The Story of Stupidity samples

Generally, the world of the Greeks was as small, orderly and statuesque as they could make it, and for all their genius, everything Greek remains comprehensible in a glance. Their political ideal was the little polis—the statuary city-state. Their gods were superlative shapes rather than omnipotent forces. Their religious services were formalities of piety not expressions of soaring emotions. Their great ethical systems—Stoicism and Epicureanism—idealized steadiness, with the goal being to limit desires rather than fulfill them, and such desires as existed were for order not excitement. Their science was one of form not energy. Their mathematics was geometric not dynamic. Their painting, having no horizon and no perspective, expressed no sense of either space or depth, and their architecture was based on the post. p. 25

Basically, the romantics changed the cultural standard from logic to aesthetics—from reason to beauty. The contemptible, contemporary world of industrialism, ugliness and cruelty was unfavorably contrasted with the ancient and medieval worlds, which were invariably idealized by nostalgia. Oddly enough, the romantics loved not just their own quixotized absolutes—utopian images and models of perfection—but strange sorts of things as well. Rousseau loved what was useless, destructive and violent (canyons, storms, waterfalls, etc.), and generally romantic fiction featured ghosts, castles, decadent aristocrats, despots, pirates and the occult. When nature was portrayed, it was no longer Newtonian—neat, orderly, mathematical, and mechanical; it was wild, spontaneous and random. Science was still acceptable if it led to something peculiar, but most of all, the romantics loved medieval chivalry because when writing about kings, knights and tables, they could freely indulge in their stock in trade, which was to cut loose from reality. p. 185