Thursday, September 30, 2004
Stupidity Rules!
News wires on 13 September 2004 claimed something in North Korea exploded, producing what may have looked like a giant mushroom cloud, but wasn’t necessarily nuclear. Meanwhile, this past month saw numerous reports saying various intelligence officials war-gamed Iran, generating not a single outcome that should prompt much optimism. It was a perfect time to go to the movies, and so I did, on more than a few occasions.
Stupidity [http://stupiditythemovie.com], a work by Canadian auteur documentarist Albert Nerenberg, investigates the notion and substance behind what it means to be stupid, though he claims there is no easy and universal definition. I very much enjoyed the movie, hope to see it again, but was struck by a number of things. First, director Nerenberg explains that, and this applies throughout the ages, not all that much has been done to explore this concept. The centuries may have yielded only seven academic volumes dealing with stupidity. While so many are fixated on intelligence, what is it about stupidity, nowhere in the Western world in short supply, that makes it so overlooked? Second, why did more than a few people have such a visceral reaction to this movie? Maybe it was the crowd I happened to be with, but more than one audience member decided he needed to share his insights and displeasure with the screen, and then leave in disgust. This happened most noticeably during one scene, where the filmed interviewee, the author of a book that argues that getting stupid and then remaining so until death is the true path to bliss and enlightenment, expounds on the merits of his theories. Just how leaving a movie with a loud attention-grabbing reaction constitutes any form of activism, or anything other than stupidity is, well, something that escapes me. Third, there was throughout the film a marked preference for analyzing, exploring stupidity as a psychological phenomenon or commodity. But what of stupidity as a social or sociological variable? To be sure, social behaviour is examined in Stupidity, but almost exclusively from social-psychological paradigms.
And then it happened, when one interviewee in this documentary made a comment about foreign policy and conflict, the remark came up that “war is stupid.” I suppose I could have hoped for no clearer example of the “all politics is personal” phenomenon. Gone is any real notion that war and conflict have sociological roots apart and distinct from the psychological; at least, some say, gone from the twenty-first century and Stupidity. In the past, wars may have been interpreted as means for readdressing power imbalances, or for ways of imposing rules and order, while now the emphasis is on recognizing that violence is counterproductive at the personal, individual level, and therefore must also be just as immaterial or inappropriate in all its forms.
Personalizing macro-social interaction, chiefly foreign relations and discussions of the world systems, may be so pervasive that few even recognize or notice it, or understand how this came about. Traces of this “all politics is personal” pervade popular culture. For example, in movies striving to be much more than entertainment, like the recent insomnia cure Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke’s character illustrates this by waxing ‘that people evolve like countries.’ In analytical works, broad social issues are often framed in terms of the psychological, likely to make the material more accessible to contemporary audiences. The recent moving documentary Shake Hands with the Devil does this, in part explaining the Rwanda genocide in terms of its impact on one person who was there, Canadian General Romeo Dalaire [NB, the film is based on the General’s book of the same name].
Some may complain that giving ‘a personality’ to institutions predates the era of ‘all politics is personal’. And indeed illustrations, some may suspect, could be offered up. For instance, didn’t peasants in pre-revolutionary Russia look to the state and its embodiment in the Czars as their ‘little father’? True enough, but his role was social, to serve as protector, mentor, guide, and saviour of the Russian villages that needed to be shielded from the menaces and intrusions of the outside world. The ‘little father’ phenomenon is precisely what I’m not talking about. But if you should happen to notice someone observing that the planet is regressing, going through a reawakened adolescence because we’ve reverted to war in places like Iraq, you’re bumping into the current ideal.
George Bush, Tony Blair, and a host of Iraqi politicians regressing? Now could that be stupidity?
Stan Markotich
Submit comments to stanmarkotich@yahoo.com
¶ 1:28 PM
News wires on 13 September 2004 claimed something in North Korea exploded, producing what may have looked like a giant mushroom cloud, but wasn’t necessarily nuclear. Meanwhile, this past month saw numerous reports saying various intelligence officials war-gamed Iran, generating not a single outcome that should prompt much optimism. It was a perfect time to go to the movies, and so I did, on more than a few occasions.
Stupidity [http://stupiditythemovie.com], a work by Canadian auteur documentarist Albert Nerenberg, investigates the notion and substance behind what it means to be stupid, though he claims there is no easy and universal definition. I very much enjoyed the movie, hope to see it again, but was struck by a number of things. First, director Nerenberg explains that, and this applies throughout the ages, not all that much has been done to explore this concept. The centuries may have yielded only seven academic volumes dealing with stupidity. While so many are fixated on intelligence, what is it about stupidity, nowhere in the Western world in short supply, that makes it so overlooked? Second, why did more than a few people have such a visceral reaction to this movie? Maybe it was the crowd I happened to be with, but more than one audience member decided he needed to share his insights and displeasure with the screen, and then leave in disgust. This happened most noticeably during one scene, where the filmed interviewee, the author of a book that argues that getting stupid and then remaining so until death is the true path to bliss and enlightenment, expounds on the merits of his theories. Just how leaving a movie with a loud attention-grabbing reaction constitutes any form of activism, or anything other than stupidity is, well, something that escapes me. Third, there was throughout the film a marked preference for analyzing, exploring stupidity as a psychological phenomenon or commodity. But what of stupidity as a social or sociological variable? To be sure, social behaviour is examined in Stupidity, but almost exclusively from social-psychological paradigms.
And then it happened, when one interviewee in this documentary made a comment about foreign policy and conflict, the remark came up that “war is stupid.” I suppose I could have hoped for no clearer example of the “all politics is personal” phenomenon. Gone is any real notion that war and conflict have sociological roots apart and distinct from the psychological; at least, some say, gone from the twenty-first century and Stupidity. In the past, wars may have been interpreted as means for readdressing power imbalances, or for ways of imposing rules and order, while now the emphasis is on recognizing that violence is counterproductive at the personal, individual level, and therefore must also be just as immaterial or inappropriate in all its forms.
Personalizing macro-social interaction, chiefly foreign relations and discussions of the world systems, may be so pervasive that few even recognize or notice it, or understand how this came about. Traces of this “all politics is personal” pervade popular culture. For example, in movies striving to be much more than entertainment, like the recent insomnia cure Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke’s character illustrates this by waxing ‘that people evolve like countries.’ In analytical works, broad social issues are often framed in terms of the psychological, likely to make the material more accessible to contemporary audiences. The recent moving documentary Shake Hands with the Devil does this, in part explaining the Rwanda genocide in terms of its impact on one person who was there, Canadian General Romeo Dalaire [NB, the film is based on the General’s book of the same name].
Some may complain that giving ‘a personality’ to institutions predates the era of ‘all politics is personal’. And indeed illustrations, some may suspect, could be offered up. For instance, didn’t peasants in pre-revolutionary Russia look to the state and its embodiment in the Czars as their ‘little father’? True enough, but his role was social, to serve as protector, mentor, guide, and saviour of the Russian villages that needed to be shielded from the menaces and intrusions of the outside world. The ‘little father’ phenomenon is precisely what I’m not talking about. But if you should happen to notice someone observing that the planet is regressing, going through a reawakened adolescence because we’ve reverted to war in places like Iraq, you’re bumping into the current ideal.
George Bush, Tony Blair, and a host of Iraqi politicians regressing? Now could that be stupidity?
Stan Markotich
Submit comments to stanmarkotich@yahoo.com
¶ 1:28 PM
