Of mice and morons

STYLE, SEPTEMBER 2000

HAVE YOU NOTICED how stupid the world is becoming? Well, not the world, exactly – the world, while not necessarily one’s first choice as an after-dinner speaker, has come up with some nifty ideas in its time. Plate tectonics was a pretty shrewd manoeuvre, and the condensation cycle generally earns nods of approval in all the right circles. No, I mean the people who inhabit the world.

Stupidity is everywhere. It is the air we breathe. There are, of course, many shades of the stupid. I don’t mean the recognisable stupidity of drooling, slack-jawed incomprehension, although, as anyone who has ever watched SABC1 will tell you, there is plenty of that shuffling around. Far more depressing is the stupidity that disguises itself as thought, that talks so glibly and eloquently – indeed, that never stops talking. How powerful is this species of stupidity? It is so powerful it has invented a genre of literature that actually makes people more stupid for having read it.

I was rictally grinning my way through a dinner party recently, when conversation turned, like a deflating boerewors on a suburban braai, to the subject of self-help. For some reason those beyond help are always talking about self-help. They can’t help themselves. A young lady of doubtful provenance dipped into her handbag and hauled out a glossy paperback. “Read this!” she commanded. “It will change your life. It contains the lost wisdom of the ancient Mayans.” The book was called The Avocado Prophecies or Footprints of the Toucans or some such horsefeathers and flapdoodle. I fixed her with an eye both cold and unaccommodating. I have no patience with the cultural anthropology of loserdom.

Any curling potpourri of antiquated mysticism is celebrated nowadays, provided it can be attributed to the Incas or the Etruscans or some other culture that has disappeared with scarcely a trace. Besides celebrating communal cocaine use and the social merits of human sacrifice, what can the Mayans teach us now? How to be invaded by a rag-tag bunch of Spanish ruffians? If those ancient cultures were so damned clever, where are they now? Eh? Pyramids and maps of the stars are all very well, but they might have found the wheel a touch more useful in the long run.

Anthropological mysticism is but one rickety arm of the genre of quick-fire self-help. To sell an idea today, you simply have to tell people it will change their lives, and tell them it won’t be hard. It’s not stupid for people to believe in something better, but it is a very modern stupidity to believe it will come easy. The fashion for mainstream mysticism is not a swing away from religion as such, but away from systems of belief that require rigour and application.

Hence the popularity of faraway cultures – they don’t have to make sense. In fact it’s better that they don’t. Modern folk are so hostile to thought, we’ll put our faith in anything, provided it’s not rational. With alternative medicine it’s the alternative that attracts, not the medicine. No doubt sundry roots and tubers and suchlike have useful healing properties, but the way people go on you’d think that dangling crystals and painting your bedroom puce is guaranteed to work, for no other reason than that it hasn’t been subjected to clinical testing.

The more non-rational a self-help book pretends to be, the more certain it is to succeed. We prefer anecdote and analogy to case studies and evidence. Invent a snappy metaphor and the crowds will flock. Consider the latest best-seller in the field: Who Moved my Cheese? by one Dr Spencer Johnson. It bills itself, and I’m not making this up, as the parable of four characters who live in a maze. Their lives are dedicated to the pursuit of, ahem, cheese. Apparently they like cheese. Two characters are mice named “Sniff” and “Scurry”. Two are miniature people named “Hem” and “Haw”. There’s more, but I can’t bring myself to utter it. Yet is this any more preposterous than a book titled 60 Ways to Make Your Life Amazing? I doubt it.

And for all this hogwash and hoo-hah, are people noticeably wiser, kinder or more interesting dinner-party guests? They are not. I say to hell with this obsession with the real you. If you want the world to be a better place, don’t try to be more true to yourself – try to be more polite. Say please and thank you, teach your children not to interrupt adults while they’re talking, wear a jacket to dinner. Sod self-discovery, bring back manners. Imagine a day when every self-help book is replaced by a manual of common etiquette. Now there’s a world I could live in.