Sally Adee is pleasantly surprised to find that Gustave Flaubert devoted the end of his career to the pursuit:
He had spent his whole life analyzing the automatic thoughts and platitudes of the chattering classes. … Eventually that obsession became so great that he devoted himself to a last great work, a compendium of every variation of human idiocy. The novel Bouvard et Pecuchet and its companion volume, Dictionnaire des idées reçues (the Dictionary of Received Ideas) were to be a kind of encyclopedia of stupidity and object lesson. To that end the eponymous protagonists in Bouvard et Pecuchet are a Laurel and Hardy-style duo who make their way through all the spheres of life and in the process experience stupidity in all its guises, from shopkeepers to academics. What unites their stupidity is a lazy over-reliance on received wisdom.
For more on the science and history of stupidity, check out Adee’s piece at New Scientist (free registration required). From the introduction:
The idea that intelligence and stupidity are simply opposing ends of a single spectrum is a surprisingly modern one.
The Renaissance theologian Erasmus painted Folly – or Stultitia in Latin – as a distinct entity in her own right, descended from the god of wealth and the nymph of youth; others saw it as a combination of vanity, stubbornness and imitation. It was only in the middle of the 18th century that stupidity became conflated with mediocre intelligence, says Matthijs van Boxsel, a Dutch historian who has written many books about stupidity. “Around that time, the bourgeoisie rose to power, and reason became a new norm with the Enlightenment,” he says. “That put every man in charge of his own fate.”
The Dish 