Deep Thought: Let's Talk About Dummheit
Created | Updated Jul 6, 2024
Deep Thought: Let's Talk About Dummheit
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Dummheit ist ein gefährlicherer Feind des Guten als Bosheit.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian. He opposed Hitler. He was killed by the Nazis. The kinds of Christians you don't hear about on the news these days think he was supercool. When I was a student in Germany, we used to sing a song with lyrics he wrote. Bonhoeffer put his money where his mouth was, and his life on the line, and so I figure he's worth listening to when he says that 'stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than evil is.'
There's a lot to unpack here, starting with the word 'Dummheit'. I like it better than 'stupidity'. There's a reason for that.
My friend and mentor Miss Lindquist, who was born in 1888 and taught me German in the 1960s, said that she couldn't stand stupid people. I was shocked.
'But, Miss Lindquist,' I protested. 'People can't help it if they aren't clever or don't know things.'
That, she informed me, was ignorance. Ignorance, according to her, was not knowing things. Stupidity, she averred, was not wanting to know things. I allowed as how she had a good point.
Erich Kästner was a German writer and former teacher who used Dummheit in the sense of 'ignorance', as well. 'Lacht die Dummen nicht aus!' he wrote in an essay for schoolchildren. 'Don't laugh at the dumm!' He added, 'They aren't that way out of choice, and not for your amusement.'
Dietrich Bonhoeffer made it clear that he wasn't talking about ignorance. He was talking about Dummheit as a conscious choice. He said it was 'in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.' So a person could have five PhDs and still be dumm, in Bonhoeffer's book.
Bonhoeffer said that evil contained the seed of its own destruction – but stupidity was more dangerous. He also said it wasn't an inborn trait: people weren't born stupid. They were made stupid. And that most of the time, this pressure to make oneself stupid came from other people.
Ignorance can be fought with information and reason. Stupidity can't. Stupidity merely ignores any evidence that contradicts its pre-conceived notions. You don't have to go very far to find corroboration for Bonhoeffer's assertion: you're using the internet, aren't you? When Bonhoeffer wrote this, he was talking about fascism in the 1940s. When we read this, we're thinking about the turbulent state of our own time.
Bonhoeffer wrote that people couldn't be argued out of stupidity. He said they had to be liberated from it. He, of course, believed that the Holy Spirit could do that. Your personal thoughts on the matter may vary. I'm with Bonhoeffer, by the way: I think there's a voice we can choose to listen to. So did Socrates.
Bonhoeffer wrote:
Das Wort der Bibel, daß die Furcht Gottes der Anfang der Weisheit sei, sagt, daß die innere Befreiung des Menschen zum verantwortlichen Leben vor Gott die einzige wirkliche Überwindung der Dummheit ist.
Yeah, yeah, I know: what does that mean in plain English? I'll try: 'The word of the Bible, that the 'fear of God is the beginning of wisdom', means that the inner liberation of a human being to a responsible life before God is the only true way to overcome stupidity.'
Keeping in mind that Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant theologian, we might paraphrase his statement to say, without the religious connotations, 'The only way humans can be liberated from crowd-sourced stupidity is to learn to see themselves as individuals in the universe, responsible for their own actions.' I hope he wouldn't be too irritated by that way of putting it.
Bonhoeffer said that it was useless to argue with stupidity. When I was a gamemaster, we told outraged users to put stupid people on slash/ignore. I still think that's good advice. Talk to people who are still willing to discuss things without turning every conversation into a battle. Live your life with an open mind. Do your own thinking. Remember to be kind. Comfort yourself with Bonhoeffer's final thought: that most people can't be that stupid. That sooner or later, reason will prevail.
