Every August, as regularly as the geese fly south for winter,
there are complaints in the British press about the ever-increasing
number of candidates who are getting As and Bs on the main
secondary school leaving and university entrance exam for
18-year-olds, called A-levels. Nothing seems to be able to stop
this inexorable decline in standards, however much people continue
to complain about it. But of course the people who complain about
it are the same people who, through their elected representatives,
created the expansion of higher education in Britain that has
brought it about. If there is a demand for more people with As and
Bs at A-level— and therefore the theoretically necessary
qualifications for university entrance—then the exam system must
increase the supply.
The problem, if there is one, arises only because people had
become used to thinking of the exams as what the educationists call
“norm-referenced,” and now the norm has been deformed. The bell of
the bell curve has been pushed rightward, so that it now looks more
like a whale than a camel.
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud, that’s almost in shape of a
camel?
Polonius: By th’ mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks, it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale.
Just like the exam results, that is, the cloud can be whatever
we want. And, increasingly, what we want when it comes to exam
results is that everybody should be above average. This phenomenon
is yet another product of our post-honor society, where distinction
no longer resides in virtue or character but in intelligence.
Certainly, intelligence is now honorific as virtue was formerly,
and, as a bonus, it is also unisex, which virtue wasn’t. This means
that any imputation of its deficiency, whether in gentleman or
lady, is indicative not just of misfortune but of disgrace. It’s
still possible to suffer other kinds of disgrace.
Only this morning I noticed that the press in his home country,
weary of the complaints about A-level results, is loudly
proclaiming its discovery of the “£2 million Hampshire bolthole” of
“shamed rock star Gary Glitter” after that worthy’s return from
prison in Vietnam on child-molestation charges. But it is hard to
think of many other circumstances in which the media would use the
word shame unironically, particularly about a rock star—than whom
there can be few classes of men more unshamable.
When it comes to describing people as stupid, however, the shame
belongs to the describer. The foundation of our educational system
is “self-esteem,” and under the régime of that egalitarian
substitute for honor the worst thing you can call someone is
stupid. To call a man a coward or a liar or a woman a slut or a
whore used to be considered what the law calls “fighting words”—the
kind of insult that was likely to be replied to with violence.
Insofar as there is still such a socially recognized category as
fighting words today, stupid and its synonyms, along with racial
epithets, must surely be included, and it is that feeling, as much
as inflation of the currency of euphemism, that lies behind the
outcry over the use of the word “retard” in the Ben Stiller film,
Tropic Thunder, a late-summer blockbuster comedy in spite of the
calls of Timothy Shriver and others for a boycott.
Mr. Shriver, son of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, is
chairman of the Special Olympics, in whose founding 40 years ago
his mother was instrumental. Protesting on the op-ed page of the
Washington Post against Mr. Stiller’s picture, he wrote: “I know: I
could be too sensitive. But I was taught that mean isn’t funny.”
Mean isn’t funny? Au contraire! There’s not much that’s really
funny unless it’s mean. The question is to whom you’re allowed to
be mean. Once this category included people of other races or
religions, not to mention liars, cowards, and sluts. Also the
handicapped and those, like drunks, lechers, and others, who would
now be classed as being victims of some addiction. Today the
pickings are a lot slimmer.
We still have non-ethnic white males, of course, particularly if
they are bogus heroes, like the principal characters of Tropic
Thunder, or fathers, once the heroes of the hearthstone. Nowadays,
fathers are ex-officio bogus heroes—no longer the execrated Ozzie
Nelson but the celebrated Homer Simpson. But Homer, like the heroes
of Tropic Thunder, is also stupid, so hitting the trifecta of
comedy. Without this stupidity, the hilarity that any of these
characters is able to excite would be much diminished, and it’s
hard not to have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, without
the shame of stupidity to exploit, our comedians and comic writers
and satirists would suffer the fate of the fairies after the
Reformation in England.
But now, alas, they all are dead, Or gone beyond the seas Or
farther for religion fled, Or else they take their ease. The
religion of political correctness would banish from our shores not
just the Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something
About Mary) but also David Zucker, whose An American Carol, opening
this month, promises to be that once-oxymoronic phenomenon, a
Hollywood comedy (by the author of the Naked Gun movies and
Airplane!) of the conservative persuasion. On the other hand, I
share Mr. Shriver’s belief that it is, well, rather cowardly to
attack the stupid. Presumably they were born that way and can’t
help it any more than can the handicapped—who, apart from the
developmentally challenged in the (inevitably) “edgy” Tropic
Thunder, are off-limits. Moreover, ridicule directed at the stupid
is a not-so-subtle way of trumpeting one’s own putative
intelligence. Boastfulness, from the point of view of the
now-discredited honor culture, is almost as unlovely a quality as
cruelty.
Political satire sounds more manly, less sneaky and mean, but
doesn’t most political satire boil down to an attack on those whom
its authors consider to be stupid? Anyway, that was the problem
with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 four years ago. The comedy,
based on Mr. Moore’s belief that President Bush was stupid, kept
getting in the way of the more serious charge that he was also
wicked and corrupt—almost an evil genius in fact. It just didn’t
seem plausible that he could be both. But, having helped to set the
tone for our political dialogue ever since, Michael Moore—the
principal target of Mr. Zucker’s film—must look with a certain
amount of satisfaction at the campaign of Barack Obama, which
amounts to little more than a promise to be smarter than the
axiomatically thick-o incumbent.
Actually, without the sympathetic media, this would be a rather
brave way to campaign. Every leader makes mistakes, and every
mistake can be made to look, with the benefit of hindsight, like
stupidity. Senator Obama would be setting himself up for a fall of
spectacular proportions if he couldn’t count on the media’s being
much more forgiving toward his mistakes than they have been towards
those of President Bush. But of course he can. So that’s all right
then. He can also rely on the fact that he is appealing to a whole
class of the aspirational cognitive élite. Just as John Kerry did
four years ago, he is inviting the people who care most about
looking smart to look smart by voting for the champion of smarts—a
man who, indeed, has almost nothing to recommend him as the chief
magistrate in the land but the twin genetic endowments of his race
and his brains.
As Senator Kerry showed, being the leader of the smart party can
be almost enough in itself to get you elected president these days.
The popularity this year of movies like Tropic Thunder or the
mega-blockbusting Dark Knight, which flatter their audiences’
intellectual pretensions, suggests that the culture’s
over-valuation of intelligence has now reached the point where the
smart people’s party will sweep all before it. Nor is it a
coincidence that the evil doers in both these films are much more
glamorous, as well as smarter than, the ostensible heroes. For it
is another of the hallmarks of intelligence in the popular
mythology that it is skeptical about ideas of good and evil. It
famously sees the world in gray, not black and white. Now, to me,
that’s the best reason for sticking with the stupid party.
“Good old rock! Nothing beats that,” as Homer says when playing
rock-paper-scissors. But at least to Homer the Americans are
automatically the good guys. That doesn’t play well in the media or
on university campuses, but it’s a quality a lot more likely to
keep a grip on America’s position of world leadership than merely
being smart.
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident
scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author
of Honor: A History and the new book Media Madness:
The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by
Encounter Books.
