Braining Stupidity

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF HUMAN STUPIDITY--Walter B. Pitkin--Simon & Schuster--($3.50).

If brains had legs, most brains would be all legs, or so Walter Boughton Pitkin, breezy professor in Columbia University's School of Journalism, seems to imply. For its gangling lack of intelligence the Professor takes the world to task. Its follies, like its females, show an infinite variety, but there seem to be only nine major categories of human stupidity. "These intermarry and blend in all sorts of combinations. . . . Some rise to glory, while others are hunted by the police. The history of them all is the history of our race, in the main." Though abysmal dullness abounds, Author Pitkin finds that lack of integration in people's personalities is what makes their stupidity so genuine. In some ways high-grade morons are cleverer than ordinary men; in some ways near geniuses are more stupid. From the same unbalance suffer individuals, mobs, nations, races. With these as building blocks Author Pitkin gradually erects a Katzenjammer Kastle of the human race. One of its foundation-stones is the Pittsburgh citizen, now dead, who encouraged his smouldering pipe with kerosene; a large block of the Kastle's coping is the English nation, which to the Professor's amazement seems always able to addle through. In a sketch of Henry Ford, Author Pitkin disclaims ambition to write the Ford biography--"the job would be too dull for us." Walt Whitman he calls a caution, but is forced to admit, "Not until introverts no longer read and write shall we be rid of the Steer that lived on Leaves of Grass." In spite of all, Author Pitkin remains incorrigibly optimistic. With not unheard-of scientific naivete he hopes to save mankind by mechanization of many of man's functions. In his age of Super-Sense, "A hay fever sufferer will . . . have a pocket sniffer which will enable him to detect in the summer breeze the April 4, 1932

presence of one one-trillionth of a grain of timothy, golden rod, or ragweed pollen." On this happy note, with his tongue reaching for his cheek, Professor Pitkin winds up his 540-page introduction with the words: "We are now ready to begin the history of human stupidity." He cannot be said to have left his subject where he found it.

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