In 1509, while traveling from Italy to England, the famed Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus composed one of the strangest and most enduring works of the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) was written partly for amusement, perhaps out of a self-deprecating boredom to break up the neurasthenia that was synonymous with long-distance travel in the early sixteenth century. As a work, it was dedicated to his friend Thomas More, who would later become Chancellor of England and gain renown and martyrdom through his interactions with the Tudor monarch Henry VIII. The title itself is in homage to More, embedded in the meaning of the Greek word moria, meaning “folly.” Despite its age—over five centuries at this point—its insights are as fresh and as biting today as they were in the pre-modern world.

　　The world Erasmus inhabited is eerily familiar to our own. A few decades prior, Gutenberg had altered Western civilization forever with his mechanization of the printing press. Information and misinformation were everywhere, and the laity struggled to comprehend truth in a rapidly advancing world. Political life in Europe was fractured by dynastic rivalries and mounting ideological extremism. The proverbial “battlelines” were being drawn as tensions between political factions spilled over into doctrinal disputes. Old cultural and moral certainties were collapsing. Religious institutions were in a vast flux. Political leaders were vain and bellicose. Scholars relished in pedantic arguments, and ordinary Christians were spiritually exhausted under the weight of so much anomie. Within a few years, Luther’s spiritual revolt would shatter the fragile state of Western Christendom altogether. Erasmus’s central psychological insight—that human beings are governed by vanity more than by reason—was as true then as it is today.

　　While easily the companion of other great works of the period, the brilliance of The Praise of Folly lies in something novel: its method. Rather than attacking society directly, Erasmus allows the personification of Folly herself to speak. She exerts a frank braggadocio, stating that she governs all human affairs. Every human being and mortal institution is subject to her suzerainty. Royal courts, universities, monasteries, and even the Church itself are part of her ever-expanding dominion. Folly does not discriminate in her influence. The greatest of kings and emperors depend upon her because flattery sustains their temporal power and all claims of fealty. Scholars depend upon her because, in an age of technocratic skill, pedantry masquerades as wisdom. The various ranks of bishops and clergy depend upon her because outward religiosity often conceals an inward spiritual malaise. Erasmus delighted in targeted social critiques. Folly mocks scholastic theologians who debate questions so obscure and arcane that “not even the apostles could understand them” and ridicules the various monks who mistake legitimate piety with mechanical clerical ritual. In Praise of Folly unfolds less like a systematic moral treatise than like a theatrical monologue in which every class of society is gradually pulled onto the stage and exposed for its own absurd pretenses.

　　In her various monologues, Folly exposes the comic charade of civilization itself, one in which every human being participates. As Folly herself boasts, “No man is wise at all times, or is without his blind side.” Erasmus’s point is not that some small cadre of people is foolish, but that folly is ubiquitous, woven into the fabric of our human nature. For Erasmus, there was a recurring question of “knowing” in the most formal sense. How do we truly know what is good? How do authorities discern this? What separates wisdom from insanity? In exploring this, he casts light on the absurdity of the task of civilization.

　　This is not a new observation. There is certainly a quality of “vanity of vanities” about his critique, but it is expressed in a way that is unpretentious and approachable. As a general rule, Erasmus was not a cynic. He did not despise humanity, and his criticism of social pretensions is not condemnatory. Instead, he understood the central truth present in both classical philosophy and Christian thought: that man is a creature prone to seemingly endless self-deception. Our pride clouds our judgment. Political ideology always hardens into overt idolatry. Erasmus loved to mock humanity’s seemingly endless tendency toward self-deception, observing that “human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.” This brand of skepticism was not nihilistic, but an appeal for humility in the face of so many unknown variables that invariably drive our world. T. S. Eliot would mirror similar sentiments in The Waste Land, drawing upon the biblical motif, saying: “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.” Institutions decay and collapse when they assume to have the fullness of knowledge in their actions and cease to carefully examine themselves. The limited saving grace for humanity is not in sermonizing or another reformation, but in the moral instrument of satire. By laughing at human absurdity, Erasmus hoped to recover that most ancient or civilizational virtue: humility.

　　Human beings are rarely corrupted by ignorance alone, but by pride masquerading as intellectual certainty.

　　With rare exception, modern political culture has largely lost the ability to laugh at itself. Every disagreement becomes apocalyptic. Every potential or encountered opponent is a monstrous enemy. Public discourse increasingly rewards outrage rather than cautious reflection and restraint. Yet Erasmus understood that societies incapable of irony and self-parody become dangerous. They are unable to address the fundamental absurdity that lurks in all human aspirations. Fanatics of all political varieties are almost always humorless. For Erasmus, psychological rigidity was a symptom of folly. Those who are most convinced of their own moral certitude were often the least capable of the craft of self-examination or irony. As Folly herself declares, “Mortals are so taken up with their own opinions that they mistake shadow for substance.” The ideologue cannot tolerate the slightest smell of moral ambiguity, because ambiguity threatens unassailable certainty. Erasmus’s humanism offers an alternative to this proposition: that intellectual seriousness must not overstep itself and must be tempered by modesty about our own human limitations.

　　This is perhaps the most practical lesson that In Praise of Folly offers our own divisive age. Erasmus reminds us that moral reform begins internally, not with denouncing enemies, but with recognizing our own susceptibility to error. Folly is a universal reality, and no faction possesses a monopoly on wisdom. Such an insight cuts against the grain of our contemporary culture and its overutilization of anathemas and moral projection. As Erasmus recognized: “self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.” This can be seen plainly as institutions and political movements are often sustained less by truth and more by collective moral vanity.

　　Equally striking is Erasmus’s critique of the intellectual vanity common to the scholars of his own era. The Renaissance scholar, brimming with humanist pride, mocked the contemporary theologians, who buried simple truths beneath oceans of technical jargon and philosophical hairsplitting. Simple theological questions, or even the looming question of church reform, were regularly blocked by the vast egoism of Renaissance academics. Today’s social equivalent may be the technocrat or the online expert whose fluency in arcane terms conceals a profound lack of personal wisdom. Erasmus openly mocks scholars of his own age who “speak with such authority that you would think they had descended fresh from heaven,” a tendency hardly unfamiliar in our own specialist- and expert-saturated age.

　　Importantly, Erasmus distinguishes knowledge from the virtue of prudence. A civilization may become highly educated while simultaneously losing its own sense of moral clarity or perennial philosophy. However, Erasmus was not fighting against the utility of education, nor was he an anti-intellectual. As a Renaissance humanist himself, he believed deeply in the utility of formal education, classical learning, and rhetorical adroitness. Yet, he also believed learning should cultivate a sense of charity and moderation rather than intellectual arrogance. For Erasmus, guarding against pride was part of the task of humanist education. His humanism aims at forming humane persons. In this way, Erasmus represents the forgotten ideal of the “educated man,” academically rigorous and spiritually humble.

　　Erasmus never imagined the digital epoch, yet he understood the permanent contours of our human nature better than most modern theorists. Five centuries after its composition, In Praise of Folly endures because it confronts a truth that every civilization finds deeply unsettling. Human beings are rarely corrupted by ignorance alone, but by pride masquerading as intellectual certainty. Erasmus recognized that civilizations often decay not from a lack of intelligence, but from hubris, an excess of intellectual certainty. Folly flourishes wherever humility disappears. Erasmus offers a remedy that is neither despairing nor an ideological panacea. He offers the proposition that the vast majority of human behavior is folly, not from any one person or group of people, but that most human endeavors are “chasing after the wind”. In an era saturated with cyclical outrage and relentless political absolutism, his satire remains strangely medicinal. To laugh at the array of human folly is not to abandon truth, but to recognize that no person or institution stands above moral scrutiny. Erasmus understood that societies survive not merely through the state of their technology or political power, but through the difficult virtue of recognizing their own limitations. That lesson may be more necessary now than at any point since the collapse of the late medieval world he himself witnessed.