A Short History of Stupidity is a 2025 book by journalist Stuart Jeffries. I expected something snarky, full of yuks. It’s actually a serious examination of philosophical and psycho-social concepts. Parsing ideas of stupidity, ignorance, intelligence and its lack, rationality, foolishness — and how to live.
It starts with Socrates. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Something Jeffries actually questions. And for Socrates, the beginning of wisdom was to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Even this Jeffries subjects to scrutiny. Suggesting maybe Socrates was stupid. Indeed, the book casts stupidity, in one permutation or another, is humanly endemic.
Then we come to Eastern philosophies: Buddhism, Daoism, etc. Jeffries focuses on what Chinese call wu-wei, an elusive concept he translates as “effortless action,” a seeming oxymoron. If any sense can be made of this, it might be, at least don’t do too much. But is wu-wei itself kind of stupid?
Can reason extricate us from this morass? Or is that notion, too, stupid? I’ve been chided as putting too much faith in reason. But it’s not faith, and while humans don’t use reason enough, our whole civilization rests upon what use we have made of it. Otherwise airplanes wouldn’t fly.
Jeffries often seems the ultimate cynic, calling everything and everyone stupid. But what does that really mean? A true nihilist might deem everything stupid in the sense that no positive cosmic purpose is served. Meantime, the concept is problematic in the sense that every human thought or action has a reason behind it. It may be a faulty reason, but that can be argued. Calling it stupid merely signifies disagreement. There is no Occam’s razor-like criterion.
Even the very idea of reason is questioned in this book. It invokes the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, founded by Nagarjuna, quoted that any rational argument rests upon an infinite regress of premises so that at bottom there’s no there there. Thus (in Jeffries’s words) “rational thinking is always groundless.”
This I would call stupid. We may not fully understand the cosmos, but its very existence necessarily bespeaks rationality. The same is true of human affairs. People may behave irrationally — but again, there are always reasons why they do.
Am I too being stupid? My own life is a much examined one. Yet I don’t think an unexamined life isn’t worth living. What makes one worth living is experiences, thoughts, sensations, feelings, that feel good. Nothing else can matter. Literally.
If you suppose something else might matter, try explaining how and why, without invoking sentient feelings. That’s what being alive is all about. And this clear proposition can only be confused by introducing some nonexistent supernatural something.
All this my reason tells me. I feel certain it’s true. And that confidence is part of what I experience overall as good in my life. Perhaps it would be otherwise if my reason postulated a totally bleak cosmos. But that’s countered by our ability to nevertheless have rewarding experiences and feelings. Possible even in an otherwise meaningless cosmos.
Most people probably don’t ponder such matters. And for too many, religion prevents rational thinking about them.* And many, like MAGA cultists, have minds like snakepits roiling with all sorts of other delusions. Against all that, what feels like my own calm, grounded sense of reality is itself a great source of satisfaction. (I’m too humble to say it indeed gives me a feeling of superiority.)
Back to Jeffries — if he has a theory, it’s in his quoting Flaubert that stupidity is “wanting to conclude.” That is, to resolve all questions; whereas at best we can progress toward truth but never fully attain it. Jeffries cites here philosopher Karl Popper, who conceptualized science as progressing via “falsification” of previously held precepts, with no truth ever final. Epitomizing its antithesis of “conclusionism” is of course, again, religion — with its idea of unchanging ultimate truth.
The author also quotes Kant that stupidity is “the lack of the power of judgment,” which resonates for me. Thus, not mere ignorance (we’re all ignorant of many things) but inability to distinguish sense from nonsense. Even laziness in that regard. Not bad thinking so much as not thinking. As with Trump cultists (an obvious point Jeffries refrains from making — refuting assertions that the book is politically biased).
A chapter titled “Mass Stupidity” begins by quoting a lecture by novelist Robert Musil in Austria just before it went Nazi. Speaking of “not so much a lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence.” A “higher stupidity,” says Jeffries, “seen by Musil as a spiritual sickness.” (My emphasis) Whose victims “may manifest a seemingly intelligent capacity to invent ingeniously plausible explanations to justify their actions, and to rationalize their views and behavior . . . with half truths and attractive falsehoods.” This too reminded me of today’s American spiritual sickness. But the name “Trump” appears just once in this chapter.
A key theme here revolves around Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” line (inspired by Eichmann). At bottom it’s a very human inability to put oneself in another’s shoes. Thus: “stupidity is a moral category . . . a certain learned insensitivity to reality.”
Later, Jeffries writes, “the German people projected onto this [narcissist] their hopes for a restoration of pride and order, projections that on the face of it seem spectacularly deluded.” Here too the parallel to today’s America hardly needs stating. And Jeffries does not state it.
Stupidity’s antithesis is explored in a chapter about IQ testing, and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Murray and Herrnstein, which basically cast darker skinned people as biologically stupider. Though (a point not made by Jeffries) Darwinian natural selection would actually suggest the opposite. Black people having faced tougher life challenges, not just in the African environment, but of course in murderous slavery, and later ill-treatment — so that “survival of the fittest” should have weeded out dumber genes. Similarly, while many think poverty is caused by dumbness, actually it’s so tough being poor that coping with it requires more smarts.
But anyhow, Jeffries argues that IQ tests really just measure one’s talent for doing IQ tests, with intelligence being a far more elusive and complex matter. He discusses the Flynn effect, a statistical finding that, whereas The Bell Curve saw average IQs falling due to proliferation of dumber human variants, in fact IQs steadily rose through the 20th Century. Ascribed largely to better nutrition, health, and education. Or possibly more experience taking tests. However, the Flynn effect has lately reversed. Here one might mention smartphones, making people stupider, though the reversal began before their advent.
Jeffries is a techno-pessimist. With too many tendentious lines like “a human society sleepwalking into its own oblivion.” But we are assaulted by fakery, taking advantage of our evolutionarily inborn default of believing things we’re told, because questioning is simply more work. And trusting other people was necessary for society to function. Such social trust, in surveys, has been falling. Presaging real trouble ahead.
So what, finally, is stupidity? Not till the last page does Jeffries briefly mention the Dunning-Kruger effect: limited knowledge itself leads people to overrate their knowledge. Emblematic is his discussion of vaccination rejection. Yes, lies abound, but Jeffries deems the main factor “a culture that, stupidly, refuses to defer to expertise.” The Brits have a term fitting perfectly here, and for much else: bloody minded. Refusal to be reasonable, virtually as a point of pride.
Jeffries also cites Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow. We’re programmed with reflexive heuristics for handling situations big and (mostly) small. Without which we couldn’t function. But one needs to know when to override such reflexes with careful reflection. That again is judgment. Failure there is the essence of stupidity.
And it does seem to be rising. Americans threw judgment to the winds, like never before, in electing a moral monster.
A final point. Yes, stupidity abounds. Well, we’re not perfect! Our degree of intelligence and rationality, vastly surpassing all other creatures, is practically miraculous. It would be nicer still to have godlike omniscience, with never any stupidity. But that would be asking too much.
* I unabashedly call all religions stupid because they rest on propositions quintessentially absurd, from which are spun vast cathedrals of nonsense. The very idea of “faith” presupposes stupidity in the sense of defying what one knows of reality.
