Are We Getting Stupider?

"For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert's characters says that, in mass society, "the germs of stupidity . . . spread from person to person," and we end up becoming lemming-like followers of leaders, trends, and fads. (This "modern stupidity," Jeffries explains, "is hastened by urbanization: the more dense a population is in one sense, the more dense it is in another.")"

"And the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen further innovations. We're now conscious of the kinds of stupidity that might reveal themselves through intelligence tests or bone-headed bureaucracies; we know about " bullshit jobs" and " the banality of evil" and digital inundation. Jeffries considers a light fixture in his bedroom; it has a recessed design that's hard to figure out, so he goes to YouTube in search of videos that might show him how to change the bulb."

Nineteenth-century perceptions framed stupidity as the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion that spreads through mass society, producing lemming-like conformity. Urbanization intensified this modern stupidity by increasing social density and facilitating the transmission of unthinking views. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries added systemic and technological forms of stupidity, including errors revealed by intelligence tests, bone-headed bureaucracies, meaningless 'bullshit jobs,' the banality of evil, and digital inundation. Everyday tasks become complicated by high-tech design, prompting reliance on online tutorials. The proliferation of different kinds of stupidity may reflect more shared thoughts as education and communication expand, not necessarily a decline in intelligence.

Read at The New Yorker