A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  One man’s story of debunking and desperation

  As someone paid to write about public affairs, I have a certain professional as well as personal interest in the Stupid that hides in numbers. Having written for years about polling, I’ve decided that voting intention other than immediately before an election is of limited interest except to the extent to which it seems to influence the views voters express on other issues. I also get my share of ‘independent reports’ from publicists, NGOs and other purveyors of such things, although not nearly as many as some other people in the Australian media, much of whose entire journalistic output consists of ‘exclusives’ about new reports commissioned by major industry groups. But mostly my interest is centred on trying to debunk bullshit reports, a task that feels like King Canute trying to whack aquamoles while holding back the waves.*

  It can be a tedious task—going straight to the methodological explanation of a report, if it has one, checking the data and assumptions, checking the results of other reports, consulting independent sources of data, putting together your own data. There are certain tricks you can use. There is often a remarkable difference between what companies involved tell investors and stock market regulators and what their ‘independent modelling’ says, like the foreign-owned power companies who produced ‘reports’ stating that a carbon price in Australia would see them shut down generators and go out of business, while they told foreign shareholders Australia would continue to be an excellent market for them. And sometimes there are surprises—I once encountered a report from one of Australia’s best-known economic consultancies that significantly understated the case they were making for the client who had hired them. Another time, the data in a report outright contradicted the conclusion in the executive summary, which is all most people ever read.

  But mostly it’s the same weary trudge through Stupid, often from the same consulting firms, via media spokespeople and PR firms who mysteriously don’t yet have a report to give you despite a media release or an ‘exclusive’ article about it being carried in a newspaper that day. Such reports are inevitably ‘probably available next week’, that being a Friedman Unit–type period in which corporate communications people think you’ll forget you wanted a copy of the report. In fact, one ends up feeling less like Canute than Travis Bickle, God’s Lonely Man, walking through streets filled with statistical depravity and mathematical filth, hoping that one day a real econometric rain will come and cleanse the place.

  To be sure, this form of Stupid isn’t as deadly as some. People don’t die from biased modelling or inflated claims, at least not in the way that people die, say, from vaccination denialism or the War on Terror. But this kind of Stupid offends, offends egregiously, producing a stench that combines the sickly odour of people on the make with the rot of intellectual dishonesty. It dresses itself in the garb of rigour, and quotes data at you; it purports to adorn public debate by adding to our understanding of economic and social impacts. In fact, it is collations of lies, generated for the purpose of skewing, not informing, public debate, and leaving us misinformed, not better informed.

  After three centuries of collating statistics, developing the probability techniques to use them and building the econometric tools to understand how we interact economically, there has never been more mathematical Stupid. In fact, most of us are worse off than Adam Smith, who at least knew to be sceptical of statistics even before they were called that.

  BK

  * Australian studio bodies are simply subsidiaries of Hollywood bodies, and parrot exactly the same lines on file sharing.

  † In a similar period, employment in the US arts and entertainment industry has risen 16 per cent.

  * Now, peculiarly, one of the Australian employer groups that incessantly argues that Australian costs are too high, the Australian Industry Group, takes a somewhat different view when it comes to overpriced IT products. AIG told the parliamentary inquiry into the differential that large companies like Microsoft shouldn’t have to adjust their local prices downwards to reflect currency fluctuations because of ‘the desirability for consumers, suppliers and retailers of having relatively consistent pricing of goods’. That wasn’t very long after AIG had argued for a tiny minimum wage raise because small businesses were struggling with the impact of the high Australian dollar. Naturally its position had nothing to do with the fact that Microsoft is an important partner of AIG.

  * Marshall McLuhan argued the development of statistics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an inevitable consequence of the arrival of printing and the more centralised, visually oriented world it enabled.

  * The reader will recall from an earlier chapter that William Jennings Bryan, in the Scopes Trial, was doggedly opposed to Darwinism, not merely because he believed it incompatible with the Bible and Tennessean folk wisdom, but because he believed it promoted conflict.

  * Yes, I know, Canute got a bad rap—he was demonstrating the stupidity of trying to hold back the waves, not seriously attempting it. Call it the Caligula effect—sarcastically threaten to make your horse a senator because actual senators are such duds, and the next thing you know you’re being portrayed as barking, or more correctly neighing, mad.

  9

  Postmodern nausea: Derrida, vomit and the rise of relativity

  ‘Let me tell you what postmodernism isn’t.’

  This was the reliable beginning of just about every Stupid lecture on the postmodern condition I attended in the 1990s. This made it very difficult to know what to do in exams. And when you mentioned this to your Stupid teacher, they would say, ‘Ah—the text is just like life! Decentralised and confusing with no real purpose.’

  But the fuckers still made us do exams.

  Look. I got so annoyed by this I am just going to break all of the rules of postmodernism and tell you what it is rather than what it isn’t. Because it’s a useful term to describe some stuff that has, quite justifiably, gained a reputation for maximum bullshit.

  Postmodernism might be used to refer to two things. (At this point, all the postmodernists say, ‘But it is so many more than two.’ They can fuck off.) The first thing it refers to is the current era. That’s quite simple. It’s just called postmodern because we used to call the period modern. It describes a period in time characterised by certain things. Which mostly involve increased complexity and the failure of the Enlightenment to deliver on its promise of enlightening.

  The second is the ‘practice’ of postmodern philosophy. My favourite of these guys is Jean Baudrillard. My least favourite is Jacques Derrida. In the habit of postmodern confusion, we’ll go with Jacques.

  Derrida is the deconstruction guy. What is deconstruction? Every lecture I ever attended started with, ‘Let me tell you what deconstruction is not.’ I’m not going to do that. Instead, I am going to show you deconstruction. Here goes.

  On 8 January 1992, US President George H.W. Bush vomited on the prime minister of Japan. Well, he didn’t actually vomit on so much as around PM Miyazawa. The video is blurred and it is hard to assess exactly how much the guy was showered in free-world sick. What is clear from footage is Bush barfed more copiously than in the recorded banqueting of any statesman since Seneca took notes from the long tables of Rome. (Soon you will see what I’m doing. I am taking an arbitrary moment in history—8 January 1992—and elevating its importance. I am taking little details and blowing them up in order to show you, as deconstruction does, that everything is meaningless! Yay!)

  Within days, the incident was widely documented and analysed. This alleged product of intestinal flu was broadcast on ABC in the US and parodied the following week on Saturday Night Live. It was later referenced in The Simpsons when a fictionalised Bush threatened Homer he would ruin him ‘like a Japanese banquet’. It appeared in a USA Today roundup of The 25 All-Time Most Memorable Meltdowns and would enter the Japanese lexicon: Bushu-suru is slang still used to convey the act of public vomiting in Japan.

  I remember hearing that a sati
rical play and a painting were inspired by the executive chunder. That there is no hard evidence these works exist does not diminish the plausibility of their creation. Which is to say, as one’s parents often will at a gallery: they’ll make art about anything these days. (Okay. I have stopped deconstructing for the minute.) The man often held responsible in intellectual circles for legitimising art about vomit is Derrida. Or, to be more general, the man often held responsible for legitimising everything is Jacques Derrida. The guy whose most quoted sentence is ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ or ‘There is nothing outside the text’ (in Of Grammatology) was, himself, a vomiter on the emperors of reason.

  Nothing. There is nothing outside the text. There is no God, no reason, no taste and no morality. There are only words, words, words which, in turn, only relate to other words. This statement is helpful to an understanding of the two previously mentioned things: both the postmodern era and the philosophy it spewed.

  No one finds Derrida appealing, and if they say they do, then they are ill or they are liars. Let’s just start our painful date with Derrida in understanding that the declaration ‘There is nothing outside the text’ means: all meaning is relative to other meaning. And therefore meaningless. It is all just text; or, it is all just words we utter and pointless discourse we make.

  This idea is pretty hard going. And unfortunately, once you see what he is saying, it is also pretty hard to dismiss. The repercussions of saying that all meaning can only be compared against other meaning are great. It means that there is no dependable truth, morality or ethical way to govern. This is an immense break with the past. But, as we will see, it is one that is currently being enacted in my Stupid deconstruction, which now begins again.

  In 1992, the year we repeatedly visit, Cambridge was one of many storied universities that honoured this important man. Not everyone was pleased about his honorary doctorate, and a number of academics wrote a letter of protest to The Times of London, beginning, ‘M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.’ It went on, ‘M. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period.’

  If I am not mistaken, these guys are calling Derrida a dirty hippie. Such was the man’s infamy in 1992.

  There are plenty of ways we could write about postmodernism other than using Derrida, the dirty hippie. But if George H.W. Bush has taught us nothing else, it is not to overstuff ourselves.

  There are many postmodern philosophers we could greedily consume here. But we need to be picky or we might be sick. I actually did chuck before an exam in the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University in 1992. Postmodernism actually made me spew.

  So, we have confined this buffet to two simultaneous courses. We have Derrida as the primary way to understand what is meant by postmodern philosophy, and we have the year 1992, in which George H.W. Bush vomited on the prime minister of Japan and I vomited on the flagstones of the university quadrangle.

  In the interests of declaring my bias—itself a Derridean habit—I should say that I liked Derrida a lot at university, upchuck notwithstanding. This is chiefly because (a) he was very fond of cats, and (b) he was, and is, so difficult to understand, it’s quite acceptable, if not actually useful, to give up the chore of understanding him and say, ‘Ah, Derrida . . . so playful!’ and have your peers not think of you as an absolute tool.

  This helps to explain why people who did not ponce about doing cultural studies think that Derrida is a tool. The point is, he’s not a complete tool. But given that people like me, and curators of art shows with vomit as a central theme, spent the better part of the 1990s saying, ‘Ah, Derrida . . . so playful!’, it is perfectly reasonable to think of the man and his work as a waste of good French.

  There is a lot of good postmodern thought to read. But if we have to choose one guy, let it be Derrida—for three reasons. First, for the sake of brevity. Second, Derrida is currently enjoying a lack of popularity; I therefore conclude you may be less disposed to boredom in reading the name of a man currently resting in theory’s lavatory. Third, Derrida ‘invented’ deconstruction.

  And, even overlooking that ‘deconstruction’ is one of the most abused words in the philosophical vocabulary and can often be seen on menus or in colour magazines on Sunday preceding the names of actresses who offer glimpses of themselves no more candid than ‘sometimes I don’t feel that pretty’, it also permits us to ‘deconstruct’. Which is to say, focus on an arbitrary thing.

  Like, The Year My Non-Vomit Streak Broke: 1992.

  So I am selecting a postmodern way of describing postmodern thought and postmodern life. You might find it useful to get an understanding of the thing called deconstruction, if only because you can dismiss it in the future as Stupid.

  Deconstruction is often used to mean a revelation; a kind of stripping back to a foundation. Woody Allen famously misused it in the title of one of his worst films, Deconstructing Harry. Here, Harry is ‘deconstructed’ through Allen’s customary lens of psychoanalysis. We see Harry’s dreams and his past and this is not at all Derrida but Freud. It is true that deconstruction is a way of investigating a text—and text can even mean a person. It is also true that deconstruction, like the talking cure, might employ methods like wordplay or concentrating on elements of a thing normally considered unimportant. But it is not true that deconstruction, unlike psychoanalysis, strives to get at any sort of truth. Because, and this is where you might justifiably spit at the page, deconstruction does not believe in truth. I’ll tell you what deconstruction does believe in (spoiler: nothing!) in just a little while. But we do need to look briefly at the long history of the death of truth.

  I have about as much time for the claim that there can be no truth as I do for middle-period Woody Allen. Which is to say, it’s depressing and it’s not very useful. In the absence of truth, we may as well just all pretend we were always totally fine with Woody shacking up with Soon-Yi.

  (DECONSTRUCTING AGAIN!)

  Allen, quoting the poet Emily Dickinson, said of his 1992 separation from Mia Farrow, ‘The heart wants what it wants.’ It is only in matters of the heart that I can accept such absolute relativism. The heart is permitted to bang out its independent truth. Everything else, as far as I’m concerned, has a responsibility to truth beyond itself; to truth outside the text.

  While it is Stupid to call Derrida Stupid, I am actually going to say that I believe that he is wrong. There is something outside the text. I think as an assessment of life as it is currently lived, his deconstruction is pretty much spot on. But I think that as a grand theory of how meaning has always been and will necessarily be, it is probably the most depressing thing I could imagine.

  I am so angry with Derrida for saying that life is necessarily meaningless that I am going to give some meaning to his.

  Derrida was a French Algerian philosopher who was born in 1930, set Anglophone philosophy aflame in 1966 by declaring the death of meaning at John Hopkins University, and died in 2004 shortly after he had written about feeling embarrassed to be naked in front of his cat.

  Deconstruction is not a set of instructions, necessarily. It is not a way to look at the world, but it is the way in which the world reveals itself to us; or the way the world, to use the maddening phrase of Derrida, is ‘always-already’.

  In other words, he’s saying we’re fucked. Or rather, always-already fucked. Always-already fucked.

  It’s true that a lot of the language of postmodernism is really hard to follow and/or take in with a straight face. It’s my hope, though, that I have done some of the heavy lifting on your behalf and that soon we’ll move towards an understanding of something that is not, actually, all obscurantism and does serve to describe the current shape of the world.

  I believe in truth. This is not an extreme statement. Unless, of course, you are a devout postmodernist in which case, it’s heresy. But for the rest of us, there is at least the idea of some f
oundation on which we can rest our knowledge.

  But it’s slipping away. With or without Derrida.

  Still, for some people, a deity is the foundation of all knowledge. But it is often and quite compellingly argued by His critics that God has ceased to function in the way that He once did, even to those practising religion. The ‘common sense’ of humanism is now shared by most people who believe certain secular truths to be self-evident, such as man is by nature reasonable or has a particular essence.

  In recent years, superstar atheists like Richard Dawkins have been making much of humanism as a thrilling new way to live. Dawkins, who had started to get antsy by 1992—when he wrote in the New Statesman: ‘Religion is no more than corrupted software of the mind. God sits in people’s brains like a virus’—borrows heavily if selectively from the humanism of Kant and other theorists of the eighteenth century. He just gussies it up.

  Some of us also borrow from the truths of the nineteenth century. We don’t have to be socialists to believe Marx when he tells us that the foundation of being is to organise the materials necessary for life. We might believe Nietzsche when he tells us it is the ‘will to power’ which is, more or less, the drive to live. Then Freud tells us it is the drive to have sex and then, later, the drive to die that is at the foundation of everything. And then we meet a whole lot of guys who think it is the need to make meaning through language and there is always something and so it has been back and back and back since Thales, who believed in the sixth century BCE that the foundation of all life was water.