TOM EATON | Radio Ga Ga: we are stewing in stupidity if the flat Earth debate is on the menu

There is no quicker way to lose hope than by listening to commercial radio for five minutes, but when one of South Africa’s largest stations asks its 6-million listeners whether the earth is round or flat, claiming it is a “debate” on which there is “still no consensus”, it’s worth wondering for a moment about our collective health after years of being subjected to relentless stupidity.   

To be clear, this column isn’t about slagging off Metro FM’s poll, run on social media over the weekend. First, it wasn’t made for you and me, because we can read. Second, it’s not Metro FM’s fault if there’s a market for that sort of thing: stupidity is a growth industry and one can’t blame the eternally broke SABC for gravitating towards things that actually make money.

“Stupid” is a word that’s thrown around a great deal in South Africa, but often inaccurately.

Even now, for example, many of our compatriots continue to call Julius Malema or Cyril Ramaphosa stupid, failing to understand that both men are considerably cleverer than most of us. I might be deeply suspicious of the bona fides of both, and I might consider a lot of what they say and do cynical and often hypocritical, but I’m the one working full time to pay the salaries they get for maintaining our catastrophic status quo, so who’s the dummy in this relationship? 

There is also still an old and unkind tendency to conflate stupidity and ignorance, but they are not the same thing. Ignorance is poverty of information. In many cases, ignorance is not the fault of the ignorant, and it is seldom a choice.

Stupidity, however, is always a choice, being, a deliberate rejection of knowledge and wisdom. The stupid person knows that there is a vast library of evidence and experimentation and observation about the known world, and has more and easier access to that library than at any time in human history. And yet they choose not only to reject that immense body of knowledge, but to follow others who do it more loudly and more stupidly than themselves.

Thabo ‘Beetroot and Garlic’ Mbeki is one of our most famous intellectuals. Dali Mpofu is our most famous lawyer, though even as I write that I recognise the special genius it takes to be paid tens of millions of rand to achieve essentially nothing. 

Stupidity is a choice to stand before two collections of information — one vetted and refined and questioned by people dedicated to an agreed-upon standard of professionalism and honesty; the other a heap of grievances, rumours, superstitions and child-like promises and fantasies — and to choose the later, often for no other reason than that it makes the first group angry.

But even here I can’t be too critical of people who have chosen stupidity, because there comes a point when one is so awash in it, that it starts feeling normal; when one starts hesitating for a fraction of a second and asking, “Wait, is there really a debate around whether the Earth is round or flat?” 

The Overton window is an idea used in political analysis, describing a cluster of attitudes and policies that are considered acceptable — or more, specifically, electable — at any given time. As voters pull politicians in one direction, or politicians push voters in another, the window moves: what was considered taboo a generation earlier becomes acceptable. What was considered entirely sensible becomes scandalous. 

A clear example of this is in US politics, where the Republican party has been dragged so far right by the evangelical-populist complex, that footage of late arch-conservative George Bush Senior now makes him look like more of a mensch than most of the McKinsey-manufactured rhetoric robots who dominate the Democratic Party. 

Yes, the Overton window moves both ways; but what happens when the Stupidity window gets stuck at one end of the scale; when what was considered laughably dim-witted a generation ago is earnestly discussed by people who’ve been through school and, in many cases, university?

To some degree, we in South Africa already know the answer. In politics, we no longer want technocratic constitutionalists, just slightly less ham-fisted nationalists and populists. Thabo “Beetroot and Garlic” Mbeki is one of our most famous intellectuals. Dali Mpofu is our most famous lawyer, though even as I write that I recognise the special genius it takes to be paid tens of millions of rand to achieve essentially nothing. 

We know we’re stewing in stupidity, and all the arrogance, short-termism and collapse of expertise that comes with it. We’ve known it for years. But what I think we’ve lost track of is what it’s doing to our minds and our sense of ourselves, and, more importantly, our vision for this country once the ANC is removed from power.

When the national broadcaster starts wondering if the Earth might be flat — to say nothing of the government allowing social grant recipients to starve — we have reached a point where national aspiration means dreaming of the least terrible outcome. And once we’re there, any last shreds of idealism can quickly be swallowed by sharp-toothed pragmatists, explaining to us that the democratic ideals of 1994 were all well and good, but if we want security and jobs, some of us may have to give up certain freedoms, and if you call them a fascist for saying so then you’re part of the liberal elite and are probably also a human trafficker.   

And as for the shape of the earth, well, who are you going to believe? Those famously untrustworthy astronauts and their lying eyes, or Metro FM?