- One of the joys of hosting this show is that every week we get to explore big ideas with great guests.

And this week's guest is no different, even though he's an expert on of all things stupidity.

He even wrote a book about it.

He's Stuart Jeffries, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Stuart Jeffries.

For years he was on the staff of "The Guardian," but now works as a writer whose new book is "A Short History of Stupidity."

He joins us from London.

Stuart, thank you so much for being with us.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

I'm so grateful.

- You know, I've told you this, and I'm not trying to embarrass you, but I absolutely loved this book.

We're gonna get into it in some depth.

- Thank you.

- But why a book about stupidity?

- Well, it was partly during COVID when people were injecting themselves with bleach and denying some scientific expertise and with lots of anti-vaxxers.

There's also near where I live, somebody put a sign in their window saying, "The Age of Stupid."

And I thought, "Well, that in itself is stupid because it's grammatically incorrect.

It should be "The Age of Stupidity."

and again and again, you'll see these headlines, "Golden Age of Stupid."

It should be "The Golden Age of Stupidity."

It's like even the clever people who are indicting us for being stupid are themselves stupid.

So it was about that really.

But what's happened to us, you know?

Are we all going downhill cognitively?

And if so, why?

That's why I wanted to write the book really.

- Well, and we're gonna try to explore a little bit of that why in just a second.

But let's start with a definition, whether it's stupid or stupidity, what are we actually talking about?

- Well, you know, the technical definition would be if, you know, score less than 100 on an IQ test, the further you are from 100, you know, the more stupid you are.

I mean, there are other definitions.

There's a philosopher here in London who defines it as being a sort of inability to use your cognitive skills to achieve a goal.

You self-restraint, you hobble yourself.

You think you know something and you don't.

And that's the kind of worst kind of stupidity there is.

Because you believe that you've got the brain power to overcome a problem, but actually you don't use your brain to do so.

- And- - So I think, yeah, those are the two definitions, but there plenty of others kicking around and they all pull against each other.

So if you go back to like Socrates, Socrates connected stupidity with evil.

So, you know, it's bad to be ignorant.

It's a bad thing to be ignorant.

But the good thing about ignorance is you can overcome it.

You can read books.

The worst thing is to think that, you know, you're not ignorant, or worse, if you know you're ignorant not to do anything about it.

And that seems really relevant to me now.

- And so in that thought, is there a sort of an an intrinsic quality of stupidity that some people have?

And it's one point in the writing I think you said "That some people are born stupid and for other stupidity is thrust upon them," right?

- Yeah.

- Is there something about, is is there some responsibility of the individual not to be stupid?

- Yeah, I dunno if you're born stupid, but I think you've definitely got a responsibility to fight against your cognitive shortcomings.

Absolutely.

You've gotta read, you've gotta study, and you've gotta take yourself seriously.

and also you've gotta have a, this is what Socrates was so good at, you've gotta have a certain humility.

You've gotta realize that you are the problem.

You know, very often it's down to you not having the will or really thinking about or having the humility to realize that you're the problem standing in the way of you becoming less stupid, becoming intelligent.

You know, Socrates famously said, "I know nothing."

I don't think he was entirely serious about that.

But what he meant was to have that posture of, you know, sort of a lack of certainty in stuff.

And so that you're gonna think about problems and work through them.

This is what people don't do today.

And we're in an age very often where people are, posture is being certain about stuff that they don't really know about.

This is why there's contempt, I think, for scientific expertise because sort of, we think, "Oh, we know, we know, we know.

These scientists guys, what do they know?

We know just as well."

So there's that kind of, you know, certainty, which is borne of ignorance, certainly, but it's also born from an unwillingness to think very seriously about your problems.

It's about pride, I think, and about a lack of humility.

- But it wasn't lost to me, though, that despite that humility, or maybe because of it, your book starts with the trial of Socrates.

Socrates is sentenced to death.

- Yeah.

- So I mean the relationship between wisdom and happy outcomes is not necessarily one for one.

- No, no, absolutely.

I mean, he was accused of, you know, misleading young boys.

But actually he didn't, he tried to help them I think.

I mean, there may have been a sexual thing going on, which we might have frowned upon, because ancient Greece is very different from now.

But he also was trying to help people to help themselves.

So in this great dialogue, which is really key for understanding stupidity as Socrates understood it.

There's this Greek aristocrat called Alcibiades.

So he was probably a teenager.

He was full of himself, you know, he was beautiful.

He thought he had all the chops to, you know, rule Athens.

He thought he could lead the people.

He got all the political clout and all that.

Socrates just says to him, "Why do you think this?

"You've got nothing.

You know nothing.

And that's fine.

You can learn, you're just a dumb teenager, fine.

But what you're not doing, which is the worst thing about you is that you're not prepared to change.

You're not prepared to think about yourself critically."

And I think this is what, you know, 2,500 years ago, Socrates was saying that I think this plays out really well right now.

You look at politicians now, there are so many people who are not prepared to learn, you know, not prepared to think about themselves critically or about how they should rule.

And that's quite possibly why we're in such a perilous state in terms of, you know, the democracies we live in.

- You know, well, there was a moment, it's gotta be 20 years ago now in the United States where the comedian Jon Stewart, famous for "The Daily Show."

- [Stuart] Yeah.

- Went on CNN and basically took, it was a show called "Crossfire" where there's- - [Stuart] Oh, I know, I know what you're gonna say.

Yeah, yeah.

- [Jim] Somebody on the left and somebody on the right, and they would just argue back and forth over people.

And Stewart went on and said, you know, "You have this incredible opportunity to educate the American public, and all you do is make stupid arguments at one another."

- Yeah.

- We live in a time where that stupidity almost seems like it's been monetized.

- It really does.

I mean, don't you think the nature of political debate is like that, it's still "Crossfire."

Because didn't he say just stop.

He said it to Tucker Carlson.

I dunno who the other guy was.

- Yeah.

- But he had a rant against Tucker Carlson for being a grown man wearing a bow tie for a start, which is just hilarious.

(Jim laughs) He just said, "Can guys just stop?

Because actually you are cheapening political debate in this country."

- [Jim] Yeah.

- And I don't think what he said was wrong.

I think it is absolutely right.

We don't have serious political debate.

We just have point scoring and, you know, a lack of respect and a lack of real argument, which is precisely what Socrates was about.

- And so is there a specific challenge then that stupidity poses to a well-functioning democracy?

And this is something that Socrates and Plato were certainly thinking about, and is it still true today?

- Yeah, and I don't disrespect Donald Trump.

God bless him.

And he may be a genius.

He may be a genius.

Because I think the jury's still out.

But, you know, this is a guy when he was asked, you know, if he was humble, he says, "You don't even know how humble I am."

So in a way, he doesn't know what humility is, because humility is about, you know, you have to sort of not boast about being humble.

You know, top of mind is you don't boast about being humble.

I think that's the problem.

That's a real problem.

It's like a psychological stumbling block to overcoming stupidity.

- So the book is not even so much about, though, individual politicians.

- No.

- It's about sort of societal-wide stupidity.

And one of the things that a recurring theme is this question about whether or not education can actually serve as an antidote to stupidity.

Where do you come down?

- Oh, definitely it can.

I mean, the founder of the IQ test is a great guy.

Binet, he was a French psychologist, 1900 thereabouts.

He was called on by the French government to try and improve the scores of kids in schools who were lagging behind.

So he advised a battery of tests and the idea was to help kids, you know, to identify kids how they were suffering or how they were struggling.

And then to improve their skills in certain areas where they were lacking.

And it seemed like a really good idea.

So it can be done through education and IQ tests may have some role in it.

But since his day, IQ tests became about something else.

They became about finding a particular number, you know, like your 130 or your 95 or something like that, which would just be hung around your neck like, you know, forever and would doom you.

So it wouldn't be a sort of means to help you, it would just be a way of marking you off or, you know, sort of saying you're a genius or saying, you know, you're too stupid to bother with.

So actually IQ tests became perverted.

But I certainly think that education is clearly, you know, yeah, I think the brain's malleable and education has its role in helping us become less stupid than we are.

Teaching particularly, you know, because Socrates is all about teaching and the erotics of teaching, you know, they would just get turned on by the excitement of learning.

How wonderful, what a wonderful idea.

And for those of us who've had good teachers, then that can be a way out.

You know, it can get you out from the sort of stupid mass you might have other otherwise been.

So, yeah, absolutely.

- Yeah, I wanna linger a little bit on IQ tests because you're critical of them, at least the way they've been applied.

And some of that has to do with racist application both in the United States and in the UK.

But what is that history of the IQ test and what are some of the dangers of relying on it as an indication of intelligence overall?

- Often they're very culturally specific so that there's a problem there.

In the twenties in the States, you know, a lot of the immigrants coming through Ellis Island were submitted to sort of IQ tests and were deemed too stupid, and wind up with this weird profile of people from South Europe who didn't do well in these IQ tests.

Because they didn't really understand English that well.

But, you know, often they were very clever people, and they were just the kind of people that America needed, you know, at that time, exactly, you know, the immigrants that America needed.

But that was used as a part of the immigration act to just to keep people out from the south of Europe, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, people like that, and boost people who may not have been, you know, as cognitively adept from the north of Europe to come in.

You know, it felt like racial profiling.

And then you go fast forward to one of the most appalling stories in the book.

It's just awful because it's in my lifetime.

1968, there's this African American woman in North Carolina where IQ tests were used quite widely to support a program of eugenics.

Awful story.

She was raped and when she gave birth, she'd done some IQ tests and was found to be deficient at them.

They performed a hysterectomy on her on the ground that people like her, and then there's a racial tinge to it, people like her should not breed.

America was producing too many more morons.

This is how to stop it.

You know, I mean, it's just an awful story, and yet she went on to become, you know, a successful businesswoman.

The son she bore, the only son she bore, he's a successful businessman.

They've both got, you know, academic qualifications.

They are not by any means stupid at all.

So it becomes a justification, IQ tests can be used as a fig leaf to justify kind of racist eugenics.

And I dunno how old you are, I'm 63, and I just think this happened in my lifetime.

Something really criminal and awful about that.

- It's staggering.

It's in the context of a lot of different ideas about limiting births to sort of expunge the weak links, I guess, from the genetic pool, right?

Some of the other sort of evil that you write about in the book though is the evil of Nazism.

And one of the things that I was struck by, and this hearkens back to whether or not wisdom and intelligence is synonymous with good.

- Right.

- You write convincingly about the intelligence of the Nazis put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes after the war.

Would you share some of that story with us now?

- Most of the siting Nazis by the time that the trial started, like Hitler and some were dead, but the ones they put on trial, a couple of American psychologists thought, well, I'll do some tests on them to find out, you know, is there an evil gene?

That kind of thing.

So they did Rorschach tests and all that kinda stuff, but they also did IQ tests.

And the IQ test revealed something extraordinary, which is that the most senior Nazis to survive the war scored very high for IQ tests.

People like Albert Speer, you know, were sort 140 something like that.

So they're almost geniuses.

So there's something clearly wrong with an IQ test, which says these guys are geniuses, because there's gotta be a moral component to what stupidity and intelligence is.

And so fast forward to 10, 11 years to Jerusalem, where Hannah Arendt, who's writing a piece for "The New Yorker," she's doing a report on Eichmann's trial, you know, one of the architects of the Holocaust.

And she sits there looking at him and she just thinks this guy's stupid.

And it's not because he's not intelligent enough to have organized the Holocaust, you know, sort set the trains in motion and done all that, which obviously takes a lot of organizational skill.

It's because he can't see other human beings at all.

He can't see the Jews he's killing, the humans.

And she said, "That is stupidity, because it's a lack of empathy."

And that tracks back, I think, to what Socrates were saying, which is there's a stupidity attached to this kind of, an evil attached to stupidity.

I think he calls it an evil and she calls it an evil.

So it's not just a sort of number, you know, it's not just an objective fact about you.

It's also about what kind of a person you are.

And, you know, if you're lacking in empathy or you're lacking a self-critical perspective, then there's something gone horribly wrong with you.

And that's the kinda stupidity which, you know, IQ tests, I can't see how they can measure that kind of factor.

But it's important because I think that's how we think about stupid people.

- So the book is, it's both funny and thought-provoking, but it really is a tour of important Western thinkers from Socrates to the present.

How did you write this?

- By writing.

I mean, I went on a sort of steep learning curve.

Because initially, I just thought, you know, there are a lot of books called a history of something which you wouldn't necessarily think has got a history.

Like some are suggesting to me now I write a history of cool.

I think, well, okay, so you write about Miles Davis and then, I dunno where the books goes.

And I thought stupidity didn't really have a history.

I thought it was like, it's a thing that's just there, but actually it does, so when I started rereading Socrates and reading dialogues I've never read, and then reading stuff like, you know, all the stuff in the renaissance readings of Erasmus and reading Shakespeare and how they thought about folly as being a concealed wisdom and all that.

I kind of realized that there was a narrative to tell.

So that's what I like to find out.

That's what I kind of love to do in these books.

I always write books which are kind of nonfiction.

They always have a kind of, you know, almost like a novelistic narrative, so you're just finding stuff out.

And it's an interesting because the philosophy I studied at college was, it was very much you look for necessary and sufficient conditions for a term.

So truth is, you know, whatever it is.

And it's always been like that, you know?

- [Jim] Yeah.

- But actually is kind of mad because actually all these terms are actually historically specific, and we live in the shadow of how people thought these things worked.

You know, we live in a shadow of how Socrates, how Shakespeare, how, you know, Cervantes when he wrote "Don Quixote" how they conceived stupidity and how they conceived folly.

And so there's a history to be told.

So how did I write it?

By doing a lot reading actually, which was great fun.

- Well, you know, so as I was reading the book, I kept sort of grappling with and sort of struggling a little bit with, really, what the essence of stupidity was.

- [Stuart] Right.

- If I try to define it in the negative, it's not the opposite of intelligence.

Is that right?

- That's exactly right.

And yet, you know, the idea of the IQ test is to say that, you know, intelligence is above 100, you know, and stupidity is below.

But I think you really seeing exactly what the problem is.

The normal idea of, so the analytic philosophy I was raised on is to say necessary and sufficient conditions, that's how you define a term.

And it's defined like that for all time.

The reason you struggle to find out what stupidity is or decide in your head what it is, is because it's so nebulous.

You know, even when we call people stupid, we aren't really saying, "This guy is stupid."

We're just saying, "You've done something stupid."

You know, it's not you are stupid, you know, it's because you've, I dunno, you've poured some milk over or something, you know, you've done something stupid usually.

So the use of the term is kind of different from, you know, this idea that, oh, it's fixed forever.

We know what stupidity is and it's never gonna change.

- Well, and, you know, my fear in this doing this interview with you is that you were gonna say, you know, "Jim, that's a stupid question," but I'm gonna ask it anyways.

So is there a impermeable, unchangeable quality to stupidity?

Or is stupidity in the eye of the beholder?

- It's definitely in the eye of the beholder.

But we assume that there is an unchangeable.

We assume there's an unchangeable core to what stupidity is, and we also assume that there's a fixed proportion of people.

Whatever society, you know?

I think Voltaire and Schopenhauer both said, you know, pretty much, "Like the poor, the stupid are always with us."

And that's in a way that's trivially true because if it's all relative, you know, of course, you can have clever people and more stupid people.

But if you're looking for an absolute term, then not really.

I don't think you can sort of say stupidity can be be got rid of.

And also I think that, you know, this is an idea of called called the Flynn effect whereby we in the West happily in the 20th century got more and more intelligent, and now we're on a down slope because of whatever, you know, social media apparently, you know, there's too strong weed, all these kind of crazy factors, use of antidepressants, and so stupidity might be something that is increasing.

So there isn't a core to it, it's just something that's because of the way we foolishly have applied technology we've been making ourselves more stupid while devising technology that would make us more intelligent.

- You know, you write a little bit about artificial intelligence.

You mentioned the Flynn effect and its corollary the negative Flynn effect.

- [Stuart] Right.

- There's a thing with artificial intelligence that is called cognitive offloading, where we just basically trust the machine to create whatever that next work of literature is.

You also write about bureaucratic stupidity.

And, you know, what I wonder is, if we have essentially made it harder to basically just sort of get by on a day-to-day basis.

We think about living with all of the modern amenities and conveniences that the world has created for us.

But when you walk through sort of the stupidity of having to go through some bureaucratic exercise with the government or a business, stupid is the exact right descriptor of some of those experiences.

- Oh, absolutely.

I feel stupid 20 times a day.

I mean, I felt stupid, you know, at one point earlier I couldn't get online and I thought, "I'm not gonna be able to do this interview.

It was entirely because of my ineptitude, you know?

(Jim laughs) In the book I talk, I've talked to a lot of philosophers and professors, all of whom have, will have these little stories about stupid things they've done.

And these are some of the cleverest people in the world, by any metric, you know?

This one guy who he was trying to fill in forms when his mother was dying to get her Medicaid, and he kept misspelling his name or he would just put it in the wrong box or something because the bureaucracy had got so complicated that actually even a really clever guy like him was just getting tripped up at every instance.

I don't think he got the money.

You know, he didn't get Medicaid in the end.

But, you know, it's that kind of thing where life has become much more complicated.

Or maybe it's just me getting older and feeling that life's getting intractable.

You know, the technology we're using is, like years ago, you know, we used to joke that, "Ah, you know, these old guys, they don't understand how to program their VCRs."

(Jim laughs) Actually, VCRs were really difficult to program.

I mean, you know, objectively they were difficult to program.

But I feel like that old guy now, and maybe we all feel like that.

So we all think we're getting more stupid, but actually maybe we're not.

I dunno, maybe we're not.

You know, for me, everybody's so gloomy about it.

Everybody's so gloomy about the idea that we're getting more stupid.

I'm not entirely convinced that we are.

There are certain things, it's almost like cyclical.

You know, bet back in, you know, the horse and cart times when they started introducing steamships and stuff like that, people freaking out about how that was gonna destroy their lives.

You know, every piece of new technology makes people freak out.

And I think AI clearly is making people freak out because you think, "Oh no, we've offloaded our intelligence.

We're destined to become obsolete."

- So, you know, you've got a a great chapter about the folly of stupidity or stupidity and folly.

But, you know, I guess what I wanna ask is, you basically conclude that there's wisdom hidden in folly that is not stupidity.

- Right.

- We've only got a couple of minutes left here, but if we eradicated stupidity, would we also eradicate funny?

- Oh God, yeah.

(Jim laughs) Some of the best books ever are about stupid people or about genius people playing themselves off as fools.

Like, that's what Don Quixote is.

Don Quixote is absolutely deluded about the world.

And you might think he's stupid, but my God, he's having a great life.

You know, he's tilting at windmill, he's having all these adventures.

The fool in "King Lear" is this guy, you know, who's telling truth to power and not getting his head chopped off, which everybody else would do.

And then he got this great, oh my god, this great French novel, which I commend to everybody, "Bouvard and Pecuchet" about these two boobs who just resign their jobs and decide they're gonna go off and do loads and loads of experiments.

And it's like they keep failing everything they try to learn and they're stupid but they're absolutely lovable.

And all the way through to "Catch 22," you know, there were characters in that who are just very seemingly stupid, but actually they're negotiating a horrible, hostile system, which they're subverting somehow.

So, one, yeah, we'd lose a lot if we lost stupidity.

And two, you know, stupid is funny.

Stupid's always funny, isn't it?

- Well, you know, so we got literally 30 seconds here.

And this question, you know, I guess, do you worry about being recognized as an expert on stupidity now having written a book about it?

- Yeah, I'm the anti-Einstein.

I'm terrified.

It really is a terrible brand, isn't it?

You know, I will never get tenure at Oxford or Harvard.

It's just, I have put up with that.

I'm the stupid guy.

And I can't remember which was the dumb one in Abbott and Costello.

But I think I may have typecast myself as the dumb guy.

- Well, I gotta tell you, Stuart Jeffries, "A Short History of Stupidity" is a great read.

Thank you so much for sharing some of it with us this week.

That is all the time we have.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you too for joining me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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