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, B…
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