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[Essay] the Third Force, by Garret Keizer : Harper's Magazine

[Essay] the Third Force, by Garret Keizer : Harper’s Magazine

Section titled “[Essay] the Third Force, by Garret Keizer : Harper’s Magazine”

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  • In 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Nazis, a French clergyman named André Trocmé stepped into the open air with a revised view of the human condition. “Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil,” writes one of his chroniclers. “From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over this world: stupidity.”
  • Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me. Socrates held that human beings do not knowingly act against their best interests; perhaps his wisdom made it hard for him to imagine a human being who could say, “To hell with my best interests, and screw Socrates too.” A willful loss of reality, however death-defying it may appear, is never far from a wish for death.
  • I know of no more definitive expression of stupidity than proudly professing a total inability to understand an opponent’s position on a controversial issue. That a fetus is an integral part of a woman’s body and thus under her sovereign moral control, that a fetus is a form of human life entitled to certain protections, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get rid of guns, that in a world where maniacs go around shooting schoolchildren it’s a good idea to get a gun—“I simply can’t understand how anyone can think like that.” Really? Can’t agree with it, sure. Can’t accept its basic premises, fine. But can’t understand it? And yet I catch myself saying this all the time, and what is more, I think I might be telling the truth. Because after a while the refusal to understand becomes the inability to understand. Chronic stupidity is not the result of injury or genetics; it’s a learned behavior. We acquire it like a microwave or a suntan.
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  • It’s possible that some individuals embrace stupidity because they’re afraid of being alone. Idiocy loves company more than misery does. When I taught school, I often remarked on the touching inclusiveness of the druggie segment of the student population. Looks, grades, and athletic prowess were of no account; the only requirement was that you do dope. There is an even more welcoming social circle where the only requirement is that you be a dope. Who among us hasn’t basked for an hour or two in the self-congratulatory stupor of the like-minded? In contrast, thoughtfulness can be a lonely choice, especially when accompanied by courage.
  • If COVID-19 has highlighted anything as much as some people’s feckless disregard for scientific evidence and the health of their neighbors, it’s the utter and often poignant inability of many people to endure solitude—or even, in some cases, to avoid a large crowd. If they can’t be in a packed bar, gym, or banquet hall, they’d just as soon be dead.
  • Bonhoeffer says, We note … that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. He goes on to say that although a stupid person is usually stubborn, his stubbornness shouldn’t be mistaken for independence. “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.”
  • Or if we imagine ourselves above self-pity, we might at least pity those who seek to transcend an enforced stupidity by embracing it. Oppressed groups have been known to make a tactic out of adopting the names and stereotypes by which they’ve been denigrated, so that, for example, a certain feminist cachet can attach itself to a woman who calls herself a bitch, a slut, a dyke, and so on. Call me a name, and I’ll shut you up by owning it. Treat me like I’m stupid, and I’ll show you stupidity like you wouldn’t believe. Any thought for my self-interest becomes the sacrifice I make to restore my self-respect.
  • The contemporary philosopher Avital Ronell writes of the “temptation … to wage war on stupidity as if it were a vanquishable object.” She quotes Flaubert: “Stupidity is something unshakable. Nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it”—a cautionary note to those who would wage war on the MAGA mindset. Bonhoeffer is perhaps the most helpful here when he writes that “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.” He adds that “in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.” Many people, including most religious people, would reverse the sequence, but here is one of the religious heroes of the past century putting external liberation first.
  • The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, much less knowledge or information. The opposite of stupidity is faith. Not necessarily religious faith, which in the common parlance of “belief” is not even faith in the ancient Hebraic sense. In Hebrew, faith (emunah) is something you live, often against stupefying odds. At first glance, faith might look like stupidity, because it too seeks a kind of transcendence, but through engaging with reality rather than denying it. “If I wish to preserve myself in faith,” Kierkegaard writes, I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.