It seems that stupidity became a hot topic in the last decade. Several tomes were published on the subject: James F. Wells, The Story of Stupidity (1996) and Understanding Stupidity (1997), Giancarlo Livraghi, The Power of Stupidity (1996-97), an edited volume by Robert Sternberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (2002), and Avital Ronell, Stupidity (2002), which inspired a 2003 eponymous documentary by Albert Nerenberg - Stupidity. The film touches on such topics as the origins and history of the IQ test, Marx’s and Einstein’s references to the force or limitlessness of stupidity, and even shows us the place of origin of the word “moron” in Vineyard, NJ.

What struck me, however, is that the film intercuts interviews of
outstanding American intellectuals with questions posed to the populus in the streets in a rather clichéd and simplistically contrasting way, portraying intellectuals as smart and the populus as dumb. No sign of the traditional folk wisdom, which I suppose is meant to back up the film’s not very original thesis that TV and Hollywood are causes of the infantilization and cretinization of the American populace, so that wisdom was banished from the streets. Maybe, therefore, the film triggered my memory of a much more subtle exercise dedicated to the same topic, namely Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues, usually published as an appendix to Bouvard et Pécuchet.

The Dictionnaire purports to be a collection of stupidities, clichés, and commonplaces which Flaubert put a lot of effort into banishing from his oeuvre but strangely enough compiled in this work. It came to constitute an enclave or niche where the banality of language, of which Flaubert seemed to be so wary, could find a refuge. Why couldn’t Flaubert just drop clichés altogether? Reading Dictionnaire and Bouvard et Pécuchet, one can hardly ward off the impression that this turning inside-out of Flaubert’s refinement of style is an obsessive bad conscience paying homage to the repressed. The question that I think troubled Flaubert in regard to clichés was, what is the difference between stupidity and wisdom?

The alleged stupidities collected by him are indeed not always easy to identify as such. We know that Flaubert thought of publishing his Dictionnaire first as a separate book with a preface that would deceive the reader about the seriousness of his enterprise. He wanted his reader to be torn apart in the evaluation of the book – is it a collection of aphorisms and wisdom or a collection of banalities and stupidities? The border between the two had to be unclear.

This intention is reflected in the dictionary’s two epigraphs. The first one is the Latin proverb “Vox populi, vox Dei.” It is anonymous and evokes the idea of universal folk wisdom. The second one is an aphorism by the late 18th- century French moralist Nicolas Chamfort, an individual opinion which seems to negate the meaning of the first epigraph : « Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre. » These two epigraphs represent two extremely opposite understandings of something what we call “common sense” and “common knowledge.” But what is the difference between the wisdom of a proverb and the stupidity of a “commonplace,” or a “cliché”?

Anne Herschberg-Pierrot describes an idée reçue by three characteristics: it has the congealed, rigid form of a pre-constructed judgment of the dominant discourse; it possesses enunciative authority as truth; and it assumes passive reception and adoption without reflection and criticism. However, it seems that all these characteristics are also applicable to proverbs and quotations from the classical literature --the “winged words” which are associated with wisdom rather than with stupidity. Maybe then the difference is not structural but contextual? Here are some speculations suggested by Flaubert himself.

Proverbial wisdom has the character of law and is based on timeless truth confirmed by centuries of common experience. A proverb relies on empirical authority confirmed throughout time. A subjective and arbitrary personal opinion can easily become a stupidity by its illegitimate claim to be timeless truth. Stupidity seems always to have the status of a particular that clumsily presents itself as universal.

Stupidity as Flaubert seems to understand it is associated with a pretence at being something that one isn’t by adopting ideas from ready-made sources other than life experience or education. In it, the lack of independent judgment is compensated through reproduction of a cliché. It also has something to do with urban social space, since the second half of the nineteenth century produced an avalanche of real and fake conversational guides, manuals, dictionaries, and parodic sottisiers (collections of stupidities). Here are some funny titles:

- Musée de la conversation
- Sottisier
- Le Parfait Causeur. Petit manuel rédigé en langue parisienne, suivi de six nouvelles
- Dictionnaire des lieux communs de la conversation, du style épistolaire, du théâtre, du livre, du journal, de la tribune, du barreau, de l’oraison funèbre, etc. etc.
- Des Erreurs et des Préjugés répandus dans les diverses classes de la société
- Très peu de ce que l’on entend tous les jours
- Un peu de ce qui se dit tous les jours.

These titles testify to a new social mobility and mixing of classes in urban space and to a concomitant need to handle many registers of conversation, maybe even to pass for a member of another social class or adjust a conversation somewhat to the level of one’s customers.

Stupidity, for Flaubert, also has something to do with literalism, with a lack of figural thinking, and a one-dimensionality that erases the complexity and the winding, discursive path of knowledge by turning it into a practical recipe. It is especially manifest in the case of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s moves to apply their knowledge. The notions they scoop from museums, collections, journals, manuals and dictionaries turn into stupidity when they try to make them absolute, endorse them practically and live by their wisdom. Let’s call it a lack of dialogical openness to the world.

Pierre Bourdieu explains Flaubert’s “merciless elimination of all received ideas, of all clichés, and of all the other stylistic features that could mark or reveal adherence to one or another position” with Flaubert’s point of view that lies “in the irreconcilable diversity of its perspectives, in the universe from which the author has deleted himself but remains, like Spinoza’s god, immanent and coextensive with his creation” (“Flaubert’s Point of View,” Critical Inquiry, Spring 1988, p. 562). In a way the stupidity which Flaubert studiously tried to avoid and to counteract by intercutting a variety of perspectives is a profoundly human frailty, the egotism and self-righteousness of one singular point of view. But what kind of world would it be, if human intelligence were like Spinoza’s god?

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