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Bonhoeffer on Stupidity and the Public Sphere
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who became a leading member of an anti-Nazi conspiracy, wrote the following while he was in prison awaiting execution:
Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Part of this rise in stupidity is reflected in the use of weird, special words, ways of speaking…the ‘catchwords’ to which Bonhoeffer referred. In recent decades in America, this pattern started out as clearly silly, but not necessarily actually evil. For instance, years ago, a blogger noted:
I run two lunchtime literature clubs at my school. The fourth graders just finished reading A Little Princess. During our discussions, I encourage delving into the text and discussing it on its own terms. I am not a big fan of “accountable talk,” “making predictions,” “making connections,” and so forth when they assume precedence over the subject matter itself.
One student brought up the part where Sara spends her money on hot buns for a beggar girl. “She made a self-to-self connection,” the student said. I felt sorry that students are learning such ghastly terminology, however well meant. Why are students not encouraged to say, “She understood how the girl felt” or “She felt compassion for the girl”?
The requirement for students to use terminology like this, IMO, has nothing to do with teaching the enjoyment of literature and little to do with teaching the analysis of literature. Rather, the lesson being taught is one of submission to a specified way of speaking.
Today we see much more sinister forcing of phenomena and events into verbal categories…’Colonialism’ and ‘Whiteness’ being two examples. The Hamas sympathizers currently active on America’s campuses frequently exhibit such verbal behavior, with the term ‘Occupier,’ for instance, being applied to eight-year-old hostages.
The French writer Andre Maurois suggested that people who are Intelligent, but not at all Creative, tend to latch on to intellectual systems created by others and to hold to them fiercely. Intelligent but not at all Creative applies to a lot of American academics, journalists, and government officials, at least using a certain limited definition of ‘Intelligent.’
An earlier version of this post appeared at Chicago Boyz in 2018. Bonhoeffer’s thoughts seem especially relevant in the West today.
Published in General
Euphemism must be used to disguise evil and obfuscation used to put noble thoughts out of mind.
See Orwell: Politics and the English Language.
And Lewis. Uncle Screwtape talking about academics has some connections.
Great post
Speaking of catchwords and weird ways of speaking…Exeter University in the UK is offering a new masters degree in witchcraft, magic, and occult science. The new post-graduate program will be housed within the university’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. The placement will help students understand “the Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage back where it belongs” with “decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism, and anti-racism…at the core” of the program, according to its website.
A cross-cultural course in magical thinking could actually be quite interesting, if done well. But it sounds like they will just force it into the Procrustean Bed of ‘progressive’ thinking with its repetitive incantation of certain words, sort of like a form of Tourette’s Syndrome.
I am concerned about those who are intelligent, creative, and evil.
In various private sector roles, I had the, er, “privilege,” of working with a handful of Harvard grads. I can’t believe they represented all Harvard grads — at least, I hope not. But each fit perfectly into the “Intelligent but not at all Creative” mold.
(As I phrased it at the time, “they can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.”)
When faced with a unique challenge, they’d immediately suggest some tidy, black-box solution they learned in some unrelated classroom case study years ago. “We need to do Step 1, then Step 2, all the way to Step 38,” not realizing it didn’t deal with this particular circumstance.
I’d suggest it wouldn’t work, explain why, and the magnetic tape in their brains would whirr until it found a different (similarly unrelated) set of procedures. It drove me ’round the bend.
When a lowly state-U grad like me offered a few options, they would ask where I got it from. Dude, I just thought it up; I can’t reference a Harvard Business Review article or McKinsey study.
They’d spent their lives studying to the test. Each problem had a single “correct” answer they would memorize to get an A. That works for classroom apple-polishers, but not in real life.
By themselves, they are a tiny, powerless set.
The Austrian philosopher F. A. Hayek called this set the “intellectuals” and characterized them (much more helpfully than he named them in English at least) as “the second-hand dealers in ideas”.
That’s good! I hadn’t heard that before.
It just takes a few.
They often run in packs.
Indeed. I’ve noticed that recent MBAs are often more interesting in fitting a business situation into some predefined paradigm (say, the BCG matrix) than in understanding the specifics of the situation, and Computer Science grads particularly want to use the methodologies and tools they have learned, more than they want to solve the business problem in hand. This syndrome does erode somewhat with years of out-of-school experience, I think.
Moreso for the computer science types and others involved with real-world engineering, than for the MBAs and PhDs.
Yes, but even one intelligent, creative, evil person, like a psychopath without any conscience or fear, can do a LOT of evil. Intelligent and creative often goes with charming and charismatic.
It just takes a few infectious cells to start the disease process. The next phase has many more agents: the second-hand dealers, the uncurious intelligent. The violence begins in the third stage when the order of magnitude of the number of the now-stupid and -armed agents jumps again.
WSJ article today on the role of the term ‘settler colonialism’ in the campus attacks on Israel. Link.
More on “decolonization”, at Spiked.
That is a helpful overview.
As I was reading the article Prolegomena to Any Future Indigenous History of the Ancient World I was thinking to myself, “Well, yes, those things happen in history. It’s complicated. But why is it necessary to explain the obvious in this way?”
The Spiked article explains why.