DIETRICH BONHOEFFER'S thoughts on the particular kind of stupidity he identified as one of the greatest dangers from where I left of yesterday:
And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. 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.
Just last week in talking in real life with someone about the terrible persistence of Trumpism and Republican-fascism, they reflexively brought up religion as one of the primary motivations of that, in the common way of college-credentialed, received ahistorical wisdom. I pointed out that the majority of Americans don't go to church services or listen to them on TV, most Americans, even those who profess a religious belief do not do much in the way of practicing it and those who do might spend one or two hours at it once a week as opposed to how much media they consume. Entertainment TV, mostly, "news" etc. TV and other media, the social-disease spreading media, time-waste media, is what most American minds most of the time they aren't at work are focused on. That is an enormous "upsurge of power in the public sphere" starting with the advent of radio and the increased popularity of movies - the Nazis among others immediately understood that they could harness that "upsurge of power" and produced and mandated the use of cheap radios in Germany.
When they invaded Poland, as a prelude to their planned genocide of the Polish People, they instituted a policy of degenerate and frivolous entertainment replacing anything informative and important for those they intended to kill. Other gangster run regimes have done the same.
The influence of heretical "white evangelical" "Christianity" and "traditional Catholicism" (neither of which have much use for the Gospel of Jesus) is certainly not to be discounted among those in thrall to Republican-fascism, especially those of the self-discrediting Trump "Christians" but even there the primary venue of its consumption is probably the media, "Christian" broadcasters, EWTN and other Catholic identified hate media are real and a major force among a margin of people useful to American fascists. The Catholic liturgy as a sort of spectacle conducted in an uncomprehended language, perhaps some following along with a libretto, features heavily in that part of it.*
When Christianity is intent on fulfilling The Law and the Gospel, as in the Civil Rights Movement against American apartheid that brought the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, other laws being destroyed by America's indigenous fascism which runs the Republican Party now, it shows that religion can have a powerful effect but that effect can be destroyed by the power of the media which has been the foremost vehicle of the resurgence and backlash of white supremacy, starting almost as soon as those laws started to take effect.
If you wonder why I spend so much time pointing this out it is because the "freedom of the press" read as a "right" to lie is a major opportunity for those who are lying us into fascism using the methods and tools practiced, honed, and perfected by that most purposefully deceptive of all media forms, advertising.
Continuing on with the observation that every strong upsurge in power in the public sphere brings along with it an upsurge in that kind of obstinate refusal to accept the truth (stupidity),
It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. 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 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.
You may recognize the passage I took out of this to start with here because it contains a spot-on, quite full description of the Republican-fascist anti-vaxx-anti-mask Covid 19 denier, only one species of the denial of reality that was ginned up to be a campaign strategy of Donald Trump, a slew of Republican-fascist governors, Congressmen and women, Senators, etc.
And those very people duped by that campaign as seen all day every day on FOX, spread by the kind of EWTN members of the Catholic Conference of Bishops, by "Darwinian economists" and those who promoted the Darwinist concept of "herd immunity" were the ones who have paid the highest price in deaths, catestrophic hospitalizations, infecting loved ones, and the lingering effects of "long Covid." Yet they in their numbers are still in denial, even some of those who almost died, who lost loved ones who died on the mountain of Republican-fascist Covid denialism. I will return to the point that, as the advertising industry, its related field of audience grabbing TV and movie production succeed by appealing to our worst habits and inclinations, they get people below the level of information to stoke their greed and envy, their pleasure seeking, immediate gratification, their fear of the other, their hatred and their rejection of responsibility. The extent to which the religious imagery of the devil is a personification of our worst inclinations, Bonhoeffer was absolutely correct to attribute it to the diabolical, that which is opposed absolutely to morality and the author of morality, God.
The secular answer to that in "more education" is certainly bound to be impotent as, in fact, it has been. Many of the worst promoters of this evil have had full college educations, some of them in highly challenging fields, the law, medicine, etc. It plays on the weaknesses of the secular world view that would be disinclined to bring up that what this is, at its foundation, is a problem of the rejection of moral responsibility. The common received reluctance, even queasiness at bringing up anything that so directly impinges on a serious and responsible issue of religion in the modern, secular age is a tool that these gangsters have but one they might not yet fully realize is there for their use. If any of the MSNBC TV liberal ghetto started addressing this in the terms that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. did they would probably find their contracts cancelled as they bled viewership. The great force behind the success in getting the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts passed, the People of the Black Churches, other religious groups and figures who joined in that massive struggle were taken away as religion became uncool and an object of mockery among, mostly, white secular liberals - though others wanting to mix with them certainly went along with it. At the same time the corporate media defined Christianity as first biblical fundamentalism and, more recently "evangelical Christianity" restricting that term to only those who were or were the close allies of white biblical fundamentalism and reactionary traditional Catholicism. Thus further stigmatizing the thing that has been one of the most effective forces against the kind of stupidity and the power in the public sphere that uses such people.
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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.
It strikes me that this could describe what became of popular entertainment starting in the 1970s, the nostalgia for the most meat-headed memory of the 1950s, the rise in Monty Pythonesque racial caricature, morally nihilistic comedy that was more mean boy and gal derision than funny. That led directly to the "anti-political correctness" or, more honestly racist, sexist "comedy" of the likes of Andrew Dice Clay - though that had already been pioneered by the never was funny "comedy" of Lenny Bruce. But I'd have to think that out more. Perhaps what he describes is the use of something like the intellect completely lacking in anything to enjoin it to responsibility. Freedom from religion.
* The degeneracy of much 19th century Catholic liturgical music, especially in Italy, with Latin texts that an overwhelming majority of the audience didn't understand cannot be emphasized enough. The reaction against that in the late 19th and early 20th century is not understandable unless you look at what it was reacting against. I think, oddly enough, the process of reforming the Catholic liturgy that resulted in the abandonment of Latin for the vernacular languages may have gotten its first change in that direction by, among others, the arch conservative, anti-modernist Pius X. I was rather shocked to find out that, before I was born, the somewhat less but still very conservative Pius XII started it by having the Scripture readings done to the congregation in the vernacular as the priest whispered the same texts in Latin. Something which I never noticed being done, it was done so subtly, from before the change to the vernacular. Now, alas, I don't have anyone left to ask about the period from before that change was made what they recall.
