Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s 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.
But then there’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same 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 quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it’s all of these. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing.
Perhaps inescapably, therefore, Jeffries makes a number of nice philosophical distinctions about the meaning of the term – 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’s an amiable and rambling tour through the history of philosophy, looking at the idea of rationality and its limitations.
If it’s stupid not to seek the truth, is it not even more stupid to suppose there’s a truth to be sought? The western ancients were in the first camp; and their special distinction – thank you, Socrates – was to see reason and virtue as being directly connected. It’s 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’s reflections on Eichmann, on the banality of mind that made Nazi evil possible, we perhaps return to the older view.)
There’s 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 “wu-wei”, or “effortless action” (going with the flow) is the key. Western individualism, according to a scholar Jeffries quotes, leaves us with selves resembling “a kind of avocado” with a nub of ego at its centre, whereas in the mysterious east there are to be found “flexi-selves” of the sort you can’t buy in the grocery aisle.
It’s not all straight philosophy. Jeffries gives us affectionate readings of Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, dips into Shakespeare’s 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 greatest stupidity of all is given concrete force in Jeffries’s chapters about IQ tests (their inventor, we discover, would have been horrified by the stupid way they came to be used), eugenics, the “mass stupidity” of totalitarianism and the “structural stupidity” of life under late capitalism. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – which draws a line from utopian rationalism to the camps – 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’s a bit all over the place – but, given the subject matter, it’d be stupid to expect otherwise.
• A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries is published by John Wiley & Sons (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
