, of solace and comfort. In this sense, religion is probably better understood as an amplifier of and vehicle for other human characteristics, rather than being innately Stupid or non-Stupid.

  But in the modern, secularised West, we have little understanding of just how central to European society Christianity has been for most of the last thousand years. We also have a skewed conception of Christianity as anti-, or at least resolutely non-, intellectual, seguing easily from the Inquisition and the persecution of Galileo through to the modern Republican Party of Intelligent Design and Legitimate Rape. But Christianity (meaning both the Catholic Church and later Christian movements like Protestantism) in the high Middle Ages and the early modern period was the key engine of Western thought. Moreover, because of its central role in Western society, not merely was that society suffused with religion to a much greater degree than we can now comprehend, but Christianity was suffused with social and secular concerns in a way that would be equally incomprehensible to people of the twenty-first century.

  Indeed, it is hard to distinguish between Christianity and Western society in intellectual terms up until the seventeenth century. Thus, intellectual developments within Christianity were in effect intellectual developments in the whole of Western thought. That’s why we’re now, however improbably, detouring back to the Reformation to explore why Jenny McCarthy wants people to stop pulling fingers.

  Printing and the split between head and heart

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the theological monopoly of the Catholic Church came under unprecedented pressure from two different directions—humanism and Reformism. Both are important movements in the Western intellectual tradition. Both challenged the basic position of the Church, that it was the only body able to interpret the divine will, that its priests were a necessary medium to connect ordinary people with the Christian deity and that its teachings were the only path to salvation.

  We’ll deal with some of the other consequences of this challenge in later chapters, but for now we’ll stick to the intellectual impacts. The Church’s ‘no salvation without us’ business model—and ‘business model’ isn’t sarcasm, this was an institution of enormous economic as well as political power—couldn’t withstand the arrival of a disruptive technology: printing. The early modern Church was the music industry of its day, albeit with less cocaine and better composers, hapless in the face of a new technology that empowered the people formerly known as its worshippers. It wasn’t merely that people could now—assuming they were literate—read a wide range of material on religious and political matters. Rather, both humanism and Reformism posited a much greater role for individuals in religion and, it would become clear, beyond religion as well.

  Humanism emphasised the use of reason and evidence—in particular, critical textual analysis, the historical importance of which has long since been forgotten. Humanism celebrated source documents and subjected them to searching scrutiny, trying to extract as much information from them as possible. Classical and early Christian texts were pored over, as were the books of the Bible itself; it was no longer sufficient to accept either the official position of the Church on what a particular text said, or even the commentaries of philosophers and Church fathers. If possible, the original texts on an issue must be accessed and analysed to determine not just their authenticity, but the historical circumstances in which they were written and the message they were intended to convey when they were written.

  Humanist scholarship was boosted by an historical accident: western Europe was at this point rediscovering, or seeing for the first time, a number of key classical books—many after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottomans, which sent Orthodox scholars fleeing westwards with them.

  This sort of focus on books had been seen before in Europe, particularly during the eighth- and twelfth-century renaissances (yes, there were several renaissances; it wasn’t all buboes and flagellants between Christopher Plummer’s death in Fall of the Roman Empire and Michelangelo), but this time it was fuelled by printing. Printing had a stupendous scholarly impact on Europe, even through simple things like standardisation of texts and a massive expansion in readerships, let alone more complex long-term impacts. Some of those, such as the epochal reorientation of humankind towards the visual, are discussed by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: McLuhan described printing as causing a ‘split between head and heart’ in Europe.

  Consider how important standardisation was: medieval copies of even the most crucial patristic and philosophical texts were riddled with errors made by the photocopiers and printing presses of the Middle Ages—tired monks beset by cramped hands, poor light and minds numbed with drudgery. Printing enabled different versions of key texts to be shared and compared so that errors could be identified and eliminated. And the widespread dissemination of printed texts dramaticall
y expanded the number of readers scrutinising them, the result being many more standardised, authoritative philosophical and theological works and many more scholars to examine the same text, whether in Edinburgh or Vienna.

  Most of all, the Bible itself, previously chained up like a wild beast in the local church, became increasingly available to anyone who could read—a truly radical development. Martin Luther, for example, could plausibly claim to have never read a Bible before he arrived at a monastery.

  Printing thus provided a massive spur to new religious thinking—the spread of early Protestantism can be tracked in England along trade routes that carried books to literate communities, such as weaving towns, where books would be distributed and (even more importantly) discussed by people by themselves, without guidance from institutional churches.

  But while Reformism encouraged a much more personal faith than that offered by the Catholic Church, which continued until the twentieth century to perform its central ritual in a tongue virtually no one spoke, it wasn’t much more encouraging of reasoning than Catholicism. Key Reformers like Luther and John Calvin saw reason as having only a limited, and subordinate, role in religion; both emphasised, albeit with different weighting, the crucial nature of grace. Humanism might have helped create the conditions for the Reformation, but they were very different intellectually. Humanism was bibliocentric, focused heavily on the written word and its derivation; Protestantism was Bibliocentric, focused on the Bible; ‘the Word’ in Protestantism was that of God, and oral, not written—a distinction that will continually reappear in this discussion.