A Short History of Stupidity

We are living, it is often said, in a golden age of stupidity, in which boneheaded, mendacious politicians get elected by voters who’ve become too mindless to realize their interests are ill served by narcissists, while vapid social media influencers corrupt their no less witless followers with groundless conspiracy theories and eye-wateringly foolish takedowns of scientific expertise. Our time, one might be forgiven for thinking, is one in which the fool’s gold of stupidity has become a desirable commodity, a must-have, with bumbling celebrities venerated more than those who have more than two brain cells to rub together.

In this book, Stuart Jeffries analyses how we got into this parlous state and wonders if the stupid, like the poor, are always with us, or if, rather, stupidity is like Japanese knotweed, difficult to root out but to be exterminated with extreme prejudice. He considers what some of the greatest of minds – Socrates, Buddha, Voltaire, Arendt, and others – have to tell us about the slippery nature of stupidity.

During a narrative that takes us from ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, and accompanied by such heroes of stupidity as Flaubert’s double act Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeffries casts a sceptical eye on attempts to root out stupidity by such means as IQ tests, eugenics, gene editing, and racist education policies, finding each attempt to be more stupid than the stupidity they were ostensibly devised to eradicate. If today we are living in a fool’s paradise, has our species become too dim to learn anything from its rich history of folly?

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 • What is Stupidity?

Chapter 2 • Ancient Stupidity

Chapter 3 • Eastern Stupidity

Chapter 4 • The Value of Folly

Chapter 5 • Modern Stupidity

Chapter 6 • Stupid Eugenics

Chapter 7 • Stupid Intelligence

Chapter 8 • Mass Stupidity

Chapter 9 • Structural Stupidity

Chapter 10 • Digital Stupidity

Conclusion

Notes

"With an impressive range of reference from Schopenhauer and Foucault to Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, Stuart Jeffries� book succeeds in being both deeply serious and very funny, without ever sounding sneering. The fight back against stupidity begins with this fiercely intelligent book."
Joe Moran, author of Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness and On Roads: A Hidden History

"This book is lively, provocative, witty, and – not least – intelligent."
Peter Burke, author of Ignorance: A Global History and The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag

"Stuart Jeffries has written the clever, funny A Short History of Stupidity, folding in everyone from Socrates to Jade Goody, Voltaire to Trump, Hitler to AI. He takes us on a fascinating, illuminating dive into ancient stupidity, modern stupidity, structural stupidity, mass stupidity, digital stupidity - you get the idea. Unless of course you're stu�"
Irish Examiner

"A Short History of Stupidity is bracingly clever, densely didactic, and intimidatingly well-informed. I doubt that anyone who spends some time with Jeffries' book won't feel a little less dumb than hitherto"
The Telegraph

"Stuart Jeffries... treats idiocy with humour, intelligence and (relative) brevity."
Literary Review

"exhilarating"
The Guardian

"A learned, picturesque ramble through world civilisation... a thoughtful, ambitious book"
Tibor Fischer, The Spectator

Stuart Jeffries is a journalist and author. He was for many years on the staff of the Guardian, working as subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor, and Paris correspondent. He now works as a freelance writer, mostly for the Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times, and the London Review of Books. He has written several books, includingMrs Slocombe’s Pussy, Grand Hotel Abyss, and Everything, All the Time, Everywhere.