A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  BK

  * Yes, you’re right—cancer isn’t an autoimmune illness.

  * Climate change denialists routinely reject the word as somehow offensively anti-Semitic because it invokes images of the Holocaust. As British psychologist Paul Hoggett has noted, this misses the point that the most critical ‘Holocaust denial’ was not the behaviour of right-wing anti-Semites (and Iranian presidents) decades after the event trying to cobble together evidence that gas chambers never existed, but the denialism of the German people at the time that the Holocaust was being implemented by their own government.

  * Whose work as actors is more likely to induce fatal reactions than vaccines—boom tish!

  * Anti-intellectualism is also regularly treated as a new phenomenon—as Hofstadter noted, intellectuals seem to have a ‘lamentably thin sense of history’.

  3

  Look who’s talking: Why uttering our ‘identity’ makes us Stupid babies

  Once, I lived under rule where criticism of Oprah Winfrey was a serious offence. Of course, one can only take so many Inspiring Stories of Personal Triumph and this domestic regime did not last. But, while it did, I learned to laugh, cry and sing along with the protagonists of Harpo Productions’ real-life drama. Cancer patients who had beaten the odds and found new health through positive thinking. Rape survivors who had beaten the odds and found new positivity through healthy thinking. Fat mothers who had beaten the odds and positively thought their way to a new dress size through healthy eating.

  There were so many stories with such a similar rhythm, their details were easily forgotten. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was they always ended well; even when they ended badly, they were structured to reveal a ‘teachable moment’. And even if you forgot what that teachable moment was, none of them mattered so much as the founding myth of Oprah, which, of course, was Oprah herself. A survivor of weight loss, rape, sexism and racial discrimination, she was there as the victorious end to a wonderful story.

  Eventually, I found myself hating Oprah. I hated all her ‘moments’ and wanted them to be a bit less fucking teachable. My own life was lived in stasis and produced moments no more teachable than ‘it was probably wrong for you to move in with someone who likes Oprah’. Even under expert editing, my life would fail to produce an Uplifting Moral. At most, it was a Cautionary Tale.

  Of course, stories can be useful in communicating a point. I’m telling one now to underscore the usefulness of stories in communicating a point. This is my Brave and Personal Journey Towards Not Giving a Fuck About Stories. Because stories, I found, had begun to grow my Stupid.

  Since Oprah finessed real life for daytime TV and managed to make it seem instructive, stories have become commonplace. There has always been storytelling by politicians, of course. The former factory-hand who worked his way up from nothing thanks to the power of the union. The former factory-hand who worked his way up from nothing thanks to the power of free enterprise. But in the past few decades, the stories have become more elaborate and heartbreaking. Now, with their everyday details, these biographies serve as mission statements in themselves. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard wooed the female vote with a powerful personal story of sexism in the workplace. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott wooed the female vote with a powerful personal story of non-sexism in the raising of his daughters.

  In newspaper features, the writer has emerged as a central figure. About a decade ago, I began receiving the curious instruction for pieces on social issues to ‘put more of yourself on the page’. Obviously, this is a habit I cannot kick, but there is really no professional reason that I should in a world that runs on the quick-fix personal drug of Upworthy, which believes This One Guy Will Change Your Life.

  It is absolutely true, of course, that a story can move us to a different way of thinking. When I was a kid, The Autobiography of Malcolm X had an extreme and enduring effect on my world view. My ideas about race evolved into good sense at speed and I am not so much of a snob as to suppose that Oprah, at one time or another, has not had a similar influence on some of her viewers. But when personal stories become, as they have lately done, the premier method of communicating an idea, I wonder if they don’t lose their power. I have begun to suspect that the only idea they can now communicate is actually a pretty shitty one. And that is: Anything is Possible Through the Power of the Human Spirit.

  In fact, Malcolm X was communicating the opposite of that idea. His message was that Possibilities are Limited by the Idiocy of the Human Spirit. His life, which ended with an assassin pointing a sawn-off shotgun to his chest, pretty much underscored this point. In his life, as in his narrated account of it, the message was: history has taken a terrible turn. In Upworthy, Oprah, politics and even in the serious news, the message is now Watch This One Guy Change History.

  This has become the single, hopeful, depressing cry of Stupid: personal stories matter. The ubiquity of the personal story has led to its impotence. When we have come to believe that the only way to convey a big idea is through a small story, all stories have the same Stupid moral. And that is not only that every big idea can be reduced to a single narrative, but that the individual will triumph. Even if the individual doesn’t actually triumph over reality, his individual story will triumph simply by virtue of being (properly) told. A story is edited until it becomes a ‘teachable moment’. Even without the consent of the person about whom the story is being told.

  In 2012, fifteen-year-old education advocate and student Malala Yousafzai was shot three times on her way to school in Pakistan. Her assailants were Taliban and so this extraordinary young woman was quickly pressed by propagandists into the service of justifying US military interests. This might sound like a paranoid view until you follow the less ‘teachable’ moments of Yousafzai’s real story.

  Hailed by President Obama for her bravery, she was welcomed to the White House. The Western world had expected her to become an ally of the US. In the ‘teachable’ version of this story, she would thank Obama for his continued liberation of her country. Instead, she asked him to stop the drone strikes for which history will eventually remember his administration. The US-ordered drone strikes, she later told the press, sometimes killed children on their way to school.

  In refusing her time as a ‘teachable moment’, Yousafzai reminded the world that the deaths of more than 200 children by US drone have been recorded in Yemen and Pakistan. There’s no doubt that her bravery in the face of Taliban soldiers is inspiring. But Yousafzai is also a hero for her refusal to function as a personal story. This moment was so unteachable, it filled me with optimism. Here was someone not only strong enough to stare down thugs, but curiously intelligent enough to see beyond her personal story into a much wider political reality. The personal, for Yousafzai, was political. So political that she saw no reason to talk about the personal.

  When I was a young idiot, I learned the phrase ‘the personal is political’ and I found it very handy. It meant that my perspective was universal and, heck, I’d always suspected as much. For a young woman angry About Things, this maxim gave all my blurry feelings instant focus, even and especially lovesick ones. For example, if I fancied the president of the student council and he did not return my interest, I could say that this personal thing for a (political) dude was ‘political’. The student council president’s lack of interest in me was not, in fact, a personal inaction without meaning but a loaded political act. Every caress I did not enjoy was an act of political calculation as cold as that which drove him to make a preference deal with the Labor Right. His failure to attend my one-woman show on bisexuality in the union bar was not a good decision. (NB: It was a good decision. If you have little in your life for which to be currently grateful, be grateful you never saw me perform the experimental poem ‘Sexual Seahorse’.) It was a bad decision that constituted a rejection of my glorious and unapologetic femininity and he didn’t love me because of the patriarchy.

  Patriarchy!

  T
he patriarchy was also sometimes responsible for my uneven grades. It was responsible for me feeling less beautiful than Caitlin, the expensively educated cheesecloth-wearing WHORE of the student council president. And it was responsible for some other stuff, such as my parents not loaning me money, my flatmate Andrew refusing to share his pot and the hairdresser that leased the property beneath ours who blamed my bad housekeeping for the rats that ate through the power cord of his curling wand.

  Patriarchy!

  When you’re young or selfish or both, this idea that the personal is political or that the intimate is always attached to the public realm feels quite natural. And you don’t have to be a tedious young feminist socialist with terrible study habits and a raging libido to think this. You can be anyone—even a rugby-loving engineer whose idea of a good time is Ayn Rand and an ounce of blow—and still have ideas about You and the World.

  We have likely all felt, at one time or another, that the ‘world’ is against us or that the ‘world’ has certain characteristics that we exemplify. Consciously left-wing and consciously right-wing people are more likely to view the world as a system and this produces in them, respectively, feelings of oppression and feelings of freedom. The world and its systems gave us these things. But even people who think less often of the political economy are still likely to give agency to the world at times for their feelings and their fortunes.

  ‘You are only saying that because I’m pretty’ or ‘He was promoted because he is British’ or ‘You hate me because I can’t play sport’ are all statements made possible by the agreement that there are systems in the world to which one is subject.

  The political can and often does have a personal manifestation. Prejudice and profit on the basis of good looks, nationality or sporting ability are real events. And no prick in their right mind (surely?) would argue against the free expression of a person with an account of how they are disadvantaged by any of these systems.

  Except, you know, I might. I will. I am. But not as bravely as Yousafzai.

  The fact is, of course, there are systems in the world to which we are subject. I mean, only a Stupid would say that there is no system that offers cultural, physical and financial advantage to people with lighter skin. Only a Stupid could fail to see how bias is one way in which this system maintains itself. Only a Stupid would bother to say that there is no observable pattern of racism in the world.

  There are two ways a Stupid might dispute the fact of worldwide racism. First, and most Stupid, they would say—as some people to whom I am related do—that black people are lazy or just no damn good. This is essentialism of the most depressing order and I recommend you do not argue with such a sluggish level of Stupid. When I hear someone utter ‘born that way’ or ‘not trying hard enough’, I almost feel that the intellectual poverty to which they doom themselves is its own kind of punishment. Honestly, this is a Stupid so stupid that Bernard and I haven’t been arsed to give it much attention.

  Second, a faintly more sophisticated kind of Stupid might try to dispute the evidence of racism by recourse to personal anecdote. That is, they will tell you about that time a person from a different ethnic group to them was rude. Or even themselves ‘racist’.

  One will hear these arguments about sexism, too. Now, any look at widely available national or international data will show that the experience of men and women is different. Women in liberal democracies, for example, tend to experience poverty more often than men, especially in old age. Men in liberal democracies tend to hurt or kill themselves and others significantly more than women.

  Again, the ‘born that way’ argument can be used here—and this one holds more social legitimacy as an account of gender difference than it does of racial difference. Even advocates for gender equality will sometimes argue that men and women are ‘just different’. I have no fucking idea why anyone does this; even if biological sex difference is true and not, as I suspect, an alibi for neat social organisation—and there is no evidence to suggest that there is any biological sex difference to account for social difference—I do not see the point of this argument. I do not see the point of the evolutionary biology upchucked in service of this argument. Say you do find out that women lack ambition genetically? Say you do find some way to observe a non-socialised female brain and give me objective peer-reviewed evidence that women are Just Different and less biologically inclined to social dominion? Are you talking about dominion in Palaeolithic societies and, if so, can these be creditably compared to our modern, highly socialised corporate systems? Are you really trying to tell me that because a woman is less likely to kill a wildebeest with her teeth than a man that she is also less likely to adhere to business guidelines? You stupid Stupid. Even if your proof—which you have not yet found—is founded in science, your argument is complete pants founded in caveman fantasy. Give it a rest and turn your mind to useful science.

  We also see the Personal Is Political anti-reason applied to argue against the case of sexism. ‘I know women who are violent’ and ‘I know women who are rich’ is used to counter the social evidence that men tend to be more violent and women tend to have less wealth.

  I mean, that’s nice, you know. It’s great that you know Powerful Role Models who are Exploding Stereotypes and that there are women of your acquaintance accumulating large amounts of wealth by torturing kittens. It is just so fantastic and inspiring that you have met black people who are also wealthy and mean. I am immediately convinced that all data at the Australian Bureau of Statistics is actually not derived from a census but from lies, lies, lies, because you know a couple of nasty, violent black women. Seriously. This is great evidence and I think we should base all social policy on it from this moment. Please. Tell me you share your keen observation on a blog?

  Ugh.

  Anyhow, this sort of thinking is clearly Stupid. But, really, my early feminist thinking was just as Stupid. Using personal experience as proof of a system is just effing wrong at a fundamental level, even if that personal experience does tally closely with verifiable social fact. Of course, as a means to an honourable end, the description of individual hardship might work quite well in some cases. It is an accepted liberal practice that works—I presume effectively but I do not know—in liberal contexts such as the United Nations; here, speakers will often use a personal experience to make a political point. Telling a story about a particular life is an entertaining way to engage an audience in a broader social problem and, so we must suppose, a good means to a social solution. And if this does work, as I must believe it sometimes does, to encourage policy changes, then jolly good, Oprah. If the matter at hand is clean water and the means of purification is someone singing about the children being the future, I say bring back Whitney.

  Whitney and water, by the bye, gives us good pause to visit the difference between consequentialist and deontologist ethics. It’s a partial sidebar but it’s a terribly useful distinction that I can guarantee you’ll enjoy learning more about if you’re not already familiar with it. For your quick reference, the most famous consequentialist is Peter Singer, and he would hold that the ends justify the means. Which is to say, even if you do need to endure Whitney Houston’s second-worst recording (the first is the theme from The Bodyguard, obviously), it is okay so long as it produces a good result at the UN, like clean water. The most famous deontologist is Immanuel Kant, and he would hold that only good means can produce a truly good end. Which is to say, our motives must be pure. And obviously, if you have been recently listening to ‘Greatest Love of All’, you are already corrupt and in violation of your duty to universal law, the first article of which is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—i.e. don’t play people bad Whitney. (I have not read Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals for many years, but I believe that Kant says an action can only be truly moral if one has just been listening to ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.)

  It is difficult not to be a consequentialist when it comes to clean water. Even if you hav
e very sound objections to the use of emotion in achieving an end—and Kant does—it is really difficult to say that pictures of dehydrated children shown at the UN are bad if it achieves clean water. But I have begun to suspect that these moments of ‘identifying’ have become too numerous to really work on a broad scale any longer. You hear the story of a Child who is Our Future often enough, and you just stop fucking listening. Peter Singer stopped listening; you can read his thinking on this in a really good 2014 piece in the Washington Post. He writes:

  . . . the unknown and unknowable children who will be infected with malaria without bed nets just don’t grab our emotions like the kid with leukemia we can watch on TV.

  We will talk more about this problem of feeding our compassion in chapter eleven. But what we also need to look at in addition to the Stupid effects of emotion is the Stupid produced by our need to ‘identify’.

  It is possible that all we are doing in recognising other identities is getting stuck in the personal idea of ‘us’. And Singer’s unknowable children don’t stand a chance unless they are seen to have identity. As Singer has it, to move us out of Stupid when it comes to malaria—a horrible disease that the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other bodies all agree is preventable—we need solutions. Not identity.

  But identity continues to inform a lot of thinking. Of course, it informs the sort previously described which allows the personal experience of a world without racism to mean a world without racism. Of all the logical fallacies, recourse to anecdote is possibly my least favourite, even when it is enacted by people with whose broad political aims I agree. Unfortunately. Let’s have a look at feminism, whose broad political aims I embrace but whose prominent methods, which I once enacted myself, I despise.