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?
