A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity

by Walter B. Pitkin

Genres: History

574 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Walter Boughton Pitkin was an American lecturer in philosophy and psychology at Columbia University (1905–09), and professor in the Columbia University School of Journalism (1912–43). Pitkin was a member of the New Realism school in philosophy, writing on its relation to biology.

Reviews

[Ivan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Following the same line as Allegro ma non troppo from Carlo M. Cipolla this useful guide for these temps hypermodernes, give us a composition on how to deal with the present danger on a feature inherent of the people, wether if it present to us face to face, on long distance relations or any situation may arise that may or may not collide with us.

[Stephen Mackintosh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has not passed test of time unfortunately. Interesting as a barometer of what pompous people believed in the 1930s. Otherwise avoid.

[Tommy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aimed at and critical of the common man. Truly a product of it's time of publication... filled with all kinds of ethnic chauvinism but he had quite an impressive group of help in formulating his thoughts:

I wish particularly to thank Mrs. Herbert Bates and Harper & Brothers for permission to quote freely from that lovely translation of the Odyssey which Herbert Bates finished only a few months before his untimely death. To Mr Bertrand Russell is due special gratitude for calling my attention to a most important psychic mechanism of stupidity which had escaped my attention. Excellent instances and references have also come from Lewis Mumford, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Oswald Garrison Villard, Joseph J as trow, Harry Elmer Barnes, Horace K alien, Earnest Elmo Calkins, Charles A. Beard, William Worrell, Silas Bent, Robert E. Rogers, George Sokolsky, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Bayard Swope, M. Lincoln Schuster, Gene Tunney, R. C. E. Brown, and Arthur Garfield Hays.

The tl;dr:

Stupidity is brought on by any of the following defects:
1. Defective adenoids
2. Defective tonsils.
3. Carious teeth.
4. Mild epilepsy.
5. Mild syphilis.
6. Various forms of heart disease
7. Malaria.
8. Hookworm disease.
9. Influenza.
10. Advanced tuberculosis.
11. Most kidney diseases.
12. Almost any marked sensory defect such as blindness, deafness, etc.
13. Rickets.
14. Endocrine diseases.
15. Various severe physical injuries.
16. Various intestinal auto-intoxications.
17. Cerebral meningitis.
18. Scarlet fever.
19. Pellagra.

Then, too, it is all too readily induced by many bad ways of living, among which the commoner are:
1. Prolonged malnutrition, especially in childhood.
2. Alcoholism.
3. Drug addictions of certain types.
4 Prolonged masturbation, apparently.
5. Physical exhaustion from overwork.
6. Prolonged emotional excitement.

[Bruce Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Bokonon, a religious guru says "If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity..." One suspects that Vonnegut was aware of Pitkin's book and read it. After all, he was an anthropology major and separating stupidity from homo sapiens would like separating wetness from water.
It seems clear that irony is at play in this work from the beginning. It's a "short" introduction, totalling a mere six hundred plus pages. Pitkin, being human, contributes his share of stupidities in this work. Here he is on Spaniards: "The simon pure, autochthonous Spaniard can show to his own credit nothing worthy of note in all the centuries chronicled by historians. He has not brought forth a single constructive thinker in philosophy." What about Miguel de Unamuno? Or José Ortega y Gasset?
He's even naive enough to think that computers will reduce stupidity. "Mechanized thinking has begun. Within a century it will be as commonplace as today the automobile. No well educated man will, in those happy eras just over the hill of time, be so foolish as to try to think out with bare brain how he will invest his savings, or which part of his factory he will enlarge, or for what purposes his town will vote funds."
That said, those with hungry minds will find nourishing nuggets of idiocy within.