(circa 1040)
As the western world was instructed by means of the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, it was not Gutenberg that first gave the world mechanised printing in 1450, but an eleventh-century guy called Bi Sheng. China and not Europe first reproduced ideas on paper.
Whenever and by whomever literacy and literature is distributed, though, the results remains the same: freaking awesome.
Sure, the printing press and now the internet disseminates unspeakable idiocy. But it also makes possible the synthesis of thought that can change the world—even, sometimes, for the better.
True and broad engagement with ideas written down with great care is something we can, perhaps, refuse to see as anything other than a universal good. And you can’t say that often.
(384–322 BCE)
Just thirty-one of the guy’s some two hundred written treatises survive, but these were sufficient to carry his influence through the millennia. And to really give his snotty teacher, Plato, the shits right through the ages.
The granddaddy of formal logic, the great Greek whom Aquinas simply called ‘The Philosopher’, looked to argument as a foundation. This is a great shift from the Platonic idea that there is a perfect Form that is a blueprint for all reality.
Aristotle dragged thinking into matters of the everyday and did quite a good job of convincing some of us that essential ‘good’ was a bit of a crock.
(Classical antiquity–present)
In our age of super-smarm, where negativity is seen not as a force for good but nastiness, it is difficult for us to remember the importance of doubt.
Socrates wasn’t particularly positive and neither was Descartes, whose methodical doubt forms an important part of all scientific method and discovery. In fact, anyone who ever eliminated ideas and hypotheses by looking at them and testing them is a doubter, and thank goodness for such grumps at laboratory benches who are the sine qua non of useful innovations from vaccination to genuine justice.
Doubt, let it be said, is quite different from kneejerk scepticism or denialism, which simply reject ideas without examining them. Doubt is a tedious process that brings forth the best of history, whereas denialism is enormous fun and just requires that one sticks one’s fingers in one’s ears while shrieking ‘La la la what is even science.’
(1724–1804)
There is so much that is wrong with this bourgeois thinker but even an incorrigible pinko like me has to acknowledge that we owe him a great debt.
Okay. So his preoccupation with the idea of a universal good will is an enormous problem. His idea that individual reason is somehow so peachy-keen it can defeat all unreason, or cannot itself become unreason, is wiggety. The guy’s not practical.
But, Kant’s failure to engage with social forces that causes some reason to die and some reason to rule notwithstanding, his urge to those who read him to think was, and remains, pretty compelling. His instructions for thought may not in themselves be anything approaching workable but his passionate belief that thought must be undertaken is a great moment.
(1792–present)
The most annoying thing about the many annoying features of liberalism is its failure to see how it rests on an idea of inequality; even and especially those who advance the idea of a ‘meritocracy’ are all still banging on about a natural hierarchy.
Feminism, which remains for the most part very liberal, also has this problem, and it comes to us first and most compellingly in the form of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Like most of her present-day daughters, Wollstonecraft sees the arbitrary social division of labour and of opportunity by means of gender as total pants. And this, despite the fact that it is founded on an idea of ‘free’ enterprise and has a limited political imagination, was, and remains, a courageous and entirely non-Stupid idea.
Using half-arsed ideas of biology and ancient history to justify social organisation is ridiculous. Gender, or biological sex for that matter, is not a foundational truth. It’s just a bit of a shame that liberal feminism could see some forms of inequality as ‘unnatural’ while letting others persist. Like liberalism.
(1818–1883)
There are those who snigger at this great philosopher for what they perceive as his naiveté, and then there are those who laugh a little more kindly at the impossibility of his project. There are very few, however, who actually bother to read his ideas, now mushed and consigned to the insinkerator of the past.
While it is true that Marx’s predictions about revolution may have been a tad wrong, his Hegelian idea of history as conflict may now be more or less useless, and his hope that one day we would not need intellectuals is probably impossible, this is no effing excuse not to read him.
Whether you are inclined to Left thinking or not, the first volume of Capital is an extraordinary document which shows us how, as foretold in The German Ideology, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ and explains how the material organisation of the world makes Stupid.
(1917)
At the height of the anti-art movement known as Dada, the French-American brat Marcel Duchamp and his genuinely batty collaborator the ‘Baroness’ Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven took a urinal and entered it in an art exhibition. Where it was, in fact, held from view.
They had not made the lavatory and they did not affix their names to it and in this rejection of both the idea of an artist and the fundamental ‘truth’ of art, they flushed some very dearly held ideas about art and purity down the drain forever.
Even if the idea of art seems to you insubstantial or, at most, a matter of beauty, this radical move was utopian. To interrogate our most fondly held ideas about greatness in a swift and naughty moment was marvellous.
Of course, now some artists continue to tediously examine this idea of meaningless nearly a century later and have turned the idea of a readymade toilet into an affront to something that can be collected. But we shall not forget that the disappearance of pompous ideas down the drain is occasionally possible. Viva true punk.
(Mid-nineteenth century–1970s)
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are some of my favourite guys. They are often known respectively as idealistic pinko, Nazi and pervert. This is hardly fair.
One of the things I initially liked and continue to like about each of these authors is their explicit and vitally important understanding that we’re not as bright as we like to think we are. Or, more to the point, that our actions and responses are dominated by forces we do not fully understand but think of as natural.
Marx examines ‘ideology’ as the invisible thing that dominates our action, where Nietzsche calls it the ‘will to power’. And Freud, of course, brings us the transformational idea of the ‘unconscious’.
These are people who reject the state-of-nature account such as we might read in Rousseau, Hume or Locke, and who continue to influence the way we do things in the west.
The idea that we don’t know what we are doing pretty much died with the radicalism of the seventies. I’d like to see it back.
(1950s–1970s)
There’s a tendency these days to remember Martin Luther King, Jr as a nice guy who just wanted all folks to sit at the same lunch counter after they went to church together. And while it is true that the guy was a Christian minister and is fondly remembered by liberals as a force for polite reason, he happened to be a greater and more radical force than he is usually remembered.
When King was assassinated, it was not just his opposition to segregation and the extraordinary forces of racist Stupid that did it. It is worth remembering that he was talking to a group of sanitation workers about their labour rights. The man, just like the great Malcolm X and the Black Power movement which followed these leaders, wanted to change the entire system. It is not just shared swimming pools and the attitudes of tolerance he wanted to transform.
He called for a great change in thinking and rejected namby-pamby strategies for social change. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, he cried out for opposition to the white moderate, which he saw as more invidious than the Ku Klux Klan.
It is not just the will to justice that informs African American civil rights and international Black Power leaders; it is the intelligence of this moment from which we can all learn.
(1975)
Courtly. Christian. Romantic. Like just about any other human endeavour, love has its history formed in society and ideas. It has been as unnatural and without essence as any other damn thing, and as a contemporary notion it bolsters some pretty crappy practices, such as marriage, normative sexuality and terrible films.
But, in his 1975 work Born to Run and in more or less every recording since, Bruce Springsteen describes the powerful victory of violent love that can exist, just in instants, outside the alienation and the ultra-rationalisation of the everyday.
‘Together we can break this trap,’ he says to Wendy, and talks of that strange exclusion that chooses love for one person over the rest of the world; it’s a feeling that can overcome the broken cars and closing factories of New Jersey and temporarily infuse us with a hope that has nothing to do with the world and all its upward mobility, but is a force of sheer passion.
It is the possibility of this passion for the other, even if it is short-lived, that can deliver us momentarily from the world or New Jersey or whatever disappointments or aspirations otherwise inform us.
While it is probably true that love for the other is some kind of terrible by-product of early childhood, it is also true that it has a logic that precedes most forms of everyday reason. The insanity and the exclusion of love has nothing to do with empathy or morality. In fact, that it delivers us temporarily from these everyday principles into a state that might not be natural, but is certainly as liberated as we’re ever going to get, is probably quite useful.
The insanity of affection is not Stupid.
(1632–1704)
There can be no doubt that this Oxford physician and philosopher had a brain at least so big and shiny as a Megachurch—or a shopping mall, if you prefer your references secular. But it is Locke’s cleverness in conflating humanism with material wealth that makes him so useful to Stupid. This guy made property ownership seem like a moral imperative and America seem like a great idea, and it is his compelling view on the loveliness of greed that continues to make it so difficult for us to think beyond liberalism and building enormous blocks of luxury apartments, as though stainless steel European appliances are somehow an ethical birthright.
(1954–)
Like so many of history’s influential Stupids, Oprah herself is clearly not thick. What she does, though, in so effectively popularising the You Can Do It If You Try view of individual achievement, is blind us all to social structures and replace them with arse-hat affirmations about bending the universe to our will. She has popularised that shitty book The Secret, the tough-love inanity of Dr Phil and that unmitigated twit Eckhart Tolle, who bangs on about something called ‘the emotional paidbody’, which holds that we are each responsible for our poor fortune. However nice and liberal Oprah might seem, she has done her very best to promote the idea that it is only laziness and a lack of personal empowerment that makes some lives worse than others. In this world view, global poverty is all the fault of starving people themselves. Do some yoga and you’ll be right. Fuck off.
(1941–)
He who was formerly one of the more effective science communicators of the twentieth century has turned from a guy who can force even idiots like me to truly understand evolution theory into a dangerous shit. By positing science and the idea of pure logic as a panacea for all the world’s ills, he has become as fanatical and perilously simple as the new politics of anti-science he seeks to undo. Let us hope he returns to the important work of explaining difficult ideas of good science to a broad audience and away from the humanist pseudo-philosophy of screaming ‘god isn’t even real!’
(1999)
There is a good deal to loathe about Lucas’ clumsy prequel, not least of which is Jar Jar Binks, who is less a being with a character arc than an expensive merchandise puppet. But the real problem here is midi-chlorians.
For decades, the pleasant Buddhism-lite of the Star Wars franchise caused kids and grown-up kids to consider harmless ideas like being a decent person. A Jedi was someone who devoted themselves consciously to good. Like the worst of evolutionary biology or ‘state of nature’ accounts of How We Really Are, midi-chlorians reduced the Jedi to health and the Sith to a sickness.
As Aristotle said, we are, by nature, social. Any account of our essence in biology is foolish and easy and as Stupid as that turd, Jar Jar.
When Yoda says to Luke ‘Do. Or do not. There is no try,’ he is speaking as a pre-midi-chlorian Jedi. Post-midi-chlorian, he might as well say ‘Don’t bother trying because the midi-chlorians have already decided your fate.’
(1912–2006)
Adviser to US Presidents, leader of the Chicago School and almost without doubt the most influential post-war economist, Milty is what you get when take the moral insanity of Ayn Rand, combine it with the naiveté of Adam ‘the market is just awesome’ Smith and give it to General Pinochet for a bit of experimental fun.
Friedman was a libertarian and believed, apparently, in freedom for all peoples; he was an occasional advocate for same-sex marriage and believed in the state’s retreat from personal affairs. But it is perhaps this belief that creating the conditions for great wealth for the few is not only natural but has no impact on curtailing everyday freedoms of the many that makes his Stupid so stinky.
(1931–)
While it is absolutely true that there are media conglomerates just as pig-bonkingly dull as News Corp and magnates so effectively unpleasant, there is perhaps no force so effective in turning journalism from a profession that occasionally told us something like the truth into a reeking toilet of ideology as Rupe.
Throughout the western world, Murdoch continues to oversee the overproduction of the very worst in churnalism that plays to our simplest fears and the spread of half-ideas that exist for no reason more honourable than the bolstering of his business interests.
We can only suppose that he has never been made aware of the unprecedented good of his product, The Simpsons.
(1884–present)
Once, religion slaughtered those it considered to be possessed by demons. Then, thanks to the great humanity of the Enlightenment, medical science whacked these people in institutions. They were not often murdered, just deadened and hidden.
Then, many more of us became the liberal prisoners of the new idea of ‘mental health’.
Thanks to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the blockbuster publication of the APA, we are now all largely off our heads. The idea of disorders, which are treated by a one-size-fits-most program of drugs, has taken what some of us see as normal reactions to life, and demonised them softly.
Self-loathing, deep sadness and the apparently widespread urge to just give up are not viewed as responses to a complex world but, despite a complete absence of biological markers, as biology. Basically, midi-chlorians.
That antidepressant medication might make some of us feel a bit more like tolerating the world and behaving to its requirements is not evidence that the depression the APA says one in four of us experiences is medically real. It just shows us that drugs can change our mood.
The APA has helped to make real sadness the fault of biology. The wide acceptance of this deeply antisocial thinking is a new and happy kind of prison.
(Forever–present)
The fear of book-learnin’ has a long history, and even precedes widespread literacy. In 1642, Puritan minister John Cotton, who made America his home, said ‘The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan you bee.’
It is certainly true that certain religious fundamentalists continue this idea that thinking is no substitute for being thick as shit, but it is also true that anti-intellectual takes new forms equally as Stupid although not as overt as those ideas of creationists.
The Right these days is marvellous at taking science and making it into a matter of opinion rather than a rigorous system of doubt. But just as some tits bang on and on about climate science, which overwhelmingly tells us that Something Needs To Be Done to reverse terrible outcomes, others talk about ‘feelings’ as being more important than thinking.
Opposition to rational thought informs progressive politics these days just as much as it does conservatives. ‘Lived experience’ and emotional storytelling is now seen as a foundation for Meaningful Social Change on all sides.
When we take a feeling or an unexamined urge and use it as the foundation for action, we are pooping on the most decent innovations of history. Pure rationalism and absolute objectivity may be impossible. But this is no good reason to give up on it. To cry and then use one’s tears as the foundation for the future gives us nothing but soggy ideas.
(2009–present)
Reality television can be held largely responsible for the oversupply of meaning. In an era where we can call an appetiser ‘clever’, ‘ironic’ or ‘witty’, as the judges on MasterChef so very often do, there can be no real hope for the survival of meaning.
To things that obviously do not matter, such as food or video games or advertisements, we afford a great deal of attention. To the things that might truly impact our lives, such as economic policy or international relations or medical practice, we claim ignorance.
To molecular gastronomy we afford great importance and allow complexity where there is none. We become prisoners of meaninglessness. To the real scandals of our age we give less passion and thought.
We praise the meaningless and debate the inconsequential. We see significance where there is only pastry.
(circa 3500 BCE–present)
FFS, it is about time we stop seeing history as a linear progression. This is both the single great fault of Marxism and the truest filth of liberal humanism. If we keep believing that things change in a way that moves towards either the improvement or the dwindling of the species, we are stuck in a rut that does not allow for truly ingenious thoughts of a future that is different.
It is certainly true that we can look at ourselves and our institutions and our political past as a guide to what we have become. But to see history as an inevitable force instead of a bunch of stuff that can be broken is the worst kind of intellectual pessimism.
HR
Establishing a template that would be used for millennia to come by paternalists, Socrates was charged by prosecutor Meletus with corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to worship the city’s gods, found guilty and executed. It’s unlikely Socrates was the first to be convicted of heresy and leading the kids astray, but he was and remains the most high-profile victim of the classic accusations of those who would dictate how others live. While the philosopher ignored several opportunities to escape, suggesting he was relaxed about his fate, his execution also demonstrated the use of persecution and killing as official responses to both political and religious scepticism. And apparently hemlock tastes like mouse, whatever mouse tastes like.
This was a bit like the Iraq War of the fifteenth century, only it went for even longer. Anxious to put an end to a religious split in Bohemia and settle an ongoing schism within the Catholic Church, King Sigismund of Hungary invited the leader of the widespread but heretical Wycliffite movement, Jan Huss, to a council in Constance in 1414, with a promise of safe conduct. Once in Constance, Huss was imprisoned and burnt at the stake by Sigismund, on the basis that promises to a heretic weren’t considered binding. Five separate Crusades were launched by the Church against Huss’s followers in ensuing decades, and all were repelled by the Hussites. By 1436, when moderate Hussites negotiated a peace with surrounding powers and the Church that preserved their beliefs, Bohemia was completely destroyed and tens of thousands had been killed.
Out of the millions of examples of censorship throughout history, Henry VIII’s decision to try to protect Christianity in England by banning the reading of the Bible in 1543 has never been bettered—except, possibly, when a Kansas community banned Charlotte’s Web because it featured the blasphemy of talking animals. It was extraordinary not merely for its bizarrely contradictory logic, but because Bluff King Hal himself had sponsored the translation of the Bible into English to help spread the Gospel just a few years before.
Rousseau could make this list for his misogyny alone, but he seals the deal with his passionate—literally—assault on reason as a corruption of humankind’s natural, Edenic state. Rousseau’s misogyny wasn’t the standard loathing of women that characterised his age—even his readers criticised his views on women—but a more complicated, more modern affair: he portrayed women as essentially a different species, fundamentally, biologically incapable of participating in contemporary society, needing to be confined to the domestic sphere. Rousseau’s extraordinarily eccentric view of human history—primitive man wasn’t merely irrational but solitary, he believed—was a prelude to his elevation of instinct and emotion over reason, which not merely paved the way for Romanticism (which is bad enough) but for every anti-intellectual ever since. Although, in his defence, he got a bum rap for ‘the noble savage’, which wasn’t his creation—he merely thought ‘savages’ had a good thing going compared to the civilised world.
Eminent mathematicians and key figures in the development of classical statistical methods, Sir Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson were also the leading eugenicists of their age. While Galton laid much of the groundwork for theories of racial superiority before his death in 1911, Pearson advocated race war, argued against assistance for people ‘from poor stock’ and opposed Jewish immigration as Jews were ‘inferior physically and mentally to the native population’ of Britain. Before depriving the world of the benefit of his genetic superiority by dying in 1936, Pearson was unsurprisingly a professed admirer of the Nazis, having done much to establish, promote and give the aura of intellectual legitimacy to the idea of race war and racial inferiority.
Whether Wakefield’s manufacturing of a link between autism and measles vaccination slides over into outright evil rather than merely profoundly, despicably Stupid is debatable; certainly his actions were dishonest and have been alleged to have been motivated by expectations of financial gain from the vaccination scare he unleashed. But his actions gave a figleaf of credibility to the conspiracy theories, froth-mouthed rantings and self-obsessed idiocy of millions of anti-vaxers throughout the world, resulting in the deaths of who knows how many children, and the illness and often permanent injury to many, many more.
The carefully scripted nature of reality TV shows of all genres, from the now hoary elimination-based shows to talent shows to the cooking shows that now infest much of the Australian TV schedule, is well known. These are dirt-cheap dramas scripted and cut together by program makers and TV networks. But in foregoing the services of creative talents that are normally required for drama production, producers rely on the same limited number of narratives and stock characters over and over, rather than risk the danger of actual storytelling artistry. While few shows in the genre are outright misogynist and infantilising of women as the various versions of The Bachelor, that merely typifies the extent to which the entire genre relies for its narratives on stereotyping women and minorities under the guise of offering a glimpse of the real world. Watching reality TV doesn’t merely make you stupid—something even its biggest fans would admit—but it makes you Stupid.
9/11 had exactly the result intended by Osama Bin Laden: a furious America lashed out at whatever Muslim country it could plausibly attack. Saddam Hussein, a secular, oil-rich dictator opposed by al-Qaeda, was the lucky victim. The result was, literally, history’s costliest mistake, with a $4 trillion war, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead US and American troops, the fragmentation of Iraq, the empowerment of Iran and the creation of a terrorist group so brutal they were regarded as extreme even by al Qaeda. Poor Rupert Murdoch didn’t even get the $20-a-barrel oil price he predicted would result. And now Western politicians want to do it all again.
Don’t be misled by Missouri Republican congressman Todd Akin’s notoriety as the man who, in 2012, said women’s bodies can prevent pregnancy in the event of ‘legitimate rape’. Akin is the complete package of denialism, the highest evolutionary stage (sorry, Intelligent Design stage) of conservative irrationality, the political pin-up boy of postmodern politics, who claimed in 2008 that women who aren’t pregnant have abortions (reminiscent of Sarah Silverman’s complaint that she wanted an abortion but was having trouble getting pregnant), that the arrival of spring was a demonstration of ‘good’ climate change that shouldn’t be stopped and that there was no science in evolution. Akin even linked autism to vaccination and home-schooled his children—not a guarantee of Stupid but a useful indicator. So perfect a summation of all that is wrong with the modern GOP is Akin that the Democrats actually ran ads for him to ensure he won his party primary in the lead-up to the 2012 election. In mid-2014, Akin launched a book, Firing Back: Taking on the party bosses and media elite to protect our faith and freedom, and claimed his ‘legitimate rape’ comment was merely an ‘abbreviation’.
While famed for such laudable traits as incessant warfare and demanding conversion to Christianity by conquered communities on pain of death, the aptly named Charlemagne has a strong case for being the one indispensable figure of Western history. His unification of western Europe, his wide-ranging administrative and religious reforms, and the revival of learning and scholarship he actively encouraged under Alcuin of York (despite himself being unable to write and not learning to read until adulthood) had a major impact on the course of western European history. The renaissance of the late eighth and early ninth centuries that he sparked, if short-lived, was crucial in providing a link between classical scholarship and later centuries, preserving most of the key classical texts that eventually made it through to the Europe of the more economically and politically stable second millennium. Without Charlemagne, the Dark Ages would have stayed dark in the West; there would have been no future renaissances, and possibly no modern Europe as we understand it. Which you may or may not think would be a bad thing.
Nearly forgotten centuries later, Paracelsus, who lived in the first half of the sixteenth century, is a key figure in the development of modern scientific method. He rejected scholasticism and reliance on ancient texts for science and medicine, preferring observation and experiment. This sounds like a statement of the obvious, but it was considered near-heretical at the time (he was often compared to Luther, and had his works banned). He was also a chemist and botanist, as well as an occultist, demonstrating the hazy nature of early modern science, but his work was critical in allowing the Western mind to adopt a more rational, sceptical outlook in response to the torrent of works released by the printing press.
Early modern Europe was obsessed with unemployment, or what they called ‘sturdy beggars’, because unemployment was thought to be a moral failing rather than an economic outcome. ‘Sturdy beggars’, as opposed to run-of-the-mill beggars who had some legitimate disability, were able-bodied and capable of working, but, it was believed, refused to. The solution to unemployment, some thought, was to force them to work—a concept that survived into the nineteenth century ‘poor house’ and, indeed graces our society still via contemporary ‘work for the dole’ schemes. The good burghers of sixteenth century Amsterdam developed an early mechanism for curing sturdy beggars of their idleness: a room set at water level that would fill up and drown the occupant unless he pumped furiously to empty the water out. This treatment, however, was peremptorily ended after one sturdy beggar, perhaps less sturdy than he or she appeared, or keen to demonstrate a point of principle, simply refused to pump and allowed him or herself to be drowned. The story may be apocryphal, like much else in early modern Europe, but the perhaps fictional beggar deserves memorialising for treating a facile elite economic philosophy with such contempt, even at the cost of their life.
Now primarily known by philosophy students and then not many of them, Spinoza’s writings were profoundly influential on most of the key figures of the Enlightenment, even if, like Voltaire, they were hostile to his conclusions. His theology and his demonstration of the importance of religious freedom and free speech, as much as his monism and determinism, were critical in paving the way not merely for the Enlightenment but for much of subsequent Western philosophy. He also refused offers of honours and university positions, preferring to remain a lens grinder who also wrote philosophy. Sadly, this modesty was particularly costly to Western thought, since he is said to have died of silicosis from glass dust.
More correctly, the Glorious Invasion—in late 1688, William of Orange successfully conquered England (Scotland and Ireland took quite some time longer), displacing the Catholic James II, who had alienated the British ruling class with not merely his religion but his growing French-style authoritarianism and policy of religious toleration. The British elite understood the lessons of the Civil War fifty years earlier and resolved not to let an intra-elite conflict turn into an open struggle that would allow non-elite forces the opportunity to seize power, as Cromwell and the New Model Army had in the 1640s. Instead, the Protestant Dutch ruler William was accepted as Britain’s legitimate monarch. The road to a genuinely constitutional monarchy stretched well into the eighteenth century for what would shortly be the United Kingdom, but the exceptionalism of English parliamentary rule was made permanent by the ousting of a would-be Catholic absolutist.
A key French Enlightenment figure, translator, bon vivant and atheist, D’Holbach kept an extraordinarily diverse Paris salon that was a key centre for both philosophes and mainstream cultural figures. He also wrote (perhaps with Diderot) System of Nature, a rigorous advocacy of materialism and probably the single most reviled book of the entire Enlightenment, drawing a furious reaction from both the Catholic Church (which demanded its suppression) and moderate philosophes like Voltaire. His later works developed the case for a rational, constitutional government aimed at maximising the community welfare, anticipating utilitarianism.
As a democracy, Great Britain was hopeless in the nineteenth century—the franchise had been reduced, and significantly so, since the seventeenth century, until the Reform Acts began extending the franchise once again to a significant portion of the male population. But the sheer unadulterated Stupid of not enfranchising half the electorate on the grounds that they possessed uteruses remained fixed in place until after the Great War. It galled large numbers of women, many of whom weren’t content with ‘constitutional’ forms of campaigning: many, especially after 1912, adopted more radical, disruptive tactics, civil disobedience, self-defence and militant protest. Enduring first abuse, then imprisonment, then in many cases torture via forced feeding, the suffragettes provided a remarkable contrast between the ineffable idiocy of the British establishment and aggressive, effective street-level direct action.
Keynes would have had a sufficient claim to fame merely for The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which accurately anticipated how the Allies’ treatment of Germany after the Great War guaranteed another conflict, or his work on probability in the 1920s, or for regularly infuriating fellow Bloomsbury Set member Lytton Strachey. But his revolutionary opposition to austerity economics and advocacy and theoretical justification for fiscal stimulus, along with the Bretton Woods system he helped found after World War II, paved the way for the long post-war boom of the West. Countries with politicians intelligent enough to remember the lessons of Keynesianism in 2008—like Australia—benefited in the wake of the financial crisis, while European countries that embraced Depression-style austerity got exactly what they paid for—an extended economic slump that has ruined the lives of millions. Seldom has one man brought so much economic benefit to so many human beings across the planet. And to this day, the Right continues to attack Keynes for his homosexuality and claim that it shaped his economic theories.
The two most important whistleblowers in Western thought have reshaped recent history by revealing the true nature of Anglophone governments and, in particular, the US government. Taking advantage of the transition of information from a substance measured in grams per square metre to one composed purely of zeroes and ones, each released vast troves of information exposing war crimes, hypocrisy, illegality and global surveillance. The system of power they revealed is one operated by corporations, tame politicians, soldiers and bureaucrats for their own advantage, not that of the populations they ostensibly serve. Manning was tortured and jailed for her actions; Snowden has been vilified and chased into hiding for his; both are true heroes in an age seemingly devoid of them.
Much vilified as a symptom of the profound cynicism in the internet age, snark is in fact the antibody produced by a healthy, intelligent mind in response to the presence of Stupid. Matching the egregiousness of the idiocy that induces it, snark is offensive, wilfully transgressive and anti-social, and delightful both to produce and to consume, unless it is directed at oneself or something one values. Snark is a refusal to suspend disbelief; in fact, snark puts wheels on disbelief, sticks an engine in it and tries to run over whoever is demanding it be suspended. Like actual antibodies, on which this mess of metaphors is based, snark can become unhealthily surfeit to requirements and start attacking whatever is producing it, but on the whole we are far healthier for its presence than without it, no matter how many complaints of butthurt get aired, no matter how often the wambulance is called, no matter who theatrically takes umbrage at it.
BK