The fastest-selling ticket at Toronto's Hot Docs festival this weekend is for a documentary called Stupidity, by Toronto filmmaker Albert Nerenberg. So intrigued are audiences by his promise to investigate the depths of human idiocy, this afternoon's added second screening has already sold out.

And Mr. Nerenberg isn't the only one venturing into these mostly uncharted intellectual waters. New York University literary theorist Avital Ronell has also called her new book Stupidity, and it teases out the philosophical evolution of stupidity via Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kant and Wordsworth.

Meanwhile, Dutch intellectual Matthijs van Boxsel has just published his esoteric The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a romp through history, literature and science chronicling this Medusa's head of a topic.

In Mr. van Boxsel's introduction, he says his fascination with the under-studied concept started when he discovered the work of Austrian writer Robert Musil, whose last published text in his lifetime was Uber die Dummheit (On Stupidity), a transcript of an address he gave in Vienna in 1937.

"The idea, that in addition to wisdom, truth and beauty, stupidity, too, could be a subject of serious study, came to me as a surprise," Mr. van Boxsel writes.

Mr. van Boxsel, Mr. Nerenberg and Ms. Ronell each play with an emerging view of stupidity -- that it isn't simply the absence of intelligence, but an active principle in itself. Mr. Nerenberg likes to describe the starting point of stupid acts as the state of being stunned. Of having nothing in your head -- and sharing it.

"Our theory is that stupidity is, in itself, a force," Mr. Nerenberg says. "It's not really a quantifiable subject. When you look at stupidity, you don't see anything. You see its effects."

In other words, stupid is as stupid does.

The documentary samples the worst of pop culture, leaning heavily to Jackass-style gross-out stunts and self-consciously stupid Hollywood films and television. Yet Mr. van Boxsel drew a similar conclusion from revisiting the sources that Musil drew upon. He pored over studies by theologians, sociologists and physicians.

"I filed and indexed all definitions of stupidity, and discovered to my surprise that it was generally described not as a failing, but as a force."

Or, as he puts it later in the book, stupidity "is no defect. Stupidity is an independent quality with a logic all its own. Stupidity is not the converse of intelligence; it is the converse of a lack of stupidity, while intelligence is the converse of a lack of intelligence. Particularly fatal is the combination of stupidity and intelligence."

He made one of his favourite discoveries in the allegories found in medieval and Renaissance prints, wherein stupidity (stultitia) is assigned a special place among other qualities. He refers to the 1743 allegory printed on his title page: a woman with bared breasts, a chaplet of narcissi woven in her hair, leaning against a goat that is chewing sea holly (eryngo). He writes that the narcissi refer to the Greek word narkč, meaning numbness (think of narcosis). According to Pliny, goats refused to be budged after they had chewed eryngo. The bare breasts indicate shamelessness.

"In this allegory," Mr. van Boxsel writes, "three aspects of stupidity are succinctly addressed: dullness, obstinancy and shamelessness." Another beloved print adds the quality of rashness to the heady mix. Ms. Ronell's work also circles around the distinction between passive and active stupidity -- and suggests stupidity has run dangerously free.

As she ponders the translation into English of Heidegger's reference to his own Dummheit, she sees a big difference between dumb and stupid. "While the disclosure of dumbness leaves no recourse or room for argument," she writes, "stupidity is linked to an effect of malice; indeed it calls for judgment.

"In other words, whereas dumbness might be part of the irreparable facticity of existence, there is an ethics of stupidity, or let us say simply that it calls for an ethics."

If, as Mr. Nerenberg suggests, our cultural dumbing-down means (to paraphrase a bit of confessional T-shirt un-wisdom) we're all with stupid, then Ms. Ronell is on to something very relevant to modern life.

Stupidity obviously can be harnessed to fuel entire Hollywood genres -- movies based on superheroes, Adam Sandler's goofy faux-persona, Am I Hot-style TV programming. But the political implications are even bigger.

On this front, Mr. Nerenberg proposes U.S. President George W. Bush, whom he frames as both the personification of the lowest common denominator and a savvy manipulator of that role, as the one to watch.

"I'm interested in the phenomenon of wilful stupidity. People feeling for a number of reasons that they'll have a better life if they're stupid. Bush has always worked with diminished expectations," Mr. Nerenberg says. "You have low expectations because he's apparently a moron. For example, the war in Iraq is a partial success. But because we were predicting huge failure, that he comes out with a partial success makes him look good. That's him repeating his M.O."

Ms. Ronell identifies this strain of stupidity too, writing that "sometimes ducking into stupidity offers the most expedient strategy for survival."

Although the documentary is very tongue-in-cheek, the phenomenon does worry Mr. Nerenberg. "The reason we're stupid has to do with our power," he says, "meaning the consequences of stupid human actions are so much more dramatic. When we're stupid, we destroy the world. When a goat is stupid, it doesn't have that much impact."

Just ask journalist and popular historian Erik Durschmied, whose 1999 book The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History was one of the first to attribute much of human history to the capricious nature of stupidity -- from the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"The most blatant example was the Battle of Waterloo," Mr. Durschmied says from his home in Paris. "Napoleon had won at 4 p.m., and lost -- over a very stupid mistake -- five minutes later."

What was the hinge? The French ruler's soldiers usually carried headless nails to whack into the captured artillery of the opponent. They didn't carry them this time -- and Wellington was able to recover his guns, and fire them.

Mr. Durschmied has a special interest in the role of stupidity in military history. "Nobody wants to talk about it because it serves neither the victor nor the vanquished," he says. It also shows how stupidity easily befalls those in charge, especially those convinced of their own intelligence.

Grave mistakes, he says, are invariably due to the fact that generals are specialists, like plumbers or university professors. "They all have their fields of knowledge. When something doesn't fall into it, everything goes haywire."

Ms. Ronell comes to a similar conclusion in Stupidity: that stupidity morphs when it's at its boldest. "But when stupidity is not being played but instead asserts itself without remorse, it paradoxically plays on the side of truth, or at least poses as a replica of absolute knowledge: achieving closure, knowing its ground and meaning, stupidity is accomplice to the narcissism of systems that close in upon themselves as truth."

As in politics, this is true in the realm of science and technology, according to Mr. van Boxsel. Low-nicotine tobacco, for example, has doubled the consumption of cigarettes; motorists who have airbags and seat belts drive on average 20 per cent faster; and the consumption of paper in offices has increased since computerization.

Then again, without stupidity, perhaps we would be missing one of the major steppingstones of human progress. "On the one hand, stupidity poses a threat to our civilization," Mr. van Boxsel writes. "On the other, stupidity is the mystical foundation of our existence: culture is nothing but the result of a series of more or less unsuccessful attempts to come to terms with our self-destructive folly. Stupidity has forced man to develop his intellect."

There are signs that it has had that effect on those studying stupidity as well. Mr. Nerenberg, who laments the dumbing-down of media and culture, actually agreed to dumb down his own film for the Documentary Channel's commissioning editor, who felt there were too many talking heads.

And Mr. van Boxsel's final entry in his Encyclopaedia of Stupidity is about his book itself: "It observes with amazement the successful flops that all in all constitute our civilization. It looks for essences in appearance; there is no truth beyond man's vain hunt for the truth. For that reason it dances a modest two-step with its own shadow."

Albert Nerenberg's documentary, Stupidity, screens at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto today at 4:30 p.m.

Tralee Pearce is a Globe and Mail feature writer.

An explosive mixture

From The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity (Reaktion Books, U.K.) by Matthijs van Boxsel:

Stupidity forced man to develop his intelligence, but intelligence is no guarantee of self-preservation. Indeed, intelligence can boost stupidity. The explosive character of this blend is revealed most spectacularly during hostilities.

Less conspicuously, stupidity comes to the surface in the smouldering civil war we wage on the highways, which, worldwide, causes hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year -- not to mention the innumerable serious injuries. (Incidentally, 70 per cent of the contestants in the Paralympics are road-accident victims.) This chronic catastrophe makes less of an impression than a one-off spectacular disaster, such as an airplane crash.

The explosive mix of stupidity and intelligence can also be found in technological advances:

Low-nicotine tobacco has doubled the consumption of cigarettes

Energy-saving light bulbs are used mainly for the decorative illumination of gardens

Motorists who have airbags and seat belts drive on average 20 per cent faster

More highways create more traffic; more lanes on the roads cause more queues

[Crosswalks] lead to more accidents involving pedestrians

To prevent the destruction of police cameras by speed demons, cameras have been installed to keep an eye on the speed cameras

The sturdier the chassis of a car, the harder it is to free the casualties trapped inside

Air conditioning affects the ozone layer, and contributes to the greenhouse effect. The cooling of offices, in other words, contributes to the heating of the atmosphere

Mad cows are the result of recycled butcher's waste

The consumption of paper in offices has increased since the introduction of computers

The development of cushioned jogging shoes intended to protect the knees has increased wear and tear on the hips

With the development of software for solving complicated problems more quickly, minor faults now lead to more serious consequences

Filters for purifying tap water have proved an ideal breeding ground for bacteria

Better hygiene has led to greater susceptibility to germs. The successful suppression of bacterial infections has contributed to the spread of new viral infections such as AIDS/HIV

Suntan lotion is now said to cause skin cancer

Life-threatening stupidity cannot be eradicated without eradicating mankind, which would be tantamount to stupidity squared. The only solution is to devise lasting new stratagems for dealing with stupidity. Seen in such a light, stupidity is the engine that drives our civilization.

Read other News of the Weird stories on evalu8.org...