“I’m Not With Stupid Anymore” April 15, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray
Dietrich Bonhoeffer “On Stupidity” – Letters and Papers from Prison
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil, it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries with itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplishes anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
I am sure that there are translation issues involved in just how course this Bonhoeffer letter from prison seems to be and yet, his passion is understandable. As fascism rose in Germany, Germany . . . the country with the highest level of education, the most technologically advanced nation in the world . . . allowed fascism to creep into their politics until it drove them to become history’s most heinous regime, leaving Caligula and Genghis Khan in the dust.
And it is not that it was difficult to see what was happening. It may have evolved over time and yet information was clearly available. A woman I knew who was a teenager during the rise of Hitler’s power, said, “I never thought about where the Jews were being taken. I never saw any of the atrocities. What I saw were young German soldiers marching powerfully in their uniforms making us all proud to be German.”
So, when Bonhoeffer rages against stupidity, what he is saying is basically what the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, said in his definition of evil. Evil, Peck says, is willful ignorance. It is not a crime to not be very smart. It doesn’t make you a bad person to be bad in the skills necessary for higher education. What is bad is to know better and to refuse to acknowledge facts . . . to willfully hold onto ignorance, especially in a time of great moral crisis.
What Bonhoeffer calls “stupidity” might also be thought of as complacency, or a kind of self-serving acquiescence. Look at the public hypocrisy on display just this week: We engaged in a very risky military action in Syria that runs the risk of accidentally attacking Russian soldiers and aircraft that could literally light the fuse of a world war, and we did it because of moral outrage about Assad’s use of chemical weapons on, what our president called, “beautiful little babies.” When, folks, just a year ago Trump refused to allow any refugees from Syria into our country because those “beautiful little babies,” might secretly be terrorists.
There are two issues: the first is that the primary cost in Flint would be labor and not corporate profit. Pipes don’t cost that much so there is not much money to be made there. There was probably about $200 million in profit in those tomahawk missiles. I hate to be this cold about it but if I am wrong I sure would like to have someone convince me that I am wrong.
Secondly, there is the inescapable “wag the dog” factor when our President is in so much political and legal trouble that a military action can relieve him of some embarrassing press. Besides, how else can you teach the Syrian government to stop bombing the Syrian people but by bombing the Syrian people ourselves? If that logic appeals to you, then you, I am afraid, are part of the problem in this equation.
So, I get Bonhoeffer’s almost defeated sense that you just can’t argue with stupid. Stupid doesn’t respond to information, facts, rational argument, and, for me, as a pastor, what is more maddening is that stupid appears to be impervious to basic human compassion.
And here is the challenge that I believe faces our time so much more than what Bonhoeffer faced in the 1940’s. We have come to a time when there is a public insistence that all views be given equal value.
When I was a child, we were inclined to believe that doctors had almost magical insight and genius. We often mistook their horrible handwriting for Latin, as if Latin, itself, held some kind of incantational power like all of the Harry Potter spells being dramatically pronounced in Latin because that’s where magic lives.
So, in our age, we know that medical knowledge is as full of holes as Swiss cheese and some doctors are smarter than others and that Dr. House is just a fictional character. But, we have arrived at a time where the educated opinion of a trained physician is laid side by side with the opinion of a heavily pierced and tattooed massage therapist and people choose between them with the rational abandon they use in picking a chocolate out of a Whitman’s sampler.
Now, I know that you don’t come here for medical advice, but I am going to tell you something that you should pay attention to: There is a new vaccine for shingles that is nearly twice as effective as the old vaccine and you can get it, even if you had the old one. And for most insured adults, the cost is covered by your insurance. So, if you have ever known anyone who had the Shingles you know that you don’t want it, so you should get the vaccine.
Now, in a conversation with friends about this vaccine, a friend of mine who is deeply invested in astrology, tarot cards, and all of the magical stuff they sell in tattoo parlors, looked at me and said, “I don’t believe in vaccines.” “I don’t believe in vaccines,” as if there was no scientific data available, as if there was no research, no information, no facts to consider . . . just, “I don’t believe in vaccines.” That is the trap of willful ignorance that led us to the election of Trump.
When an uninformed opinion demands to stand on equal footing with an informed opinion, then education, science, diplomacy, government, and philosophy are useless.
More than 20 years ago, Carl Sagan rather prophetically wrote:
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
Let me give you a very current example:
Long was disturbed by the apparent fact that Face Book had blocked a lot of Diamond and Silk’s content because it was deemed to be “dangerous.” It was, in fact, “dangerously stupid.” The only thing that dampened the humiliation of having our congressmember looking so ignorant on TV was the fact that CSPAN insisted upon identifying him as a Republican congressmember from Illinois.
Illinois has never really done anything to me, but I believe that I can confidently say that they can have him. If there is a member of Congress who is more stupid than Billy Long, then I do not want to know who it is.
Now, again, it is not a crime to have a deficit of intelligence, so I don’t want to just throw shade on Billy Long. He was elected, and so, if our Congress member is historically stupid, it really isn’t on him, is it?
I know that it is rude to call anyone stupid and anyone who is a decent parent tries hard to teach our children not to call anyone such a derogatory name. Even when they are, even when it is manifestly obvious, such as in the case of Billy Long. The lack of security on Face Book may be one of the single factors that made it possible for Russia to sufficiently influence the 2016 election so that the most dangerous head of state in the 21stcentury was elected.
Suffice it to say, Zuckerberg has a lot of explaining to do that has nothing to do with Diamond and Silk.
I apologize for sounding so snarky myself this morning, but this just seems like a “gloves off” time in American history. And I know that every evening when I am on tour in England the first two weeks of May that I am going to questioned about what happened to America and there are no explanations that will seem to allow America to save face.
I’m not always a fan of Albright’s because she is more than a little hawkish for my tastes but having grown up in Czechoslovakia during the war years, when she talks about fascism, she is speaking with a level of authority we should pay attention to. She says in the opening chapter of this book: If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.
Nearer the end of the book, Alright concludes: Donald Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government. In the process, he has systematically degraded political discourse in the United States, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessors, threatened to “lock up” political rivals, referred to mainstream journalists as “the enemy of the American people,” spread falsehoods about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and the countries from which they come, and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions.
She goes on, but I trust that you have caught the flavor of it. The allure of fascism is an attraction to powerful leadership, even if it comes in the form of a dictator.
It is an attraction to nationalism, even if that means an irrational attack on other races, religions, and nations and a wholesale demonizing of a free press or any form of opposition whether it comes from another political party, or even the church. What I find to be very odd in our current climate is that fascism usually appeals to a nation in crisis. When Trump began spewing fascist ideology, we were in a long and sustained economic recovery, we were making real progress in overcoming racism, limits to access to healthcare and we had managed to go 15 years without a major terrorist incident. What drove voters to accept a fascist political message?
And here is the deeper irony for me. For most of 2016, Trump was almost a comedic candidate that no one could take seriously. But Russian hackers and bots were assigned to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media to sway the election. Obama, Clinton, Comey, heck, even Donald Trump, didn’t believe that the American people would be dumb enough and racist enough, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic enough, to elect Trump. But Obama, Clinton, and Comey overestimated the voting public and Putin got it right.
Folks, Russia didn’t hack into our voting machines to change the numbers. They didn’t hack into our news stations to change our media dialogue. They simply sent racist, islamaphobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic messages to Americans who already believed that crap and who enthusiastically accepted even crazier crap. They didn’t hack our computers, they just appealed to our racism and fear and, sadly, it worked.
So, yeah, we can be mad at Russia for messing with our election but, seriously guys, this is really on us. And I expect that some of our listeners and probably some of you here in the room with me are not too happy with me for being so unfiltered today and I apologize for possibly offending your sensibilities but I beg you to consider that if the clergy hadn’t been so tepid for the last 20 years, our population might not be so vulnerable to such a below the belt moral punch from Vladimir Putin.
Bonhoeffer’s peers thought that he went too far and as it turns out, he didn’t go far enough. The same might be said in every moment of real crisis from Churchill to Gandhi to King but let’s not be passive generation. I know that you may get tired of thinking about these things, and I am honestly tired of talking about them . . . I have much more important things to think about, write about, and talk about than Donald Trump but we cannot be guilty of acquiescence just because we are embarrassed and bored by our Clementine Caligula.
Even though the corporate media has started to parrot the fascist lingo, calling hard news and real facts, fake news, and trying to lull us to sleep as our democracy is taken from us, we must not be gullible, we must not be complacent, and we sure must not be compliant. That would be dangerous to democracy.
