‘Stupidity is not a living being,’ claims the Lahti International Writers’ Reunion, commenting on the theme of this, its 20th summer, ‘The Aim of Literature is to Combat Stupidity’. ‘It is the lack of thought, mental lethargy,’ it continues; ‘The aim of the writer is not to promote stupidity but to combat it.’      But what is stupidity? The more lethargic among us may seek an answer from, for example, the internet: www. stupidity.com brings to the screen Erasmus of Rotterdam’s great classic The Praise of Folly of 1509. In it, stupidity is very much a living being, namely the world-ruling goddess Stultitia (Stupidity), the text’s narrator.      Her comments about poets, for example, are not exactly positive: ‘“Self-love and flattery” are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion.’ Nor do writers get off easily: ‘[The writer] knows well enough that the more trivial the trifles he writes about the wider the audience which will appreciate them, made up as it is of all the ignoramuses and fools.’      Since 1963, Lahti has been the location for confrontations between writers and, for example, morality, prejudice, national identity, power or conflict. Difficult problems, undoubtedly. In 1995 the Finnish poet Gösta Ågren lost patience with the chatter: ‘In writers’ reunions, writers make a curiously pompous impression.... The endless talk of literature and its significance makes [writers] forget how helpless literature really is.’ Twenty years earlier, the American writer Herbert Gold, on the other hand, was so inspired by Lahti that he quoted W. H. Auden: ‘the essence of poetry is that which comes from the heart and creates order’; if poetry creates order, then perhaps the poet is not so helpless, after all.      Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote his text at a time when the basic values of life had changed suddenly; economic prosperity and the invention of the printing press speeded the transfer of information and spread the new ideal of humanism. In recent years, new translations of The Praise of Folly have been made in a number of different countries, and new editions published. Perhaps the reason for this new interest is the equally abrupt change in values over the past 50 years to which we are all heirs. Those of us who live in the West have unparalleled prosperity, and the information technology is enabling the transfer of knowledge on a scale undreamed of by Gutenberg or Erasmus. The great difference is that this time there is no new ideal to go with it; instead, we live in a period where all ideals appear to have collapsed.      Folly, the desire for power and ostentation appear in plenty at the beginning of this new millennium, so that the satire of Stultitia appeals to those of our contemporaries who are tired of them. Information, and even knowledge, is the small change of the high-tech revolution; but where wisdom lies is not always so obvious.      Soila Lehtonen & Hildi Hawkins      Editors-in-chief, 2001 Lahti International Writers’ Reunion: www.mukkula.org     Top of page