As Vast as Mankind

THE NATURAL SCIENCE OF STUPIDITY (288 pp.)--Paul Tabori-- Chilton($4.50).

"With stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain," sighed Friedrich Schiller, and Oscar Wilde added his amen: "There is no sin except stupidity." Both writers had cause for complaint: stupidity, their own or that of others, landed them in jail.* In this head-shaking book, Author Paul Tabori notes that man's incurable doltishness has managed to fill the prisons and crowd the executioner's block with the finest intelligences the human race could produce. A partial list: Plato, Socrates, Seneca, Boethius, Cervantes, Sir Walter Raleigh, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Verlaine.

A Lot of Browns. In its most virulent form, says Tabori quoting a psychiatrist, stupidity serves "to disguise the truth from ourselves." Milder cases result in folly, credulity, superstition, plain silliness. Men of science have resisted progress with the mindless tenacity of Bourbons. Distinguished experts, including members of the famed French Academy, have on occasion "proved" that there are no such things as meteors and hypnosis; they have shown conclusively that man can never fly, that steamboats and railways will not work, and that the idea of laying undersea cables is preposterous.

Gold has been an ancestor of paradoxes from the legendary case of avaricious King Midas, who nearly starved to death because everything he touched became gleaming metal, to the phenomenon of the U.S. Government's solemnly mining gold dug from the earth, only to bury it again at Fort Knox. Government red tape is a fertile field for the common, or garden, variety of stupidity. In Britain a professional man applied for gasoline coupons and got them with the warning that his car could be used only to take him to his place of business and that "the return to your residence must be made by public transport." In the U.S. during the war, when promising soldiers were sent to colleges for engineering courses, the assignments were made alphabetically. The result: of 300 soldiers arriving at a small Southern school, 298 were named Brown.

A Million Laws. The law brings out all of man's magnificent mulishness. For centuries, pigs, bulls, dogs and horses were gravely tried and executed if they caused a human death. In 1890 a sardonic Hungarian lawyer left his estate to the relative who could best answer 1) What is eternal and finite on earth? 2) Why do people need money? 3) Why do people carry on lawsuits? Litigation raged for 55 years among his kinfolk; all offers of compromise were rejected; and the case ended only when the estate was wiped out by inflation. The multiplicity of lawsuits may be partially explained by a U.S. attorney who, 20 years ago, set himself the task of adding up all the laws on the statute books of federal and state governments. His grand total: 1,156,644.

Industrious Author Tabori, who has written 33 books, 28 feature films and 120 TV scripts, begins this volume in a spirit of friendly inquiry. But as the toll of human stupidities mounts, his tone seems to get more outraged and frenzied, particularly with the follies committed in the name of romantic love and religion. "Stupidity," he groans, "is as vast as all mankind." Is it curable? Yes, says Tabori gloomily, "provided, of course, that someone wants to be cured."

*Wilde for suing the Marquis of Queensberry for libel when he referred (accurately) to the poet's homosexuality; Schiller by the Duke of Wuerttemberg after the stir caused by his social criticism in The Robbers.

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