The State

Next stop, Idiocracy  

Capitalism’s poisoning of the moral and natural environment is taking the whole world down a dead-end path 

by Michael Nenonen  

This last weekend I rented the movie Idiocracy (2006). The film follows the tribulations of Joe Bowers, an underachieving man with a 100 IQ who’s placed in hibernation for what is supposed to be a year-long sleep. Things don’t go as planned, and he wakes up five hundred years later in a world ruled by idiots. The narrator tells us that by the beginning of the 21st Century, natural selection had begun going awry. Once, only the smartest people survived to reproduce; now, thanks to a safer environment and modern medicine, even the dumbest people could live long and fertile lives. Since intelligent people were reproducing slowly while stupid people were breeding like mad, IQ scores started dropping. By the time Joe awakens, he’s the smartest person on Earth.

And, oh, what an Earth it is. Crumbling cities are surrounded by vast mountains of trash that create devastating garbage avalanches. The economy is in free-fall. America is watering its crops with Gatorade. Starbucks offers hand-jobs with its lattes. The most popular TV show is called “Ow, My Balls!” The US president is a former porn-star and Smackdown champion. Fox News is largely unchanged . . . .

It’s more than just genetics

Idiocracy satirizes the dumbing-down of American culture. While the problem is a real one, I don’t think it has anything to do with natural selection. I haven’t seen any evidence that stupid people have significantly more children than very intelligent people or, more to the point, than people of average intelligence, but even if that were the case it wouldn’t necessarily lead to a general decline in IQ scores.

It’s true that IQ is heavily influenced by genetics. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, a multiyear study of 100 sets of twins who were separated and raised in different households, found that genetics accounted for 70% of the variation in their IQ scores. That’s a very significant contribution, but it allows for a 30% contribution from the environment. It also ensures a “regression towards the mean” effect in IQ scores across generations: extremely intelligent parents will tend to have children who aren’t quite so bright, and extremely dim parents will tend to have children who aren’t quite so dull. Over time, this dynamic helps keep IQ scores within the average range. To find the causes of dumbing-down, we shouldn’t be examining natural selection, but rather the environment Americans are living in.

The most obvious feature of that environment is that it’s structured around a market economy. There’s a dangerous contradiction underlying such economies. For the market to work, its participants must possess virtues like honesty, initiative, and thrift. Economists call these virtues “moral capital.” Moral capital is a resource that’s generated outside of the market, in the network of relationships that create local communities. If sufficient moral capital is lacking, then deception and distrust will undermine the economic contracts supporting the market system. Unfortunately, the market erodes moral capital by reducing all questions of moral value to questions of personal taste and consumer choice, by encouraging competition at the expense of cooperation, by valuing sensory stimulation over critical reflection, and by ravaging our environment.

Eyeballs über alles

Advertising provides a good example of the market’s effects on moral capital. As Noam Chomsky argues in an interview for the documentary Stupidity (2003), the primary role of most major media is to provide an audience for their advertisers. Television programming, for instance, is designed to expose viewers to commercials. Commercials, not television shows, are the real content of television, the content that the most money and thought go into. Commercials and their accompanying TV shows disproportionately target children and teenagers because these are the people most likely to form long-lasting brand loyalty. Because children and teenagers have undeveloped critical faculties, and because they’re extremely susceptible to violent and sexual stimuli, commercials and TV shows are becoming ever-more debauched in order to attract their attention. The same logic applies to most of our entertainment media. Since the entertainment media are among the most powerful vehicles of socialization in developed countries, this can’t help but have a debasing effect on our cultural values.

Chomsky also argues that it’s in the interests of the powerful to de-politicize the masses. So long as the masses are overworked, impoverished, uneducated, and unorganized, they have little chance of understanding and defending their interests. By dismantling the welfare state, under-funding public education, and crippling the labour movement, America’s elites are keeping the masses in their place; they’re also preventing the masses from accumulating moral capital.

As our stocks of moral capital run low, corruption spreads through both the market and the community. People become atomized narcissists, unconcerned with maintaining the institutions and networks necessary for intellectual and social enrichment. As those institutions and networks wither, people lose their sources of mental nourishment, with predictable consequences. In this way, market economies deplete the moral capital generated by communities as rapidly as they deplete the natural capital generated by the biosphere.

The loss of our moral capital is, in fact, intimately related to the decline of our natural capital. As Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers point out in Our Stolen Future (Dutton, 1996), the chemical pollution of our environment is directly attacking our intellectual and moral faculties. Rates of autism in the developed world appear to have doubled since the 1980s. Learning disabilities, behavioural problems, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are becoming more common. Some studies have suggested that the contaminants already present in the developed world are sufficient to cause a 5-point drop in measurable IQ scores throughout our population.

Moral capital falling

It seems obvious that America’s supply of moral capital is falling fast. Media consolidation and the decline of investigative journalism, atrophying public services and a thriving military-industrial-congressional complex, increasing disparities between rich and poor, de-industrialization and urban chaos, rising tides of xenophobia and Christian fascism, massive corruption scandals at Enron and other major corporations, and the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans, are all symptoms of a market that has thoroughly squandered its community’s moral capital. Moral bankruptcy is also reflected in studies of American values. In Fire and Ice (Penguin, 2003), Michael Adams presents some very disturbing findings from his research into those values. Adams writes that “rather than moving towards greater autonomy, idealism, and inner direction, Americans are moving into an area of the map where we find values of nihilism, aggression, fear of the other, and consumptive one-upmanship.”

America isn’t unique. The same market forces are at work in every country on the planet. The United States is simply at the leading edge of a global trend. If this trend isn’t reversed, we’ll end up in a world that’s even more savage and stupid, vulgar and voracious, and polluted and poisoned than the one we currently inhabit. Thanks to Idiocracy, we now have the perfect name for our destination.

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