First published in 1494, this went into French as La Nef des Fous and was "Englished" by Alexander Barclay as The Shyp of Folys of the World in 1509. Possibly inspired by Columbus's voyage (debatably the most dangerously stupid adventure in history if current affairs are anything to go by), Brant used the motif of a crowded boat of storm-tossed unfortunates to satirise the variety of human folly and weakness. Today it would be a charter flight.Rabelais, Cervantes, Pope and Sterne also concerned themselves with stupidity. Pope's "confederacy of dunces" slipped easily into the language, although Jeremy Bentham's "Cacotopia" (the worst of all possible worlds) did not.
Van Boxsel does not concern himself with these major figures, although he does treat us to a bit of Dante, some Eliot and The Fable of the Bees. Most oddly he ignores Flaubert, whose posthumous Bouvard et P?chet is a brilliant 19th-century satire on human brainlessness.Flaubert describes two clerks who set out, rather stupidly, to acquire all available knowledge. He read more than 1,500 books to prepare for it and the effort hastened his own death. "My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me," he groaned, "I doubt everything, even my doubt." As an appendix, Flaubert published his wonderful Dictionnaire des Id? Re?s, a spoof on the slack opinions of the bourgeoisie, whose indolent posturing Flaubert, the perpetual adolescent, so detested.But was Flaubert's self-destructiveness stupid or not? At about the same time that the Oeuvres Compl?s edition of Bouvard et P?chet was published, Ambrose Bierce wrote his essay "Some Disadvantages of Genius".
He complained that geniuses are often not understood, then – perhaps realising this was a stupid thing to say – promptly went to Mexico and was never seen again. Genius and madness are close, but so are stupidity and high intelligence. Neither seems to be well understood.The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity is a very good idea, but not a terribly good book. Not as academic as James F Welles's The Story of Stupidity (a history of idiocy from the days of Greece), nor is it as witty and imaginative as those other reference books whose genre began with Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary and which also includes Alberto Manguel's Dictionary of Imaginary Places.But Wittgenstein said that if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen. In this sense, human progress depends on the continuing practice of stupidity. So let's at least be glad that progress is assured.Stephen Bayley's 'Dictionary of Stupidity' will be published by Gibson Square Books this autumn. Maeve Binchy is marvellous comfort listening: her books can bolster you in frail moments as effectively as a good agony aunt or a cup of late-night Ovaltine.
