Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. 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.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
"To live the responsible life," the idea of being responsible, in today's secularized, entertainment addled America seems almost a quaint notion. Everything around us is an inducement to not be responsible. When I read that one of the first things I thought of was the principled, scrupulous refusal of that empty granite suit, Robert Mueller, to break protocol and speak voluntarily and fully to those who were investigating the total corruption of our elections by those backing and around Donald Trump, certainly a pose of living "the responsible life" but one based on professional and conventional expediency and, so, devoid of really acting responsibly. He was joined in that by a host of other well-spoken of figures, many of them lawyers obligated to uphold secular, civil law and even those who had taken an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution." Such is the secular notion of the responsible life.
The heroic witness and action and martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer give him credibility today, even with many who would reject the central aspect of all of that and his motivation his religion, his Christianity. I have seen bits and snips of this passage used by secularists which never really gets to the substance of what he was saying nor for the hope he held out for it. Being a political blogger who agrees with him, I will begin with the end of the passage.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance.
That is real reason to hope but not one that Americans should find reassurance and repose in. The fact is that the American political context, as we have seen time and time again, the Constitutional system is set up to empower a minority over even the will of a large majority, such as on issues of gun control, environmental protection, the right of women to full ownership and control of their bodies, etc.
The minority have consistently thwarted that will of the majority on the basis of appeals to a margin of those who can be duped and suckered and corrupted. In the Governor's race in Virginia decided last night, it was shown how bald-faced lies in order to take advantage of vestigial racism in a large percentage of otherwise not stupid voters and, if not racism a ginned up sense of rightness or wrongness on issues they don't really know anything about "Critical Race Theory" can have that effect.
On top of that there is the inherent anti-democratic structure and makeup of the Senate which was always set up so a minority of people centered in small population states could thwart the will and even the wisdom of even large majorities of The People as a whole. It is far easier to win over small populations in artificially created populations, in states, so as to have that effect than to thwart the will of the electorate as a whole. Add in such corruptions as the Senate filibuster and the court packing of the Republican-fascists in the past fifty years and that great hope can be definitively thwarted.
We are not headed into a period in which the anti-democratic American "democracy" is being dictated to by a minority of bad will above the better will of the majority, we are directly in that now, especially with the capture of the Supreme Court and federal courts by Republican-fascists and the billionaires and millionaires who have paid for that court capture.
The excuse originally given for the anti-democratic features of the Constitution, that it would prevent the majority from oppressing minorities was a lie from the start. The reason for it was to protect the minority of those who kept an oppressed minority in slavery and their allies among the financier class who saddled poor whites and would soon reduce so many of them to wage slavery. And now we see, over and over again, how it prevents the majority of The People of good will from making that good will, equality, economic justice, environmental protection the law of the land. We have seen, from the inception of the country, how the Senate and, on a growing number of disastrous occasions, the Electoral College have thwarted the majority on behalf of those of bad will and selfish-self-interest.
I'm sorry to take away the consolation of that but the fact is the idolized American Constitution is set up to disempower the majority on behalf of a malignant, self-interested minority and whatever dupes they can gull to go along with what will be in the billionaires and millionaires interests and not those for The People as a whole. Racism is the primary but far from only tool of deception and corruption that works for them over and over again.
I have mentioned before how I went from someone who was entirely reluctant to discuss matters of religion in politics to becoming convinced that not only was that reticence unnecessary, it was one of the foremost reasons that the American left has been worse than a near total flop, it has been a left that has stupidly given up the ground to its opponents, turning in the very years that the sacrifice of the religious left, more than any others, got us the laws overturning American apartheid and started dismantling other forms of oppression and discrimination. I read the same text from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to its end and I agree with what he said is the only hope, though not believing that that hope is only present in Christianity or Judaism or Islam but whenever people of good will accept the same teachings present in it that are the preconditions of the modern conception of democracy, what is far more reliably contained in the economic and social justice, the personal obligations that are contained in the Hebrew word Mishpat, what Bonhoeffer was referring to in its most basic and, in an American context, potent form.
I would caution one thing about that, as I recently pointed out the great Jewish theologian and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said that even the Torah was a human expression of inspired revelation and that it was a commentary, a midrash on the original content of that inspiration. As such even that authoritative text of that inspiration is susceptible to human misunderstanding, distortion and misrepresentation. I am no more a Torah "literalist" or "originalist" than I would be of the text of the Constitution and the idolized Bill of Rights. I certainly don't think that the Holiness code for the priestly class should be held over us, today, not any more than the elaborate instructions for the outfitting of the priests and Temple, in all of its unreadable detail, should govern worship today.
Anyone who tells you that their articulation of Scripture is not fallible is a liar and, as the "literalists," "originalists," laying down the meaning of the American Constitution, they are up to no good. Those slogans sound right but they are an ad campaign for evil just as the "parental rights" spoken on TV by a Republican-fascist activist "mom" threw the election to the Republican-fascist in Virginia last night.
The Scripture is not an iron bound code of civil law, used as such it has the opposite of intended effects. But, its basic substance which is shared by some other religions, ignored will produce the impotence of the American left in its periods of post Civil Rights Movement secularism. There was never a good reason for that. I say that as an LGBTQ man who fully understands the complexities and perils of saying what I just did. None of this is easy but I agree with Bonhoeffer,
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.
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