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 realise 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 Schopenhauer was right in contending the stupid, like the poor, are always with us, or if rather, stupidity is like Japanese knotweed,  difficult to root out but should be exterminated with extreme prejudice. He considers what some of the greatest of human minds - Socrates, Buddha, Voltaire, Arendt and  among 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?

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:Mrs Slocombe's Pussy, Grand Hotel Abyss, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere and, published by Polity in 2025, A Short History of Stupidity.

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