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After having spent some time studying history I'm pretty convinced that we are, on average, no stupider than ever. It is just that history tends to ignore the "lower classes" of ordinary people. But in reading cultural history after cultural history that focuses on the lives or "ordinary" people the same themes of "people are idiots" keep coming to the surface (see, for example, Richard Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History; though for a view of what occupied the intelligentsia I can also recommend Darnton's more academic Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France).
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