A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  ‘The personal is political’ is the mission statement of what was once, and disparagingly, known as ‘identity politics’. The first recorded use of this phrase is found as the title of a 1969 essay by US feminist thinker Carol Hanisch. Honestly, as far as manifestos for a self-critical activism go, this short piece is surpassingly good. A lot of it is pretty Kantian in that it describes the ethics of the ‘therapy’ or ‘consciousness-raising’ women’s groups of that time as being essential to better social outcomes. Hanisch certainly doesn’t imply that all lived experience is evidence of politics. She wouldn’t have been very patient with my assumption that the student council president’s preference for Caitlin in her flouncy skirt was political. And she is at pains to point out that the therapeutic aspect of consciousness-raising is not for personal benefit but a sort of collective attempt at psychoanalysis.

  ‘There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution,’ says Hanisch. What she advocates is not so much an opportunity to vent, or a game of Who’s the Most Oppressed, but an ongoing process of ridding the unconscious mind of prejudice so it is better placed to find solutions. This is an un-Stupid idea. But, like a lot of good things from the un-Stupid era of the sixties, it was dulled by an interest in the self. A lot of thinkers from the sixties and seventies were using these therapeutic techniques with great caution. Even the Marxist Herbert Marcuse had a joke about the personal as political in an interview with The Listener magazine in 1978. ‘Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production,’ said Marcuse. This is pretty funny for a Marxist.

  People often blame feminism for the prevalence of identity politics in conversation. The thing is, identity is used by a great many people of all political hues to describe the world. It is just used very obviously in feminism and I think this is worth examining, because here is a very clear case of the elevation of the personal story defeating the political aim.

  This game of one-downmanship that proceeds along the lines of ‘well, I’m a disabled Lesbian of Colour with a state school education and an emotionally unstable beagle’ is, to be honest, quite easily heard in feminism. In fact, of late, that is much of what feminism has become; it’s an activism still led by women of quite considerable privilege but decorated with the baubles of identity. I am quite conscious that this account of feminism is shocking and you may be horribly offended by the suggestion that the well-to-do women who continue to dominate this essentially Western way of thinking are engaging in tokenism when they ‘welcome’ ‘allies’ with ‘diverse’ ‘identities’. But this is my view of a movement—any movement—that is enamoured of the ‘identities’ of its participants. When identity itself becomes an object for trade and a source of reason, you get a lot of Stupid. As long as you have a multiply oppressed ally in your action group, or you at least say that you are supportive of ‘identity’, you are pretty much good to go.

  And this is putatively good because Everyday People Have a Voice; because you have proximity to Personal Stories. But what happens when your ‘allies’ have a primary value as Personal Stories? Are they not then cheapened and edited as they would be on daytime television? Stories and descriptions of the identities with them cannot tell us everything. They can tell us only a little. And the more they are told—and need to be told within the fast and formulaic form of Upworthy or TED talks—the less that they say.

  The failure to see the forest for a sentimental attachment to its trees is a widespread problem. This thinking has long been common in individuals who, for example, may refuse to acknowledge racism because they have no experience of it. This basic, deluded empiricism does not pass for reason either at the personal level or the political level. But now it functions both in people’s atomised understanding of the world and in the mass reason of formerly very reasonable movements like feminism.

  Look. If you don’t think the basic tenets of feminism are reasonable—that the masculine matter of violence and the feminine matter of poverty need social redress—then you are a Stupid who can’t read evidence. But you are also a Stupid if you think that a reasonable idea like feminism can be advanced through accounts of your ‘lived experience’, whether these occur as emotional stories on Oprah or as plots on a map of identity.

  Identity is not a good guide to the world and not a way of thinking that allows clear reason. It is a way of elevating, and even celebrating, one’s social coordinates. I mean, you may be a gender-queer low-vision something something, but what does this tell me other than that you are someone who can describe your identity within a world? Does it tell me about the world, which one or both of us have agreed we want to change?

  How does plotting our place on a map of the world do anything but affirm the map? Shouldn’t we be ripping up the map? We might both feel better in the short term for having explained ourselves, but perhaps we overestimate the power of mutual understanding. Perhaps all understanding can provide is a nice moment. ‘I understand that your life is different from mine.’ We have mutual understanding. To put this in the crudest terms, a master and his indentured servant could have mutual understanding, too. They might describe the condition of their lives to each other in emotional TED-talk detail. What happens then? Perhaps the servant feels like he has got something off his chest and the master feels a bit less guilty for having listened. Storytelling and understanding is perhaps most powerful in shutting us up for a bit.

  Personally, I have had a gutful of this kind of navigation. It is taking me to Stupid Street, where they spend all day telling personal stories, each one with the same moral: stories can tell us everything.

  Yousafzai knew that her personal story had diminished value. So she told someone else’s. I don’t like to think of individuals as ‘inspiring’, but when someone rips the map up like that, it’s difficult not to use such an Upworthy term.

  HR

  4

  ‘Nudge them all—God will know his own’: Soft, hard and extreme paternalism

  . . . it would be possible to create a national smart card system . . . Using data from the card system, a sliding scale of taxes could be introduced . . . The more alcohol you purchase, in any form, at any time within the statement period, the higher tax you pay . . . On a night out, drinks would become progressively more expensive. Loading up on alcohol before you go out wouldn’t help, as the system would take into account the takeaway purchases you’d made earlier.

  —Dan O’Keeffe, The Conversation, March 2013

  For a country with a reputation as a bunch of boozers, Australia now has a strange attitude to alcohol. Official data shows that our per capita consumption has fallen by a third since 1975, and is now below, and often well below, that of most European countries. In 2013, levels of daily drinking were at their lowest since at least 1991, including a big drop since 2010; the number of Australians who don’t drink at all has risen by more than half between 1991 and 2013 and is now at the highest levels ever recorded. Binge drinking by young people has fallen dramatically, and binge drinking by women is down too.

  You’d think, on the strength of those outcomes, public health types would be well pleased. Not at all. Indeed, quite the opposite: Australia is in the midst of an anti-alcohol crusade that constantly warns of an ‘epidemic’ of alcohol abuse with massive ‘social costs’ that needs to be curbed by more regulation, more surveillance of consumers and price rises. Some of the highlights of this War on Alcohol include:

  • The Australian Medical Association proposed raising the legal drinking age to twenty-five because neuroscience suggested that was when brain development halted.

  • In 2008, the federal government pledged to end the ‘epidemic’ of binge drinking among young people, despite evidence that the incidence of binge drinking had been falling for a long time.

  • A public health body called for alcohol consumption to be banned on school grounds because drinking at fetes or barbecues ‘undermines the alcoho
l education programs for young people in schools’.

  • Public health bodies now regularly warn about ‘pre-loading’, a sinister term they have developed to describe drinking alcohol at home prior to going out, which ‘is causing alcohol-related crime, violence, hospitalisation, assault and death’ and must be curbed by alcohol price rises.

  • A government department proposed to force employers to discourage alcohol consumption on the basis that ‘in some work settings, workers who do not normally drink in their own leisure time may find it expected of them by their colleagues or workplace’.

  However, the term ‘War on Alcohol’ may well be too narrow: other perceived sins are targeted as well. Various Australian academics, politicians and campaigners have also called for bans on and censorship of social media, bans on online apps, bans on supermarkets selling pain relief, bans on advertising of junk food, bans on soft drink and high-sugar products, bans on clothing that ‘sexualises children’, drug tests for everyone in the country using opioid pain relief, licensing of smokers and, as we saw at the start of this chapter, licensing and surveillance of drinkers to track their alcohol consumption.

  This last idea has particular appeal to public health lobbyists because of its extendability: once in place, a universal monitoring system could be used to track and deter whatever is the subject of the most recent moral panic: the consumption of junk food and soft drinks, sugar, television, pharmaceuticals, video games, ringtones, pornography, hoodies and whatever music form or artist enjoyed by our feckless youth is currently considered unacceptably corrupting (we’ll return to that).

  Based on the proposals routinely floated by public health lobbyists, you might think Australia faced a major health crisis requiring urgent action. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, non-indigenous Australians are the equal fourth longest-lived people in the world (indigenous health outcomes are a very different matter). That’s despite spending far less of its GDP on health than many other developed countries, despite its apparently shocking alcohol consumption, despite Australia’s ‘obesegenic society’.

  Public health groups look to bridge this reality gap between the rude good health of non-indigenous Australians and their hysterical claims about alcohol consumption and diet by emphasising what Australians think about everyone else’s lifestyle choices. Polling from public health bodies now regularly shows Australians reporting they themselves are drinking less, but they are more and more worried about how much everyone else is drinking—unsurprising, given they are constantly bombarded with claims about ‘epidemics’ of alcohol and obesity.

  Paternalism in theory and practice

  What drives these health-motivated interventions in Australia is the same thing that has driven many other forms of state-sponsored intervention in people’s lives—paternalism: the conviction that you know what is best for others, and that that knowledge gives you the right to regulate and control others’ behaviour to make their lives better, whether they want you to or not. It is one of history’s most pervasive and damaging forms of Stupid.

  There are numerous kinds of paternalism—most usefully, for our purposes, are those described as soft and hard paternalism. The soft–hard difference comes in two kinds. One relates to how far a paternalist will go to interfere with someone else. If I decide to play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol, not realising it works differently from a revolver, a soft paternalist would intervene to stop me and make sure I was fully informed about the basics of firearms before letting me proceed; a hard paternalist would seize the weapon, or have me committed to a psych ward, because I have no right to take my own life.

  But the more common soft–hard paternalism distinction is between methods: soft paternalism seeks to influence or ‘nudge’ its target’s decision-making, but stops short of outright prohibition, which is reserved for hard paternalists, who simply prefer to ban things they don’t like. Soft paternalism sometimes gets the oxymoron ‘libertarian paternalism’, the sort of term likely to infuriate both nanny-state types and rugged individualists.

  The case against paternalism has been mounted by a succession of philosophers, starting with Locke (Spinoza as well, although less directly), followed by the likes of Kant, who argued that paternalism is innately hostile to the concept of human equality, and particularly John Stuart Mill, who formulated the classic argument against paternalism:

  . . . [T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right . . . The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is of right, absolute, over himself. Over his own body-mind, the individual is sovereign.

  Mill’s most acute point was that individuals are inevitably the best judges of their own interests; there is no other party with more or even the same knowledge about what is best for that individual. Moreover, no other party, and particularly no government, shares the exact value system and priorities of an individual, however closely affiliated to them they may be. In Mill’s famous examples, intervention in others’ decisions about themselves was only justified in rare cases: a person could be prevented from selling themselves into slavery, as he would ‘defeat his own case for liberty’, or a pedestrian should be warned of an unsafe bridge—even if that necessitated force to ensure they were aware of it—but once they were aware of the danger, left to make their own decision about whether to cross or not.

  Some arguments in favour of paternalism do stand up better than others. In particular, the argument that we are, in effect, multiple selves, and can make decisions that may be costly to our future selves, is a solid one, particularly if one’s current self is making decisions based on insufficient information—information that would be available to a future self—or one is temporarily cognitively impaired. And as we see repeatedly elsewhere in this book, humans are pretty poor at making rational, evidence-based decisions. This reinforces the ‘multiple selves’ argument: over time, as a group of our multiple selves—like those episodes of Doctor Who in which different Doctors join forces—we might reach sensible decisions, but individual decisions are likely to be affected by a host of the sort of problems we identify in this book.

  Against the multiple-selves argument, however, is the response that it is exactly our current decisions, for better and for worse, that make our future selves better; that we need the freedom to make poor decisions and mistakes in order to become wiser, and how we use our freedom is fundamental to how we develop as humans. A decision to undertake an activity that’s risky either to our health or, perhaps, to our future income, like undertaking humanitarian work abroad, embracing political activism or climbing a mountain, may in fact significantly change and improve us as people even if these activities are, from a risk-averse point of view, ill-advised. Life, even the most anodyne life, must contain some risk, and how we manage and assess risk is one of the most important aspects of our characters and how we live.

  That said, there are some forms of paternalism that all but the most hard-hearted libertarian would surely endorse. Permitting slavery, even voluntary slavery, is a straightforward case. So too depriving a drunk of their car keys. But the problem with those examples is that, once granted, they can logically be extended to other acts that might permanently reduce one’s personal autonomy, such as preventing suicide or banning dangerous drugs—restrictions with which a great many people would have a problem.

  Such shades-of-grey individual scenarios, however, are more games for philosophy students than practical guides. In the real world, paternalism is considerably wider, and Stupider, than people looking to have themselves enslaved or
pedestrians wandering towards dodgy bridges. Australians live in a society riddled with paternalism. Like other Western countries, we have drug laws designed to minimise the personal harm from consuming some chemicals and plants, a form of Stupid that inflicts far more damage on society than that caused by their consumption. Drug laws restrain personal liberty, inflict a massive economic cost from law enforcement and criminal justice, and create a violent and destructive criminal culture. And it certainly doesn’t stop at drugs: we have a range of limitations on gambling which are in effect competition restrictions maximising profits for approved operators. We retain a censorship system to stop adults from viewing materials deemed harmful to them. We have laws intended to prevent terminally ill people from receiving advice and assistance on euthanasia options. We have a costly consumption tax exemption for fresh food, designed to encourage low-income earners to eat more healthily.

  Australia’s paternalism, like that of other countries, is also remarkably inconsistent—we ban certain drugs but allow others that produce greater harms, for instance. And we’re bizarrely unpaternalistic about interfering in people’s freedom posthumously: we allow people with certain illnesses to die and suffer because others are allowed to retain their healthy organs after death. Indeed, in Australia families can override the wishes of the dead who have indicated their desire to donate their organs—where’s a little paternalism when organ donors need it?

  As with other forms of Stupid, there are also hierarchies of paternalism, which—not coincidentally—closely resemble power structures within society. It is only a matter of years since Australian states had ‘hard paternalism’ based on sexual preference, while a variety of financially discriminatory practices against gay couples were only removed more recently. Our welfare policies are structured so that middle-income earners are given generous transfer payments by governments without even having to fill out forms to claim them, whereas low-income earners are subjected to schemes such as Work for the Dole and stringent reporting requirements, and Aboriginal Australians are subjected to income management.