Bonhoeffer on Stupidity
southsidemessenger.com
southsidemessenger.com
However, none of the comments so far have really grasped his point, which is that stupidity is a group phenomenon. Maybe a modern equivalent would be "tribe." Of course you can't convince someone of the other tribe to come over and join yours on any one particular issue; that would be betrayal of everything they think they stand for.
So logic is pointless. That representative of the other tribe cannot think and form his or her own opinion because that would mean expulsion from their tribe.
Kay : A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
I think CGP grey summarized the pattern nicely, and I quote: (timestamped)[0]
"The trick is to keep your identity separate from your opinions - they are objects in a box you carry with you and should be easily replaceable if it turns out they're no good.
If you think that the opinions in the box are who you are then you'll cling to them despite any evidence to the contrary.
Bottom line: If you want to always be right, you need to always be prepared to change your mind"
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlsU_YT9n_g&t=72s
I would also add my personal take that you should also presuppose that the person you're talking/listening to will have that attitude. Most people don't, but by merely starting from that point, conversation can have a positive turn when you get a glimpse of why they decided to put that opinion in to their mind-box.
Brecht wrote "Wer a sagt, der muß nicht b sagen. Er kann auch erkennen, daß a falsch war": he who says A, doesn't have to say B. He can also realize that A was wrong.
https://beruhmte-zitate.de/zitate/126572-bertolt-brecht-wer-...
"Everyone is dumb...myself included" at least gives me room to change my mind, and an impetus to try and find things to change my mind.
Although I don't think it is possible to do it perfectly, but you can fix some things this way.
Any other techniques for dealing with this?
To get a better measurement of my own intelligence I think about my “dumb friend”, and then try to realize that that’s probably actually about how smart I am.
We're actually making it required reading at my workplace.
I had this in my "eventually" pile (worthwhile but not immediately compelling), until I read this review by Scott Alexander: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-...
I have my own guess to its meaning, but I hesitate to say it does/doesn't match his definition without seeing some exposition on it.
In any case, I did study German in college, but I'm far from being able to judge what word is accurate. If the word was "Dummheit" that translates literally as "dumb head" but that doesn't mean a German would understand it that way.
I would suggest that perhaps you are limiting your scope of possible "we" (21st century human) thought states. The passage seems to me perfectly clear. For reference, the full quote is:
> "The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity."
He's discussing one way out of the trap of conforming to group/tribal beliefs. If you put your fear of God (in other words, some power higher than, and distinctly external to, any social group) you begin to liberate yourself from caring too much about what other people think.
If you believe that God demands that you act as morally (for some definition/code) and as responsibly as possible, and you place that demand/requirement higher than any other motivating feeling, you will ask about any belief or course of action "Is this Right?" (ie. Does this align with God's command), and consider that question more deeply than the creeds or slogans of your fellow mortals.
Note that he's not saying that the above state of mind is easy, it's merely something just strive for. Many devout religious people still try to the best of their ability to work towards that exact state.
Personally I imperfectly strive to think this way, and I imagine at least hundreds of millions of others do as well.
Of course, he was a minister, so he'd spent his life thinking about that.
This is well said. I believe it was the theologian Stanley Hauerwas who said in the 70s that the decline of religion in America would inevitably lead to the rise of political tribalism - seems prescient.
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." David Foster Wallace
Based upon my understanding of him, his allegiance to Jesus Christ is what motivated his actions that resulted in his death at the hands of the Nazis.
edit: typo
David Bowie.
If logical thinking is, as you say, imperfect, is it possible that your own conclusion that no perfect things exist is itself an imperfect conclusion? If you use this word perfect, you at least have the Idea of Perfect, even if no perfect things exist. This kind of funny talk I'm using about Ideas of perfect things goes back 2400 years to Plato and his Theory of Forms[1]. According to the philosopher-logician A. N. Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition
is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Of course, I wouldn't take David Foster Wallace (or anyone who killed himself, actually) as an authority on anything.
Prescient indeed, and to me, disturbing.
[1]: https://stanleyhauerwas.org/the-importance-of-being-catholic...
edit: typo
Also cf. Cipolla:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
https://bpa.st/5DJQ is the version of the excerpt of the letter i'm familiar with.
Stupidity <——> Silliness
…Dummheit leans slightly more towards silliness than pure stupidity does in English. I think Dummheit can be both an adjective and a noun, right? The latter, “eine Dummheit”, sounds more like a silly mistake to me (like “I did a stupid” in internet-speak).
A word like “nonsense” might be a good parallel? In English that word can cover serious, trivial, and silly cases.
If you use it as a noun, referring to an individual act, it is used to refer to a mistake. But even then, not a silly one. It refers to a lapse in judgment, to a lack of proper reasoning.
If it doesn't refer to an individual act, but to a trait, it's meant as an incapability to reason properly, often painfully so. It's used as a derogative, not to mark a silly mistake.
The most famous quote about Dummheit makes fairly clear it's not just meant as silliness. Schiller's "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens" (Even the gods struggle in vain against stupidity) clearly marks it as something both detrimental and incorrigible.
That's really the core distinction - Dummheit as referring to an individual act vs. as a trait. This goes for both the adjective ("dumm") and the trait.
It is an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that individual mistakes happen and are excusable, but constant failure is a negative mark.
Bonhoeffer very clearly refers to the latter, but moves it from an individual failing to a societal one.
We see this a lot today. Although it's nothing new, social media and the internet has made it easier for people to find those lies, and find others to help reinforce the lies in each other's minds.
>It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
Pretty radical. I'm still digesting. On the one hand, I do think that people, free in the external and internal sense tend to make better decisions than otherwise. But on the other hand I feel there is a missing necessary condition here. But I'm not sure what it is
It's curious how these both name a phenomenon with words that seem off-target, "stupidity" or "nationalism"; they seem to mean something like reducing yourself to a soldier for an egregore. Anyone have a better word for the general pattern?
Orwell acknowledges we all have these tendencies but focuses on the people he sees as too far gone (I have no idea about all those 1940s folks).
Tribal is my best guess at his meaning, but ingroup is related, or perhaps partisanship when applied to American politics. Nationalism feels incorrect, especially when he chooses examples of beliefs that are against their own nation (skip to the heading “negative nationalism”), or examples that are not much to do with nationality (political Catholicism, Antisemitism, Pacifism).
Another theme is blind loyalty (authority figures) versus freethinking. As a geek I try to avoid succumbing to geek groupthink, although HN doesn’t always help that goal.
And as such he is making exactly the same mistake, because he is assuming that his God is a higher power, when in fact his God is defined by his community.
Where did he learn what it means to live "The responsible life before God"? From the community he grew up in of course. (My assumption is that God did not appear and teach him in person.)
When stripped of the appeal to the authority of God, his argument becomes "My community values independent thought over group conformity."
I totally agree with him. I just don't find it a solid argument.
And why? He has some interesting points about unreasonableness as a social (rather than intellectual) phenomenon.
This is not to say Bonhoeffer was a fool nor to completely disregard his words, but to derive essentially that" all humans are stupid in groups " because you're living through the rise of Nazism is one frame, and is not necessarily self-evidently valid. Until culture became the cesspool of the mid-10s, we had a lot of good analytical evidence for Wisdom of the Crowds, I. E. Wikipedia, PageRank, etc.
Do you agree?
> Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.
> The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
This could be why profoundly accomplished people sometimes become stupid. Their accomplishment convinces them that they are intellectually superior, at which point they proceed to stop thinking critically.
self-worship.
An atheistic wording could come from a moral perspective or appealing to virtuous characteristic.
A more scientific/ modern observation based re-wording of that is just the dunning kruger effect. (specifically the middle plateau of it)
That question seriously troubled me for some time. Ethics cannot be deduced from logic and aesthetics. To give an example, why exactly is rape wrong? Logically, evolutionary science lets us conclude that it increases individual fitness by increasing mating opportunities and group fitness by spreading alleles that are good at reproducing themselves. Judging by the popularity of the subject in fine art, aesthetics can't condemn it either. So what makes it wrong? Is it anything more than a bald assertion? On what basis and by whose authority? Is ethics merely the science of discerning whatever it is that the strongest secular power one is subject to will permit? I find that proposition philosophically unsatisfying.
Meanwhile, while there is plenty of room for elaboration, a theist can rest on the moral foundation that Mankind was created with inherent dignity in the image of the Creator and thus rape, murder, theft, and various other offenses against that dignity are objectively immoral, regardless of what whoever holds the local monopoly on violence thinks. Additionally, to aid those who may not be capable of drawing those inferences, the sacred scriptures literally spell out the most obvious dos and don'ts.
Don’t just tell us there’s evidence, share it please. This is a site for satisfying intellectual curiosity.
> it improves in-group trust and collaboration
Merely improving in-group trust and collaboration doesn’t meet any kind of acceptable moral bar. Viking raiders had high in-group trust and collaborated extremely well, while raping and pillaging to their hearts’ content. Unless you accept raiding as moral, you’ll have to do better.
> Experiments also show that even 2 year old humans and a number of animal species have clear moral thinking.
This is a risible claim to anyone who has any significant experience with two year olds. It also contradicts your first sentence.
Edit: Three replies to a single comment inside half an hour conclusively indicates emotional rather than rational posting, especially since not a single one of my queries was responded to. One would think after all these years I'd be desensitized, but I never fail to be a little bit disappointed when I encounter someone who is incapable of dialectic, and, to make it worse, covers for it with puerile rhetoric. On the plus side, this does neatly illustrate the point of the submission.
Says who? Backed by what empirically true evidence? The Vikings had a strong moral code. That’s why they worked so efficiently as a group. They believe in justice and feared their gods. While raping and pillaging.
Rape is wrong, because it induces bodily and emotional harm. You can deduce your whole ethics and morals from the 'reduce the suffering you cause' view. You don't need religion for that.
Just because you personally think harming other persons is bad isn’t sufficient. What gives you the authority to impose that value on others?
What is insufficient about it?
That involuntary harm to one may occasionally benefit the many? Even if so can the aggressor and wider society know that ahead of time? And what about individual's right to freedom from harm?
> What gives you the authority to impose that value on others?
Society has to negotiate values together. The rule to avoid harming others is the least imposing value of all.
After 30y of "living by faith" I'm no longer a fan of trusting in authorities just because their rules are old or their existence is unfalsifiable.
Your opinion isn’t a valid ethical premise. It has no basis beyond your whims. Someone else might believe that it’s good and how would you refute them without claiming that your opinion is somehow more authoritative?
> Even if so can the aggressor and wider society know that ahead of time?
Obviously, in general, no. You can’t know that shooting a random person in cold blood wouldn’t prevent some greater evil. You can’t know that the child of that rape won’t cure cancer. The limitations of human reasoning are one of the reasons I’m convinced a correct ethics must have a superhuman author.
> The rule to avoid harming others is the least imposing value of all.
Once again this is begging the question. You’re trying to slip in the premise that minimal imposition is moral without any basis.
> After 30y of "living by faith" I'm no longer a fan of trusting in authorities just because their rules are old or their existence is unfalsifiable.
This betrays philosophical immaturity, which is of course fine. Most religious organizations do a very poor job with that aspect of formation, likely because those teaching are themselves philosophically immature. But this discussion isn’t about religion, faith, or your subjective experiences, it’s about whether the normative science of ethics can have any nontrivial conclusions without an objective foundation. If your anti-theism clouds your reasoning, feel free to instead pretend that we live in an advanced simulation and its authors defined human life as having inherent dignity. In that scenario ethics has a firm foundation. Now imagine the same scenario but without such a definition.
Then there are no valid ethical premises, because all value propositions necessarily either are directly or rest upon subjective preference.
You haven't shown this, so you're just sneaking in the premise that ethics has no objective foundation, which is the very question under consideration. I could just as easily baldly assert "all value propositions necessarily either are directly or rest upon objective foundations," but I'm not because it would be philosophically uninteresting.
I accept that there are no valid ethical premises is a valid conclusion from the absence of an objective ethical authority. I can only abductively conclude the existence of such an authority because it appears to me that ethics is not in fact a degenerate science that can produce any result whatsoever.
What is a more objective foundation than independently verified, experimental evidence?
> The limitations of human reasoning are one of the reasons I’m convinced a correct ethics must have a superhuman author.
So the apparent presence of this limitation is evidence of a higher power? How can you be sure that what you consider 'correct' ethics is objectively good?
This sounds like the classic is-ought problem. Experiment can, up to epistemological and ontological limits, only tell us about what is. It cannot tell us about what ought to be. If it appears to you that it can then you’re implicitly slipping in an additional ethical premise.
> So the apparent presence of this limitation is evidence of a higher power? How can you be sure that what you consider 'correct' ethics is objectively good?
I can’t. That’s one of the limitations of abductive reasoning. Unlike deduction it cannot reach absolutely certain conclusions. And if I could this entire thread would be moot. As for correct ethics, I accept Peirce’s view that ethics, like logic, is a normative science. Just as logic is defined to be the normative science of what is true or false, ethics is defined to be the normative science of what is good or bad. Hence my question about whether or not that science is trivial and admits whatever conclusions anyone says it does, or not.
Also are you arguing that the fact that people harmed others has happened that somehow means a world where this happened less often or not at all is a worse one? With that line of argument you are excusing any crime at all that ever happened, because by vrtue of the butterfly effect we have to assume every action ever taken created the world we live in and is somehow sacred that way.
So the first question is, do you live in such a universe? Is He there, or not? Not "would you prefer Him to exist, or not?" Not "Does your culture say He exists?" But does He actually exist? Is He really there?
If He exists, this is a very different universe than if He doesn't. And it would be wisdom to live in a manner that fits the universe you are in...
If one cannot falsify a god's existence then can it be proven to exist?
He calls out stupid people for being merely vessels for ideologies. Then immediately proceeds to declare - with effortless stupidity - that god is the source of liberation from stupidity.
It's peak irony. And it effortlessly describes the real state of the world; we are all bound by the ideas that flow through us. There is no escape into critical reasoning or any other ideology, precisely because these are all ideologies. They are merely information structures flowing through the network. You are always going to be 'stupid' by his definition unless you personally verify all the information you receive and conduct well designed experiments that you personally see the results of. Otherwise you are choosing a side and trusting one cluster of information structures over another. The world is a hall of mirrors - get used to it and design your world view to accept this state of affairs.
Bonhoeffer did, in fact, reject the poplar ideas that "flowed though" his community. His sin was was rejecting the Nazi attempt to co-opt Christianity via the German Christian movement. His "confessing church" was one of the very very few organized responses to Hitler-ism in Germany.
Bonhoeffer's essay is worthwhile, but it's also true that his closing paragraphs provide a flawless example of what the previous ones warned about.
Or, maybe, only a powerful belief in something can provide the strength to actively resist the encroaching darkness.
And it works both ways: if you have faith in your own purpose while your adversaries remain disorganized and irresolute, you have a hell of an advantage regardless of whether your cause is just.
His understanding of god is very different from yours.
He seems to understand god internally, within himself, not as an external force beyond (which seems closer to your own undesrtanding of this old, complex, topic).