Matthijs van Boxsel is a literary historian who believes that no one is intelligent enough to understand their own stupidity. In The Encyclopedia of Stupidity he shows how stupidity manifests itself in all areas, in everyone, at all times, proposing that stupidity is the foundation of our civilization. A historian is a person who studies history. ...
In short sections with such titles as ‘The Blunderers’ Club’, ‘Fools in Hell’, ‘Genealogy of Idiots’, and ‘The Aesthetics of the Empty Gesture’, stupidity is analysed on the basis of fairy tales, cartoons, triumphal arches, garden architecture, Baroque ceilings, jokes, flimsy excuses and science fiction. But Van Boxsel wants to do more than just assemble a ‘shadow cabinet’ of wisdom; he tries to fathom the logic of this opposite world. Where do understanding and intelligence begin and end? He examines mythic fools such as Cyclops and King Midas, cities such as Gotham, archetypes including the dumb blonde, and traditionally stupid animals such as the goose, the donkey and the headless chicken.
Van Boxsel posits that stupidity is a condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress, that failure is the basis for success. In this erudite and witty book he maintains that our culture is the product of a series of failed attempts to comprehend stupidity.
Indeed, rather than citing the familiar and widely acclaimed retellings of the behavior of idiots and stupids, VanBoxsel treats the reader to a refreshingly new montage of the less frequently cited behavioral repertoire of select eccentrics, collectors and oddballs.
Occasionally using koans, paradoxes, jokes and catch phrases as examples, vanBoxsel's writing was (at least in the earlier sections) reminiscent of D. Hofstadter's excellent use of dialogues in his Godel, Escher, Bach…., but in the Encyclopaedia of Stupidity there is little discussion or further contextualization following presentation of the examples given.
But without wanting to give away too much here in review, vanBoxsel will convince many that the true enemies of stupidity are satire and (yes, you've maybe guessed already), a good encyclopedia -- two forces which are becoming increasingly impotent in their ability to prevent our tending towards stupid behavior.
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