Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I\u00a0still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here\u2019s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: \u201cI\u2019d\u00a0rather be stupid than happy\u201d.<\/p>\n
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it\u2019s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a\u00a0history in any meaningful sense. The\u00a0quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there\u2019s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You\u2019d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of \u201cstupidity\u201d \u2013 how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason\u2019s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.<\/p>\n
But then there\u2019s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the\u00a0same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a\u00a0quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it\u2019s all of these. It\u2019s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s only with the Enlightenment that stupidity started to be seen as a cognitive rather than a moral failing<\/p>\n
Perhaps inescapably, therefore, Jeffries makes a number of nice philosophical distinctions about the meaning of the term \u2013 and then goes back to using it in the know-it-when-you-see-it sense, so his discussion wanders through whole fields of its meanings without ever quite erecting a boundary fence. In a way, you could see this book not as a history of stupidity but as a slant history of its various opposites. It\u2019s an amiable and rambling tour through the history of philosophy, looking at the idea of rationality and its limitations.<\/p>\n
If it\u2019s stupid not to seek the truth, is\u00a0it not even more stupid to suppose there\u2019s a truth to be sought? The\u00a0western ancients were in the first camp; and their special distinction \u2013 thank you, Socrates \u2013 was to see reason and virtue as being directly connected. It\u2019s only with the Enlightenment that stupidity started to be seen as a cognitive rather than a moral failing. (Though when we later meet Hannah Arendt\u2019s reflections on Eichmann, on the banality of mind that made Nazi evil possible, we perhaps return to the older view.)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an interesting early chapter on the eastern traditions. Daoism and Confucianism and Buddhism see wisdom and virtue as linked, too; though wisdom in these cases is associated less with deductive rationality than with a submission to the natural order of things. Daoist \u201cwu-wei\u201d, or \u201ceffortless action\u201d (going with the flow) is the key. Western individualism, according to a scholar Jeffries quotes, leaves us with selves resembling \u201ca kind of avocado\u201d with a nub of ego at its centre, whereas in the mysterious east there are to be found \u201cflexi-selves\u201d of the sort you can\u2019t buy in the grocery aisle.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n It\u2019s not all straight philosophy. Jeffries gives us affectionate readings of Don Quixote and Flaubert\u2019s Bouvard and P\u00e9cuchet, dips into Shakespeare\u2019s fools and the rich menu of stupidities available in King Lear, as well as making the odd excursus into cognitive science. And the abstract question of whether rationalism is the\u00a0greatest stupidity of all is given concrete force in Jeffries\u2019s chapters about IQ tests (their inventor, we discover, would have been horrified by\u00a0the stupid way they came to be used), eugenics, the \u201cmass stupidity\u201d of totalitarianism and the \u201cstructural stupidity\u201d of life under late capitalism.\u00a0Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s Dialectic of Enlightenment \u2013 which draws a line from utopian rationalism to the camps \u2013 is the touchstone here, but the whole rationalism-skeptic crew, from Foucault and Derrida to John Gray, get a look-in. Less high-mindedly, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson also get it in the neck. This is a learned and often exhilarating book, and it\u2019s a bit all over\u00a0the place \u2013 but, given the subject\u00a0matter, it\u2019d be stupid to expect\u00a0otherwise.<\/p>\n