Combating Stupidity

I don’t like shaking hands with these disgusting people.

— Donald Trump

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis for his participation in Operation Valkyrie, understood stupidity and the danger it poses to freedom.

In his essay "On Stupidity" (unpublished in his lifetime), Bonhoeffer offered his conclusions after a decade of witnessing the sorts of Germans who rallied behind der Führer.

They were all adamant.

Stupidity is dangerous because it is adamant, he said; unassailably so.

"Against stupidity we are defenseless: neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything," Bonhoeffer said. 

"Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed; and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as incidental. 

"In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous."

Stupidity isn't related to brains, education or economic class, according to Bonhoeffer. Stupidity is a voluntary defect. People "allow this to happen to them," he wrote.

And stupidity isn't a solitary pursuit. It flourishes within parties. Stupidity is a disease of the psyche wrought by historical forces that propel people, willingly, to surrender their autonomy to a leader and his wims. 

"Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere infects a large part of humankind with stupidity," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"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 a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell."

Therein lies the danger in stupidity. 

"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," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Diabolical leaders manipulate the mindless for their own ends, "expecting more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Wise and responsible people can only respond to such manipulation through political acts, Bonhoeffer believed; god-fearing "acts of liberation" designed to unchain the stupid by undermining their leaders. 

We should forget trying to convince a stupid person he's being stupid: combating stupidity head on is "senseless." 

"Internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it," Bonhoeffer wrote.

That's why he joined the plot to remove Adolph Hitler—and why he was hanged.

Quite a Week for Wokeism

Virginians decided this month that wokeism is so offensive they want a governor who will eradicate it from schools.

Of course, these are citizens of the same state that hanged the rebel Nat Turner, then cut off his head, disemboweled him, flayed him, and sold souvenir purses made of his skin.

They don't cotton to upstarts.

Wokeism is certainly all about being an upstart.

Upstart is a 16th-century word denoting "one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, importance, or rank; a parvenu." It was borrowed from the Old Norse upp—meaning "to a higher place"—and the German stürzen—meaning "to hurl."

Wokeism is about being hurled to a higher place.

This has been quite a week for wokeism.

On Tuesday, during a guided tour of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, I was informed by the docent that the home was "built on the backs of five slaves," an absurd claim given the owner was an extraordinarily enterprising merchant seaman. It was the seaman's wealth that built the lavish house—and that allowed him to own five slaves. The slaves were the seaman's house servants. He didn't involve slaves in his business.

On Wednesday, The Women’s March formally apologized for a fundraising email it sent donors. "We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today," the organizers said. "$14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving." The apology comes so close to mockery, it defies explanation.

And today, the Tate Britain had to defend itself against critics who accused it of "cancelling Hogarth" and promoting "wokeish drivel." The museum's new exhibition, Hogarth and Europe, features wall labels which insist that Hogarth's art was only made possible by the slave trade. Hogarth in fact earned most of his keep selling political cartoons. He disdained slavery.

I'm all for hurling POC to higher places; but wokeism sometimes sounds just silly.

It's silly to attribute everything to slave labor, just as it would be silly to attribute everything to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the domestication of horses, or the heroism of St. Paddy.

Shit's more complex than that.

Consider, for example, the steps our Founding Fathers took to end the slave trade:

• Northern states abolished slavery in the 18th century. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777; Pennsylvania, in 1780; New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in 1783; Connecticut and Rhode Island, in 1784. By 1860, free states outnumbered slave states.

• Washington enacted the world's first national anti-slavery law. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 prohibited the outfitting of ships for slave transit in any US port.

• Adams strengthened the law. By signing the Slave Trade Act of 1800, Adams prohibited the transit of slaves by US flagships and US citizens aboard foreign flag ships.

• Jefferson stopped the importation of slaves. By signing the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1808, Jefferson ended the trade altogether.

• Monroe criminalized the slave trade. By declaring the trans-Atlantic slave trade an act of piracy, Monroe sought to punish illegal slave-trafficking.

• Tyler pledged to use the Navy to stop slave traders. By signing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, Tyler agreed to use US Navy ships to interdict slave traffickers.

These are only a few of the "inconvenient truths" wokeism can't abide.

There are a whole lot more.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Glen Williams for citing, via email, the Founding Fathers' anti-slavery legislation.

Mary Had a Little Turkey

If I may talk turkey, let's give credit where credit is due. 

The author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was also the author of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Hale was an early feminist and the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine in America before the Civil War.

The war, when it came, incensed Hale, who took it upon herself to write President Lincoln a letter in September 1862 stating that only he had the power to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and “permanently an American custom and institution.”

Heeding Mrs. Hale, five days later Lincoln ordered that, henceforth, the fourth Thursday of November would be marked by the national observation of Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day had long obsessed Hale, who grew up observing it in New Hampshire. 

For more than a decade, she had written yearly editorials in Godey's about the holiday, imploring government officials to fix it forever on the country's calendar.

She believed the national holiday would smooth the bitter rift between the North and South.

It took a bloody war to make Hale's dream come true.

Thanksgiving has fallen ever since on the fourth Thursday of November, except in the years 1939 and '40, when, as a means of combating the Depression, FDR moved it up a week, to extend the Christmas-shopping period.

He caved to criticism two years later, and moved the holiday back to the fourth Thursday of November.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was based on actual events? As a young woman, Sarah Hale taught elementary school near her home in New Hampshire. A student named Mary brought her pet lamb to school one day, inspiring Hale to write and publish the poem. Forty-six years later, a Mary Elizabeth Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, emerged to claim she was the Mary of the poem, and that a local boy had written it. Sawyer was quickly proven a fraud, but not until Sterling had erected a statue of a lamb in the town center.

A Bathtub Full of Baloney

A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence.

— David Hume

"Minds do not create truth or falsehood," philosopher Bertrand Russell said. "They create beliefs."

The same might be said of social media platforms like TikTok.

A new belief making the rounds thanks to TikTok—one particularly appealing to anti-vaxxers—holds that, if you take a "detox bath" in borax after you're inoculated, you will remove all the radiation and government-implanted nanotechnologies the shot delivers.

Now, before you cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone, take a moment to consider that millions of your fellow Americans accept (or are disposed to accept) this baloney as fact.

The baloney-maker is the well-known crackpot Dr. Carrie Madej, who a year ago was called out by Reuters for erroneously claiming that an organism in the Covid vaccine was pointing its tenacles at her. (She was observing house dust on her dirty microscope.)

Where wackos like Madej once had to stand on a box in the park to reach an audience, TikTok gives her a pulpit that faces millions of viewers, many as gullible as two-year-olds.

As a self-described "child of God and believer in Jesus Christ," Madjef ought to remove herself from TikTok and, like her rabbi, find a mount in the desert somewhere from which to deliver her sermon.

A desert on Mars would be perfect. (I hear the radiation problem there is awful.) 

At least one platform provider, Twitter, has kicked Madej off this week for praising borax baths. Hallelujah!

But while TikTok removed Madej’s video last month, the platform permits it to be viewed through a sharing feature called "Duet."

Madej's baloney can also be consumed on Facebook and YouTube.

So where's the issue with baloney? It's a free country. Can't I believe anything I want? 

The issue is fraud.

Madej is defrauding her audience, either knowingly—and therefore recklessly—misrepresenting the facts; or unreasonably—and therefore negligently—misrepresenting the facts.

Either way, it's fraud, and makes Madej a fraudster. 

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.