The Age of Stupidity.

[Firesong]

Taken from the Toronto Star


OLIVIA WARD
FEATURE WRITER

I think, therefore I am."


Thus, the 17th-century father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, laid down his bedrock principle: Whatever else is true or untrue, if man thinks, he must exist. So thinking is the very essence of human existence.

Or is it?

Four centuries later, in a post-modern world of gesture politics, fetishized individualism, bottom-feeding pop culture and dumbed-down mass media, the age of reason appears to be tottering to a close.

Religious radicalism is the order of the day. Evolution is under fire from creationists who dismiss centuries of scientific evidence as mere opinion; political leaders and terrorists can get away with massive mayhem if their actions have a pious face; stupidity is a virtuous defence against complexity; and philosophy, well, get over it.

"To be philosophical is to accept that there's nothing you can do," sighs British cultural theory professor Terry Eagleton in the Guardian. "Ideas have no effect on reality, even if that itself is an idea. Those who trade in theories are ludicrous but also faintly sinister."


What Eagleton refers to is the suspicion, if not outright hostility, that greets any effort to apply reason and logic, let alone the lessons of the past, to modern politics, science, economics and culture. Decision-making is no longer the product of consideration and cogitation but "only what is under your nose," he says.

Or, as the band U2 once put it, "You miss too much these days if you stop to think."

Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Never mind, Charles is marrying Camilla, and the tabloids are battling for coverage. Jean Chrétien is waving golf balls around at a government corruption inquiry. How he makes us laugh! Coffee is good for you — or was that bad? The Atkins diet doesn't work. Oops, yes it does. Voting irregularities in Ohio? Why slow down for a recount? Jen wants Brad. Brad wants Angelina: read and weep. Feeling unloved? Viagra will make you dance in the street.

Coping with life's brutality and a steady stream of contradictory information is exhausting, so people switch off their minds and coast. They seek an escape from helplessness and despair. There is a benefit to being ill-informed, even if we've turned 180 degrees from the time when Greek philosopher Socrates pronounced, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

"There's definitely a chronic resistance to intelligence," agrees Toronto filmmaker Albert Nerenberg. "Stupidity has now become an advantage."

Nerenberg's recent documentary, Stupidity, is a catalogue of people on the very front line of resistance to reason. "They don't merely resist; they actively fight intelligence," he says.


Caught on camera, well known and ordinary people scream, riot, bare their backsides and throw up onstage with the same cheery abandon with which President George W. Bush decided to invade a WMD-less Iraq.

They get away with it not because it makes sense, Nerenberg implies, but because it's done with either a fabricated sincerity or a false sense of urgency designed to impress a public that would rather not think; a public that applauds but doesn't question.

"You don't have to be stupid to enjoy doing stupid things," says Nerenberg. "Advocates of deliberate stupidity believe that it makes you happier."

Happiness is news and entertainment that has merged into snappy docu-dramas, courtroom circuses and blanket coverage of the lives of celebrities.

Films rely on special effects rather than plot and character, and complex scripts discourage backers from funding them. "The hype around movies imitates the passion of ideas, but it isn't the real thing," says Nerenberg. "What's sad about that is that movies have become a substitute for intelligence."

In the same way, beliefs have become a substitute for complex ideas. Citizens are fed a diet of urgent issues — from foreign affairs to same-sex marriage — that they are told must be addressed or their very way of life could be affected.

"It's a bullshit pandemic," says Laura Penny, the Halifax-based author of a book to be released in April, Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit (McClelland & Stewart). "And while bullshit is nothing new, all the money and modern technology that's going into producing it these days makes it simply enormous."


Both the depth and variety of bovine excrement heaped on the public mind is staggering. In the realm of public life, says New York Times writer Christopher Caldwell, "gesture politics" has triumphed, demanding nothing more than a desirable image of those who govern countries.


Bush's picture in natty flying gear, announcing the end of the Iraq war, superceded any questions about what he planned to do next.

And how many Canadians remember anything of Jean Chrétien's appearance last week at the Gomery inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal, other than the golf balls he cheekily pulled from his briefcase?

"The essence of leadership has changed into something that is less and less about significant undertakings and more and more about dramatic stunts," says Caldwell.

What stunt politics depends on for success, Caldwell says, is "a citizenry that is either easily bamboozled or disengaged. It appeals to citizens on the grounds of what their leader does as a person — probably because citizens lack the attention span to follow the things he does as head of state."

The victory of credibility over competence was demonstrated in the recent American election, says Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon.

"By rights Bush shouldn't have won," he says. "Everything was going wrong in Iraq and the economy was doing badly. Yet Bush even convinced voters he was better on military matters than (Democratic candidate John) Kerry, when he had no record to stand on, and Kerry's real record of heroism was denigrated."

[Firesong]

Part of the explanation lies in the public's feeling of trust in someone who appears to be "on the level," that is, the level of the ordinary guy. Bush did not challenge anyone's intellect or expose people to painful facts they would rather not ponder. Instead, he let them relax in a bubble bath of believability, confident that someone worthy was at the helm.

Even Bush's legendary malapropisms and ill ease during debates became, in the eyes of his supporters, a sign of his sincerity — his "realness."

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`Bullshit is more insidious than lying, because lying arouses people's anger while bullshit is simply accepted as a fact of life. It's such a benign phenomenon that respectable people indulge in it. And now it's the norm rather than the exception'
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`There's definitely a chronic resistance to intelligence. Stupidity has become an advantage'
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"The idea that, if there is no reality, you can substitute sincerity is prevalent today," says Harry Frankfurt, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University. "It's difficult to say whether it's getting worse, or whether it has always been this way. But the big difference is that in earlier times there was much less communication."


Frankfurt, one of the few philosophers to take the metaphorical bull by the horns, probed the public's tolerance for facile rhetoric and half-truths in his 1985 essay, On Bullshit, which was re-released this winter (University of Princeton Press).


"I thought it was a very serious subject," he says. "Bullshit is more insidious than lying, because lying arouses people's anger while bullshit is simply accepted as a fact of life. It's such a benign phenomenon that respectable people indulge in it. And now it's the norm rather than the exception."

Indeed, he writes, "one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Yet we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves."

In the two decades since the essay was written, pundits have continued to ask those questions. About the only shared conclusion they have come to is that the uncritical acceptance of dubious truths is more appealing to North Americans than Europeans.

"We may not have a deep enough tradition of questioning and discourse," says philosopher Andrew Lawless of Vanier College in Montreal, author of the forthcoming Plato's Sun: An Introduction to Philosophy. "North Americans are practical people, and we're a country of immigrants who are concerned with survival. We don't have time for sitting and thinking."


In Europe, Lawless points out, intellectual discourse hasn't become separated from ordinary life to the same degree. "A French cab driver knows who the great French philosophers are, and they're quoted in the media regularly. Here philosophers are mostly technical and inward-looking. Their ideas may be interesting, but they're esoteric."

In Paris, the chic seek "philosophy cafes" in which to flirt and chatter. But while intellectual elitism may be fashionable in Europe, in North America it is public poison. The snob label has been mainly attached to left-wing thinkers — the "nattering nabobs of negativism," as they were branded in the early 1970s by Republican vice-president Spiro Agnew, the running mate of Richard Nixon.

In the same vein, Bush's supporters have labelled his opponents on family-values issues, such as the debate over evolution, as "the reality-based community." These are people who reject the primacy of spiritual beliefs and accept scientific evidence that may contradict those beliefs — the children of Voltaire and the Age of Reason.

"These `anti-realist' doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry," says Frankfurt. "One response has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness, to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of the alternative ideal of sincerity."

In other words, he says, it no longer matters what you say as long as your hand is on your heart when you say it.

Because, in a postmodern world that lets everyone decide on their own reality — where each individual's viewpoint is supreme, and his happiness, not the collective good, the highest value — what is there to go on but the apparent sincerity of anyone claiming to speak the truth?

In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, British author Francis Wheen insists the idea that there is no such thing as absolute reality is one of the "great modern delusions."


Promoted by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it is the basis of individualistic postmodern philosophy.

But, argues Wheen, "If all notions of truth and falsity cease to have any validity, how can one combat bogus ideas — or indeed outright lies?"

And he points out, if everything is relative, those who deny the Nazi holocaust would be as acceptable as witnesses who recorded the evidence of their horrifying experiences.

Those who decry the new relativism say that it is not only unhealthy but also dire for the future of humanity. By refusing to think through our actions, plans and policies, we may be dooming our political and economic systems, and the environment.

"In my view, it began with the political shift in America over the last 20 years," says Laura Penny. "The demonization of the public sector and the valorization of private interest as the ultimate good. People now tend to speak and think in their own interest only.

"Hyper-individualism that reigns supreme is one reason why bullshit is so prevalent and objective reality has been lost. No wonder ideas have so little value."

In a world like that, Penny says, the public happily accepts transparently phony advertising, exaggerated pharmaceutical claims, distorted media reports and pseudo-service industries that only serve their own needs.

"If my call is so important," she asks, "why doesn't anyone answer the damn phone?"

Perhaps the ultimate failure of ideas is our wilful blindness to the destruction of the environment, a move that could end the world more effectively than a terrorist attack.

In his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond counts the ways in which humans through history have shot themselves in the collective foot and ended up committing mass suicide.


"There's overwhelming evidence that some of these `romantic' mystery collapses have been self-inflicted ecological suicides, resulting from inadvertent human impacts on the environment," says Diamond.

"They're impacts similar to the ones causing the problems we face today. But past (failed) societies like the Easter Islanders and Anasazi had far fewer people and were packing far less potent destructive practices than we are today."

Are we doomed to death by stupidity — by a failure of ideas and a willingness to let so many dubious truths into our lives?

"While some are surrendering to stupidity, others are fighting to be smarter," says Nerenberg. "In spite of all the dumbing down, there's a glimmer of hope."

One antidote, says University of Florida philosophy professor Martin Schonfeld, is the study of ideas — that is, philosophy.

"Just like medicine, it makes the world a better place," he says in his essay Why Philosophy Matters. "It questions authority. Its cultural role is to reject taking things at face value and to ask for justifications. Philosophy treads softly and uses gentle means: appeals to common sense and the invitation to courteous dialogue. But its insistence that facts, fairness and reason matter is the very power that has shaped civilization."