Are We Getting Stupider?

For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert’s characters says that, in mass society, “the germs of stupidity . . . spread from person to person,” and we end up becoming lemming-like followers of leaders, trends, and fads. (This “modern stupidity,” Jeffries explains, “is hastened by urbanization: the more dense a population is in one sense, the more dense it is in another.”) And the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen further innovations. We’re now conscious of the kinds of stupidity that might reveal themselves through intelligence tests or bone-headed bureaucracies; we know about “bullshit jobs” and “the banality of evil” and digital inundation. Jeffries considers a light fixture in his bedroom; it has a recessed design that’s hard to figure out, so he goes to YouTube in search of videos that might show him how to change the bulb. Modern, high-tech life is complicated. And so, yes, in a broad sense, we may very well be getting stupider—not necessarily because we’re dumber but because the ways in which we can be stupid keep multiplying.

“A Short History of Stupidity” doesn’t always engage with the question of whether the multiplication of stupidities is substantive or rhetorical. When Flaubert writes that people today are drowning in cliché and received opinion, is he right? Is it actually true that, before newspapers, individuals held more diverse and original views? That seems unlikely. The general trend, over the past few hundred years, has been toward more education for more people. Flaubert may very well have been exposed to more stupid thoughts, but this could have reflected the fact that more thoughts were being shared.

Arguably, by railing against the stupidity of cliché, Flaubert was actually practicing a form of self-humiliation—that is, he was asking himself whether he agreed with the clichés, and so goading himself, and us, into being non-stupid. In his satirical “Dictionary of Received Ideas,” written in the eighteen-seventies, Flaubert offered up a range of definitions embodying the stupid notions that silly people too readily accept. (Jeffries likes “Art”: “Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker?” My wife and I always laugh about “Bird”: “Wish you were one, saying with a sigh: ‘Oh, for a pair of wings!’ This shows you have a poetic soul.”) It’s natural for such thoughts to occur to us—“Stupidity is the product of the groups and societies in which we are raised,” Jeffries explains, referencing the philosopher Sacha Golob. By mocking these thoughts, we push ourselves past them. From this perspective, our sense that we’re getting stupider may simply reflect our determination to be smart.

And yet, it seems undeniable that something is out of joint in our collective intellectual life. The current political situation makes this “a good time to write about stupidity,” Jeffries writes. When he notes that a central trait of stupidity is that it “can be relied upon to do the one thing expressly designed not to achieve the desired result”—or “to laughably mismatch means and ends”—he makes “stupid” seem like the perfect way to characterize our era, in which many people think that the key to making America healthy again is ending vaccination. Meanwhile, in a recent issue of New York magazine—“The Stupid Issue”—the journalist Andrew Rice describes troubling and widespread declines in the abilities of high-school students to perform basic tasks, such as calculating a tip on a restaurant check. These declines are happening even in well-funded school districts, and they’re part of a larger academic pattern, in which literacy is fading and standards are slipping.

Maybe we are getting stupider. Still, one of the problems with the discourse of stupidity is that it can feel reductive, aggressive, even abusive. Self-humiliation is still humiliating; when we call one another stupid, we spread humiliation around, whether our accusation is just or unjust. In a recent post on Substack, the philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism might be best understood as a revolt against “the cognitive elite”—that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything. According to this theory, the world constructed by the cognitive élite is one in which you have to listen to experts, and keep up with technology, and click through six pages of online forms to buy a movie ticket; it sometimes “requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. ‘homeless’), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. ‘unhoused’).” The cognitive élites are right to say that people who think about things intuitively are often wrong; on issues including crime and immigration, the truth is counterintuitive. (Legal procedures are better than rough justice; immigrants increase both the supply and the demand for labor.) But the result of this has been that unreasonable people have hooked up to form an opposition party. What’s the way out of this death spiral? No one knows.

In 1970, a dead sperm whale washed up on the beach in Florence, Oregon. It was huge, and no one knew how to dispose of it. Eventually, the state’s Highway Division, which was in charge of the operation, hit upon the idea of blowing the carcass up with dynamite. They planted half a ton of explosives—that’s a lot!—on the leeward side of the whale, figuring that what wasn’t blown out to sea would disintegrate into bits small enough to be consumed by crabs and seagulls. Onlookers gathered to watch the explosion. It failed to destroy the whale, and instead created a dangerous hailstorm of putrid whale fragments. “I realized blubber was hitting around us,” Paul Linnman, a reporter on the scene, told Popular Mechanics magazine. “Blubber is so dense, a piece the size of your fingertip can go through your head. As we started to run down [the] trail, we heard a second explosion in our direction, and we saw blubber the size of a coffee table flatten a car.” (The video of the incident—which was first popularized by Dave Barry, after he wrote about it in 1990—is a treasure of the internet, and benefits from Linnman’s deadpan TV-news narration.)

There can be joy and humor in stupidity—think fail videos, reality television, and “Dumb and Dumber.” It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited, either. The town of Florence now boasts an outdoor space called Exploding Whale Memorial Park; last year, after a weeklong celebration leading up to Exploding Whale Day, people gathered there in costume. Watching the original video, I find myself empathizing with the engineer who conceived the dynamite plan. I’ve been there. To err is human. Intelligent people sometimes do stupid things. We all blow up a whale from time to time; the important point is not to do it again.

And yet stupidity, sadly, isn’t always so straightforward. It’s a concept that demands nuance. In order to be smart, we need to be aware of our own stupidness—to be reminded that we have much to learn. At the same time, we don’t want to feel so stupid that we give up, or grow cynical, or become disillusioned about what counts as “smart.” Similarly, navigating the world effectively requires discerning stupidity in others—but living together involves understanding that stupidity is inevitable and context-dependent. There’s some ideal degree of stupidity-consciousness—some measured amount that protects us from hubris while urging us forward. Achieving it isn’t easy. ♦