Anthropology News • February 2010 • Volume 51 • Issue 2
Paul L Doughty, Contributing Editor

In light of all that has been happening over the course of the past six months or so in this country, the following contribution from Alice Kehoe “on stupidity” could possibly assist understanding.

On Stupidity
By Alice Kehoe

Franz Boas received a request, in July 1931, for examples of human stupidity. Walter B Pitkin, preparing the manuscript A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity, explained to Boas that many of the examples he had pursued turned out not to evidence stupidity, thus he sought many more cases, hoping Boas could provide a few. Boas responded to Pitkin’s letter; the book appeared the next year, 1932, published by Simon and Schuster. At 574 pages with a dense detailed index, it is hardly “Stupidity for Dummies.” Bertrand Russell had sent comments on the “psychic mechanism of stupidity,” but Boas is invoked as the authority denying any “deep inner connection” between race and language, or culture and language: “A culture, as Boas correctly maintains, flows from innumerable influences…” Pitkin then asserts a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that grammar exerts an unconscious effect upon a speaker’s thinking. It is a jolt to turn the page and find he continues with extended discussion of the intellectual limitations of Chinese, African American and other people, directly contrary to Boas’ statement.

Boas’ colleague James McKeen Cattell is acknowledged by Stanford professor David Starr Jordan for providing material for a slightly earlier book, The Higher Foolishness (Bobbs-Merrill, 1927). Jordan invents the term “sciosophy,” or “shadow wisdom,” to contrast with “science,” noting that the Greek root skia is also the root for skiouros, “squirrel” (squirrels shade themselves with their tails). The title he takes from Israel Zangwill, and from Edwin Grant Conklin the definition that it is “thinking wishly.” Pitkin calls his work “the epitome of morology,” listing a litany of moronic pronouncements including, on the economy, Hoover and his Secretary of Commerce, Robert Lamont, assuring the nation in 1930 that “Decline has Ceased.” Considering the vast and constant display of stupidity, Pitkin was surprised that the New York Public Library had “only a few short essays, skits, verses, and rather feeble jokes” cataloged as Stupidity. His learned friends were of little help. He did locate two German tomes, Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit (Kemmerich 1912) and Über die Dummheit: eine Umschau im Gebiete menschlicher Unzalanglichkeit (Löwenfeld 1921). A generation after Pitkin and Jordan, writer Paul Tabori published The Natural Science of Stupidity (Chilton 1959). His many examples are drawn from European his