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Story of Stupidity: A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present

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A crash course in the most significant events of Western civilization judged by the context of stupidity (i.e., attempting short-term goals at the expense of being able to succeed at long-term ones). An entire book chock full of concluding paragraphs from a vast array of the most amusing and intuitive historical essays. The only fault I might add is that while it's very intuitive, it largely fulfills and is tailored towards supporting a certain mechanism of perception. Mind, I completely agree with that mindset of perception, but I can't say the book's long lists of conclusions are justified by the materials offered. It's a book to whet the appetites of laymen, to be exposed to a way of judging and start their own avenues of inquiry. It wraps this way of judging experiences and events that have past around the tapestry of real events, significant ones, but ultimately it's not about Western history. It's about exploring the schema of stupidity (for the author's lack of a better word). As much as I relish reading it, as a philosophy it can give you the tools to judge the choices people have made but it remains a bit light in their application towards present decisions.

James Welles's book, The Story of Stupidity (first published 1988) is a sweeping chronicle of Western civilization, with a decided slant as indicated by the title. Welles's grasp of history is actually quite impressive. But his unrelenting cynicism and pessimism make his book as stupid as anything he discusses.

"The lesson the twentieth century," he says, "is that science and technology will not save us from ourselves."

That's the kind of trite, pseudo-profound, ultimately stupid posturing that fills the book and makes me want to retch.

It's easy enough to find examples of stupidity throughout history. But Welles epitomizes an all too common misanthropy of pervasive contempt for Man and all his works. Ironically, he often inveighs against historical victimizations, yet it's hard to see why he cares about those victims, since he apparently has no use for any of the human race.

Not, at least, as it actually exists. Welles relentlessly condemns people for failing to measure up to an ethereal standard of sagacity, virtue, foresight, selflessness, and perfect action. As though there's no reason anyone should ever have been more - well - human.

His jaundiced mindset is manifest in discussing the Chernobyl accident. "Still," he says, "those who believe the risk to the public is acceptable for the sake of profit to themselves and their cronies arrogantly continue pushing nuclear power while mouthing soothing platitudes about nuclear safety."

I actually spent much of my professional career battling operators of nuclear power plants. I grew to realize they were not in fact motivated by "profit to themselves and their cronies." It was to provide good service to the public at low rates. To the extent they did seek profits, it was mainly to further that aim via keeping their companies financially sound. And meantime, hundreds of nuclear power plants throughout the world have operated quite safely for decades.

That's what I mean by Welles himself displaying exactly the sort of narrow-minded stupidity he denounces.

In fact, invoking episodes like Chernobyl and the Titanic, he sounds like an extremist technophobe who thinks it's wrong even to try for progress. Thus he says, "Although those who run our high tech culture are supposed to be alert and generally on the ball, they refuse to recognize that all the safety designs and official regulations in the world will not eliminate the incalculable factor of stupid errors as long as people remain human."

No - we do not refuse to recognize this. The true point here - the exact opposite of what Welles intends - is that we bravely go forward, knowing there are risks, but that nothing can be gained without risk. That's why ships did not stop crossing the seas after the Titanic. And planes don't stop flying because they might crash. And we don't stop living in houses because sometimes they burn down.

And - I hope - Deepwater Horizon won't stop offshore oil drilling.

The alternative - implicit in Welles's book, though he doesn't face up to it - is to "play it safe" and never take any risks. That would mean not getting out of bed in the morning. In fact, it would mean not even having beds, because we'd still be sleeping on the cold dirt floors of caves.

I recently earned my masters degree in history, and spent several months reading this book in my regular train commutes. As you can guess, the shaping theme in the book is stupidity, and while I was initially irritated at the one-sidedness and "negative" approach to history, I eventually got to appreciate its intend: to view things in an entirely new way. The author succeeds in going against the "dogma" of contemporary history writing that you can't view things in the light of today, but should always consider the mindset and world of those days, and that you musn't judge but see everything in an objective, distanced manned ("that's what happened, that's how it went, and that's it"). While this is the most rational (and best) approach, playing with other points of view does enriches the spectrum. E.g. I have never seen critisism of Aristotle before, in a general history book. It does make you think, and realise that Aristotle, among other people/subjects, might be "overprotected", in that you never even considered critisism of these untouchables. (Well, I never did.)

This isn't a short book; I must confess that sometimes it was a hard nut to crack, and I even considered giving up at one point, but the uniqueness of the approach made me continue. Glad I did, because the final chapter is very enjoyable (in my opinion the best chapter of the book).

This also isn't a proper history book; learn your history from some place else. However, if you're already a history buff, you might find that after reading this book, your general view on history might have gotten a wee bit wider in places you wouldn't suspect, might have gotten a few unorthodox hard edges for a change.

To give you a glimpse of what James Welles brings, I selected a few quotes:

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To the extent that reason was employed, it was used, often brilliantly, not for self-correction but to explain away fundamental errors or inconsistencies in theology.

If a reprobate repented and confessed and the proper ceremony were performed, he went to Heaven after suffering a while in Purgatory. A priest could shorten this time by saying masses for the repentant and was willing to do so for a suitable fee, but just why the holy Fathers would not do so out of Christian compassion was never explained.

Actually, it was rather ironic that the Church espoused its medieval doctrine of "Free will" while demanding obedience and conformity from the flock. The modern age is modern precisely because the people make their own decisions, but the Church did not want people thinking for themselves: Doctrine was to come from the top down, and believers were to obey.

A correlated universal was the assumption that there was a correct belief. Everyone agreed there were divergent interpretations of the Bible, but only one was right, the others wrong and naturally each home grown expert was convinced his was correct. Only a few people, like Erasmus, pointed out that part of the problem was that the Bible was not clear, with some parts being ambiguous and others contradictory. As usual, his voice was lost in the temper of the times as people continued to wrangle over obscure issues and debated questions which themselves were unclear.

As it turned out, the great appeal of reason was not that it automatically led to truth but that anyone could use it in support of any cause whatsoever.

This example clearly illustrates the problem confronting those who relied on reason to bring order to the world: Practically everything can be found reasonable by someone yet be considered unreasonable by someone else. It turned out the reasonableness of a practice or process was dependent upon the reasoner and especially the starting and end points of the train of thought. These, in turn, were both arbitrarily predetermined by subjective perceptions and values, which were matters beyond reason.

No sooner had the Constitution created a government with the power to tax and destroy than the pendulum of political opinion swung back to the side of caution, and the Bill of Rights was added to limit the power of the central authority. As much as civil rights needed expressed protection, the amendments belied the naive faith in ideals that characterized the liberal intellects of the eighteenth century: E.g., freedom of the press was expected to guarantee an informed electorate. No one anticipated the venality of the popular press nor that the media would become corrupters of public opinion as they traded informational quality for emotional impact in a quest for ratings.
In a similar vein, the Founding Fathers had no conception of the complexities of vote manipulation and the potential for political corruption inherent in the system they created. They failed to foresee the development of political parties, not to mention special interest groups, which have made a mockery of democracy.

Not surprisingly, the fearful faithful chose the Bible as the standard for judgment, and the unnecessary battle between theology and biology was on. Confronted with obvious factual errors, theologians rejected the new scientific standards for truth, refused to modify their absurd views and attempted to suppress Darwinian thought. Clerical institutions, including universities, adopted a policy of deliberate ignorance by bitterly resisting the new knowledge. As if it were some kind of test of holiness, many church leaders devoted their considerable intellectual gifts to obscuring facts, inhibiting learning and preventing understanding.

As astute as Darwin was in observing animal behavior, he was still a man of his times and saw in the natural world only a paradigm of the cutthroat competition of industrial capitalism. He completely missed the fact that cooperation among individuals and groups is as necessary to their mutual survival as competition is to their evolutionary development. All the cynical ethics based on Darwin's works are similarly jaded in that they ignore the crucial role intraspecies cooperation plays in the zoological world. Humans, particularly, are mutually interdependent and proportion their role playing as cooperators and competitors as the demands of circumstances shift.

With all parties subjectively interpreting it to suit themselves, the Constitution ceased to have any definitive meaning--if indeed it ever had--and became less the Supreme Law of the land than a national symbol which all people could worship, praise and ignore as they pleased.

In the pursuit of immediate profits, they are dedicated to the irresponsible exploitation of nature's resources and seem determined to top all the stupidity of all ages past combined with a grandiose display of pollution and destruction of the natural world that supports them.

Thus, a moderately stupid person still has an advantage in coping with this world over one who tries to understand it logically, as it is a world of compromises, tradeoffs and shabby political charades pulled off by self-seeking hacks using ideas and abusing ideals to suit their seedy needs and sordid purposes. The surprise is not that it does not make any sense but that anyone ever believed it could.

Thus, the public can hardly derive any assurance from the sanctimonious pronouncements of industry spokespeople that nuclear power is safe. In the words of one official, "The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years. The plants have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown with three safety lines, which operate independently without duplicating one another...The environment is securely protected, as hermetically sealed buildings with closed cycles for technological processes...preclude any discharge into the external environment." Are you reassured? You might be--until you learn this statement was made by VitaliSklyarov, Minister of Power and Electrification of the Ukraine and appeared in Soviet Life in February, 1986, just two months before the disaster at Chernobyl.

In the United States, the basic problem with the attitude of the proponents of atomic power is revealed by the standards they use to judge the potential effects a disaster at a nuclear power plant might have. When considering insurance coverage, industry officials concede that were a meltdown to occur, it would be so bad that any insurance companies covering it would be wiped out so a limit of $7.1 billion on liability was established by law. However, when considering public safety, the same officials assure everyone that a meltdown is so improbable that no one need worry about it. Would it not be more convincing if such spokespeople were consistent and stuck to one position on both issues? Certainly if a meltdown would be so severe that ensuing claims would wipe out insurance companies, it would have devastated surrounding communities. On the other hand, if such an eventuality is so improbable that the public can be forced to risk it, so could insurance companies. All atomic officials demonstrate by their double standard is that they think more of insurance company money than they do of human life. SURPRISE!

Welles amalgamates the choicest bits of thinking from hundreds of the brightest brains of the West into one coherent book. Whenever I read a work, usually I can sense the mental limits of the writer already after a few pages. Of the many thousand book I read in my life, Welles' is the only one where I simply couldn't sense his limits. One wonders, does Welles have an unlimited IQ?

I wouldn't say that the History of Stupidity equals a university curriculum in philosophy because never attended the latter, but after quoting it people always inquire if philosophy was my major. The examples of illogism Welles so masterfully drags into spotlight turn out to be abuses of power for a financial gain repeatedly. This and the fact that the book cheerfully shreds just about any "ism" into pieces (even the ancient Greek philosophers) is probably the main reason why the History of Stupidity isn't hailed as the New Holy Grail in thinking. Read it nevertheless; if you don't get offended, you'll learn as much from it as from a whole library.

According to the news tonight James F. Welles, the author of "Story of Stupidity: A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present", was arrested for trying to solicit sex from a undercover cop posing as a 15 year old on the internet.

James F. Welles is the perfect person to teach stupidity ;)

You'd think that a guy who's written the book on stupidity (two, in fact), wouldn't be as dumb as author James Welles. But the 61-year-old Florida writer/degenerate was just arrested for soliciting sex from a 15-year-old girl he met in an online chat room. Except, of course, the girl was actually Todd Dwyer, a 40-year-old detective with the Lantana Police Department. The author of "The Story of Stupidity" and "Understanding Stupidity" spent three weeks corresponding with his teenage friend before arranging a face-to-face date at a Denny's. But when Welles arrived at the restaurant, he was arrested by cops and charged with soliciting sex from a minor, a felony. According to this probable cause affidavit, Welles wrote in one damning e-mail, "You just have to remember--bottom line, I'll be committing a crime." Jim, we'd suggest an epilogue may be in order for that "Story of Stupidity...

Do we know if Mr. Welles is guilty? If he is, what does someone's sexual conduct, illegal or not have to do with whether the book they wrote is any good or not? Is it a sex therapy or legal advice guidebook? Why is this even a matter of discussion in a book review? Are we going to discuss Noam Chomsky's bowel movements next in reference to his new book?

Since Dr. Welles's arrest has for some reason become a topic of consideration in this format, let us set the record straight. He is not a villain but a victim whose arrest was due to neither stupdity nor criminal conduct on his part but MALfeasence on the part of the police. The state's case is based entirely on unsubstantiated hearsy, characterized by obstuction of justice and features withholding evidence, tampering with evidence, falsifying evidence, fabricating evidence and multiple counts of perjury. The charge against Dr. Welles is to be dropped.

Hey Anne, the reason this is "even a matter of discussion in a book review" is because real life stupidity and hypocrisy are far more interesting than the book. Furthermore, knowing that an authority on stupidity is more blatantly stupid than we less intellectual types gives us a feeling of superiority and boosts our egos mightily! We need fools like Welles, Jonathan Thesenga, Stefano Stefani, Bill Clinton, and George W to briefly brighten our lives with their follies.