The immorality of stupidity

Stupidity’s immoral?

Run that by me again?

Ever since my week-ago car accident that occured from my own stupidity, I’ve been pondering it. What it truly is, how and why it takes us over, individually and collectively.

First, a brief background about the accident. Engrossed in Bishop Barron’s wonderful phrase, egodrama:

“I’m late!”

“I’m not going to get there in time!”

“Me!” “Me!” “Me!”

WHAM! A truck I never saw plowed into me.

I knew better than to take the risk of blindly turning onto the road, but I did it anyway.

“Sin makes us supid,” so says my friend, Father Dan Crahen.

Precisely.

Stupid acts like mine, connote carelessness, thoughtlessness and lack of focus. But it becomes somethng else when it becomes the noun, stupidity. It describes a state of being. One that recalls experience with incompetent–aka stupid– bosses, physicians. and others immersed in a cloud of unreason.

Until now, I’d not considered stupidity-consistently stupid people, as immoral. Consider the folks who get a job or promotion because of their connections not competence: the Peter Principle. Or the person who never should have graduated. Most of us have likely experienced the damage one of these individuals can cause. Simply because they don’t know, don’t care or both. And yet they get rewarded.

In the searingly heart-wrenching and brilliant book, Killer Angels, union calvary officer Major-General John Buford, already badly wounded from a previous battle, awaits the arrival of the “Rebs” he knows will come to Gettsburg.

He had held good ground before and sent off appeals, and help never came. He was very low on faith. It was a kind of gray sickness; it weakened the hands. He stood up and walked to the stone fence. It wasn’t the dying. he has seen good men die all his life, and death was the luck of the chance, the price you eventually paid. What was worse was the stupidity. The appalling sick stupidity that was so bad you thought sometimes you would go suddenly, violently, completely insane just having to watch it. It was a deadly thing to be thinking on. Job to be done here. And all of it turns on faith.

Killer Angels

Alexandra Hudson’s piece,

When Does an Intellectual Failing Become a Moral One? appeared in my inbox the way Killer Angels jumped into my hands. Hudson’s title derives from, Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity. Although I’ve read more than a little about the man whom I consider a saint, Dietrich Bonheffer, I’d not realized his Letters from Prison. existed. That they do is something of a miracle. The letters were secretly spirited out of Tengel Prison thus making Bonhoeffer’s ruminations about Germany’s embrace of Hitler’s evil accessible.

Stupidity as vice.

Bonheffer contends that it wasn’t malice that caused the the leader and members of the German Lutheran Church to submit to Hitler’s demonic plans for Germany and the world, it was stupidity. And stupidity, declares Bonhoeffer, far more dangerous than mere malice.

“Reasoning is of no use, Bonhoeffer writes. “Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

The German martyr’s eighty-five-year-old description of 1940’s Germany evokes shudders of recognition from 21st century readers.

“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish 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.”

We Have Far More to Fear From Stupidity Than Evil

Worse, stupidity’s contagious. Why?

In the effort to fit in, or be liked, we allow fools to influence us. Stupidity seems to sweep through masses of people gobbling them up as it goes. As if there were a magnetic force drawing people in. We see it in mobs, any huge collection of people gathered together for a singular purpose. Today those gatherings occur virtually and privately on personal devices thus even more darkly troubling.

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly 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 an autonomous position.

Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

Stupidity isn’t new. Is it?

This past week, the liturgical church has been filled with the readings from Genesis. All the gifts given humanity by God. And then:

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals
that the LORD God had made.
The serpent asked the woman,
“Did God really tell you not to eat
from any of the trees in the garden?”
…..
Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
and they realized that they were naked;
so they sewed fig leaves together
and made loincloths for themselves
the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God
among the trees of the garden.

Genesis Chapter 3

What can we do?

In a remarkable interview with Rene Girard, Girard replied to that question with brilliance: increase our personal sanctity. Because on our own, all we can do is sin.

At an invitation from my online friend, Janet Klasson, I signed up to pray an assigned hour of the Passion Clock. I’d read Luisa Piccarreta’s Twenty-Four Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ before. But the wisdom of organizing a method where we pray one hour daily for seven days before moving on the next is inspired. Because after a couple of times praying that hour, we become familiar with it enough to recall it throughout our day. As is, of course, the point.

The twelfth hour is 4-5 AM. And the soldiers are mocking, insulting and torturing him. Luisa describes his beautiful eyes filled with spit, soldiers even forcing open Our Lord’s mouth to fill it with their spit. And Jesus’ “supernatural love and sweetness” that shines throughout.

Following the explicit and graphic narrative of each hour we pray-ers are asked how we handle situations in which we’re criticized unjustly. Or ridiculed. Or betrayed. Do we exhibit the constancy that Jesus did while enduring people spitting, stomping and brutalizing him?

Firmness is that virtue which makes us know whether God really reigns in us. If ours is true virtue,
we will be firm in trial, with a firmness which is not inconstant, but always equal to itself. The more
we become firm in good, in suffering, in working, the more we enlarge the field around us, in which
Jesus will expand His graces. Therefore, if we are inconstant, our field will be small, and Jesus will
have little or no space. But if we are firm and constant, as Jesus finds a very extensive field, He will
find in us His shelf and support, and the place in which to extend His graces.

The Twenty -Four Hours of the Passion