Dysgenics for Dummies: Idiocracy

The main problem with being a smart person like myself who has been trained since childhood by his Mensa member father to think for himself is that one doesn’t always like the same movies that other smart people like. Or at least one doesn’t look at such movies the same way that other smart people prefer to look at them.

Take, for instance, Idiocracy, the latest effort from film auteur Mike Judge. The standard take on this movie from most smart people is that this film is a daring effort at exposing the current American trend of “dumbing down” and where it is likely to lead us. Of course, a truly smart person, or at least one who is familiar with the concept of lateral thinking, can’t help but wonder if a movie arguing against dumbing down is all that daring. Has there ever been a film that argued in favor of dumbing down? A film that argued that we need more stupid people in this country or that our education system asks way too much of its students?

Okay, it could be argued that such films exist. But they are not necessarily the type of films people think of when they think of such films. Good Will Hunting, for example, is generally considered a smart person’s movie but it hardly presents smart people in a flattering light and indeed, the conclusion of that movie would seem to suggest that smart people would be a lot better off working on their people skills and making out with the opposite sex than they would be if they just concentrated on increasing their academic skills. Apparently, it is okay to be smart, that film argues, as long as you don’t actually do anything beneficial with your smarts apart from using them to argue with intellectual wise guys and impress women.

Of course, that is not the type of movies smart people like to think about when they’re looking for examples of anti-smart-people sentiment in America. And anyway, if such people were truly smart, they would have read enough to realize that most of the issues dealt with in Idiocracy are not exactly new. People have been fretting about the possible mental inferiority of future Americans since the turn of the century. Only back then it was argued that it would be recent immigrants that would lead to the intellectual downfall of America. The idea was that mentally inferior immigrants were outbreeding intellectually superior native-born Americans and that we were doomed to become a nation of morons because of this.

Of course, many of those “mentally inferior” immigrants eventually raised children who proved to be just as intellectually capable as any college-educated native-born. Indeed, it soon became obvious that the differences between such immigrants and the natives often had more to do with class, language, and education than with anything else. If you were born into the right class, spoke good English and had parents who could afford to provide you with a college education, you were automatically presumed to be smarter than people who were born into the “wrong” class, spoke little if any English, and had parents who could barely afford to send you to public school, much less college. Of course, this is not how America was supposed to work, but unfortunately, few smart people of the time bothered to argue that point. Perhaps because they were afraid that by doing so, they would run the risk of not being considered smart any more.

Of course, there are people who still think that way today, the most obvious example being former U.S. English member John Tanton. Like Judge, Tanton liked to argue that America ran the risk of being overrun by mental morons because all the dumb people were producing babies faster than the smart people. The only difference being the two being that Mike Judge does not pretend to single out a particular ethnic group to blame for such a result while Tanton preferred to single out Hispanic immigrants -- especially illegal Hispanic immigrants -- as being the “dumb people” in question.

To be fair, science fiction author C. M. Kornbluth made a similar argument to Judge’s in his famous short story, “The Marching Morons.” Like Judge -- and unlike Tanton -- Kornbluth refused to put the blame on any one group for the dumbing down of future America. Indeed, Kornbluth could not resist hinting that the few smart people who existed in such an America were likely to be racially mixed. Nor did Kornbluth pretend that any attempt to correct such a situation would be bloodless. Indeed, it could be argued that “The Marching Morons” was originally intended to satirize the eugenics arguments of the early twentieth century and that the true point of the story was not to warn against a tide of overly fertile dumb people but to warn that any attempt to come up with a “final solution” for that problem would be far worse than the actual problem.

In any event, Kornbluth wrote his short story back in the 1950s which puts Judge’s Idiocracy in the odd position of being a wildly imaginative restatement of a story that has already been told. To be fair, Judge’s version is a lot more light-hearted than Kornbluth’s story and has a happier ending. Moreover, he tosses in a lot of modern references for the benefit of those movie-goers who would just as soon not read anything from the 1950s -- or for that matter, not read anything, period. Indeed, it could be argued that Judge essentially “borrows” the concept of the original Kornbluth story and “dumbs it down” for the sake of twenty-first century moviegoers. Moviegoers who never once question how a society of people too dumb to figure out a jigsaw puzzle can maintain complicated machinery like computers and electric cars. Of course, some might argue that to consider such issues in a movie like this is to spend way too much time thinking. And, of course, the last thing Judge apparently wants viewers of this film to do is to think.

Or at least he does not want them to think too much. Otherwise, they might miss out on his movie’s message -- which is really funny when you think about it…