British writer Stuart Jeffries follows his last two books, cultural histories of the Frankfurt School and postmodernism, with one that malicious tongues might, however unfairly, view as a natural progression from those: a history of stupidity.
In a series of thematic chapters, Jeffries explores with brio the ways throughout history, from Plato on, in which thinkers and societies have formulated and conceived of stupidity. It is a phenomenon, be it permanent or temporary, that he says is big business, the necessary grist for scammers, marketers, advertisers, algorithmic engineers, and not a few politicians, to keep their lucrative wheels turning.
Stupidity, as Voltaire and Schopenhauer put it, will always be with us, but Jeffries shows it to be a fluid and evolving beast, one that has for centuries haunted the thoughts of writers and been treated by others, eugenicists in particular, as a problem to be eradicated from the world. For many of the latter, stupidity was, like halitosis, ideology or alcoholism, an affliction that others were stricken with, those others usually being the poor, women or people of a different race.
The attitudes and methods of eugenicists today strike most of us as stupid and barbaric in the extreme, but were dominant and fairly mainstream until quite recently, and continue to find their echo in attitudes towards autism and other forms of neurodivergence prevalent in education systems worldwide. Jeffries astutely observes the paradox of stupid people being conscious of being so, while being afflicted by the condition is completely lost on so many of the putative wise and educated.
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Given the breadth of the topic, the book’s scope is necessarily constricted, as the “short” in the title acknowledges. Still, there are a few areas omitted that Jeffries might have profitably explored, such as governmental stupidity; he mentions in passing Brexit but the follies of the first World War, the Iraq war, China’s one-child policy, or the West’s current indulgence of Israel’s murderous pummelling of Gaza might all have benefited from further examination, or excoriation.
Similarly, Jeffries’s exegesis of “Eastern stupidity” – he concludes that no such thing emerges from Confucian, Taoist or Buddhist thought – is so unmoored from real-world historical applications as to be at best tokenistic, or at worst essentialist. These quibbles aside, though, this is a lively and at times bitingly funny attempt at summarising a broad field of stu[pi]d[it]y.
