Curtis White |
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Curtis White is an acclaimed social critic and essayist whose work appears regularly in Context, Harper's and The Village Voice. He is a professor of English at Illinois State University and lives in Normal, Illinois.
Coming to a Polling Place Near You!: Defeat by Stupidity
As the English national elections [is that what you call them?] draw near, you will want to ponder the lessons of the recent American presidential election, although I think that the lessons to be learned are not what they are generally thought to be. That is, liberalism and the Democratic Party were not defeated by stupidity.
It was worse than that.
The “stupidity” theory of the Bush victory was first advanced, notoriously, by a day-after headline in the Independent? “How could 50 Million People be so Stupid?” it asked indignantly. The same day, Garry Wills suggested that the election was in fact the end of critical intelligence, the unhappy victory of religious superstition, intolerance, cruelty, torture, etc. The Bush victory was, in short, the death of the Enlightenment. (“The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” November 4, 2004, New York Times)
Dang! Four hundred years of progress dashed by a bunch of fundamentalist evangelicals in rural Ohio. According to Wills, we were going to have to start all over again. Summon old Voltaire from his cranky grave. Why, Sisyphus had it easy in comparison. (Of course, allusion to mythological figures is a purely liberal elite device and is exactly the sort of thing that will no longer be tolerated. It’s going to be all about Jayzus from here on.)
Then, cruelest blow of all, the web lit up with a chart cobbled together by one Christopher Evans from his personal web site where, among other things, he studies the musculature of the shoulder carriage. His infamous post to the web purported to show that the average IQ of “red” Republican states was far below the average IQ of “Blue” Democratic states. So, it’s scientific, this creeping resentment against the stupid. It was as if American liberals were saying, “The Republicans may have won, but they should be embarrassed about it.”
All of which seems to me to just sublimely miss the point: a Kerry victory would also have been a victory for stupidity. I’d like to suggest that, apart from the quadrennial mortification provided by presidential elections, we are routinely defeated by a sort of everyday stupidity that I have called the Middle Mind. Under the reign of the Middle Mind, it doesn’t matter whether a Democrat or a republican is in the White House, or a Laborite or Tory is at 10 Downing St. Under the Middle Mind, we are obliged to believe things that make no sense but that we are not allowed to criticize. The problem is not that we’re stupid but that—red and blue state alike—we are not allowed to think at all.
This state of affairs was crystallized for me by Barack Obama’s sensational speech at the Democratic National Convention. Now, Obama is for liberals the one bright spot in the ’04 elections. He won a Republican Senate seat in Illinois. He’s African-American, Harvard educated, from a working-class family, and he defeated his conservative opponent, Alan Keyes, with nearly 75% of the vote. Smart as this Harvard educated, University of Chicago law professor surely is, he was still willing to appeal to his audience's orthodox expectations by imagining his deceased parents watching him from heaven as he spoke. Now, one is obliged to imagine either that Obama believes that human beings are transported, subjectivities intact, to a showy place called heaven from which vantage they can watch their children and bust their buttons with pride over just how well junior is doing, or one has to acknowledge that, like 99% of his colleagues on the political circuit, there is no known limit to the amount of shit he's willing to eat in the cause of getting elected by people that, intellectually, he ought to have contempt for. The notion of "representative of the people" gets very tangled and troubling at this point. The choices aren't pretty. Either he's a hypocrite and no representative at all, or he's all too representative.
Death of the Enlightenment, indeed!
Of course, this is probably a hyperbolic example. But the not-hyperbolic examples are only more depressing. For instance, Whether Republican or Democrat, Tory or Labor, there is an unspoken pledge of allegiance to free-market democracy; the best democracy money can buy as Greg Palast puts it. No one welcomes the Enlightenment’s culture of criticism when it comes to the necessity and inevitability of global capital or its relationship to our democracies.
Liberal complicity with its supposed enemy also takes more subtle forms, and it may very well be that until these more subtle forms have been addressed it will not be possible to address the larger. Liberals imagine that they own intelligent culture in this country. It’s liberals that read the New York Times and its art and book sections. It is liberals who consume “alternative” culture in pop music and movies. And yet this “intelligent” blue state culture (despised by all the red state yokels on their way to the next NASCAR rally, Dwight Yokum blaring in the pickup truck) is fatally compromised by what it would claim to oppose. For example, liberal consumers of culture know that a book is a good book, or a movie is a good movie, if it gets four stars in the city news weekly. (A novel that I wrote recently received four bunnies out of four in Playboy. I couldn’t have been happier.)
The star (or bunny) system of evaluation is just the beginning of the truth that intelligence must present itself as something other than intelligence, as entertainment, or as scandal, or as something with a “buzz” if it is to be heard at all, even in so called liberal culture. The Anglo-American culture of intelligence is fatally contaminated by what it most fears, the stupidity that is supposed to belong to Others. Our shared tragedy is not that stupidity has prevailed in the U.S., or that it will prevail in the U.K. The tragedy is that we’re all already stupid. The tragedy is that there is no alternative to stupidity. And so we’ll cheer Tony Blair if he wins, and watch his victory speech on the tube, and sigh a great sigh of relief that the Tories are still in retreat, until Tony’s next betrayal, his next capitulation to business or Bush, at which point we’ll recognize that we’ve maybe been just a little bit stupid. Fooled again as the Who put it.
So, when you step into the voting both to cast your anxious vote, don’t be surprised if you hear a little jingling overhead. In Anglo-American culture these days, we all wear the cap and bells.
