Book review: "A Short History of Stupid" by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer

March 6, 2025

There's a lot of stupid going on in the world today, so a look back at this 2014 book is useful. It covers the expected stupidities (opposition to vaccines, climate change denial, postmodernist philosophy, some mad politics, Oprah Winfrey, ...) with a selection of well-written essays on a variety of forms of Stupid. Almost all of the chapters are individual pieces by the two authors, who write with different styles. Given his long background in print journalism, Keane's chapters read like long-form articles like those you would find in the better newspapers. Razer's contributions are much more like the rants she could sometimes get away with on "youth" radio (including the language). (The word "sometimes" is there because she certainly fell foul of ABC management on at least one occasion.)

The fact that there are two different writing styles makes no difference at all. Both are addressing the same problem. (Keane and Razer attended the same university at the same time but never met there.) The contrast in styles makes the book more interesting to read as it shows that there are more ways than one to approach the same problem. Also, no reader is ever going to totally agree with everything that either author has to say about anything. They don't even totally agree with each other on everything, but as someone once pointed out, if two people agree on absolutely everything, one of them is redundant.

The book gets off to a good start with an introduction headed "We don't know what we are doing", followed by "There is no such thing as a stupid question. Whoever said that has never worked in a shop, read a celebrity interview by a Murdoch journalist or had a conversation of any length with an actual adult human" and goes uphill from there.

The subtitle - "The decline of reason and why public debate makes us want to scream" - really says all you have to know about the book.

It is almost impossible to summarise this book into the few words usually expected in a review. Just find a copy somewhere and dive in. You will spend your reading time alternating between nodding your head in agreement, slapping your forehead in disbelief and occasionally thinking "that's wrong". It will be time well spent.

And if you think that a book published over ten years ago would have settled the issue of Stupid, consider this passage from page 282 of the book:

In many ways, it has been a successful fight: our explorations of the annals of Stupid suggest that things used to be a whole lot Stupider. Many of the most blatantly offensive forms of Stupid are now in retreat, at least in the lands of #firstworldproblems and their contiguous zones. Women are officially no longer second-class citizens, we don’t persecute and kill gay or transgender people as a matter of policy, we seek to acknowledge the impacts of imperialism on indigenous people and their prior relationship with the land if we now live on it. We live longer, healthier, wealthier lives than ever before, we place some basic restrictions on how much people can exploit one another (well other than in the US), and many of the forms of discrimination and harassment that anyone other than an adult white male once endured as a matter of course in Western society are now illegal or considered entirely beyond the pale.

As French journalist Ambrose Karr reminded us: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". Or, to quote Babe Ruth, "It's déjà vu all over again."

You should be able to get a copy of the book by interlibrary loan.

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About the authors:

Bernard Keane is the politics editor at Crikey where he turns out articles at a daily rate that would make many journalists envious.

Helen Razer is a Melbourne-born and Canberra-raised radio presenter and writer. She is the author of four non-fiction books and a columnist with the Australian version of The Big Issue, Melbourne newspaper The Age and contributor to the monthly magazine Cherrie and weekly newspaper The Saturday Paper.

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