In this well-known acid-tongued quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that stupidity can be more dangerous than malice or evil. But scanning back over previous posts in this series, you might see that very smart people sometimes act in just the ways Bonhoeffer describes stupid. They close their minds; “reasons fall on deaf ears”; when challenged they get mean and attack; they engage in outright denial of known facts; they care more about winning than about the truth; and some evidently (in some respects) smart people lie shamelessly and obviously. 

The last three posts in this series on America’s Decline reviewed some of the problems that we have brought on ourselves—problems of growing inequality, worsening social and political division, and looming ecological crises.  They also emphasize that those problems don’t just happen; they are consequences of policy decisions and of the ideas underlying those decisions. Therefore, people who develop those bad ideas, who buy into them, and who act on or tolerate them—and that’s all of us in one way or another, some more and some less—are responsible for the damage done. It’s time to stop making excuses or blaming something or someone else. There is direct moral accountability involved here. 

This post will continue exploring these themes as lead-up to the final post, which looks more specifically at some individuals and institutions who most directly set us on the course leading to extreme inequality and the threat of ecological collapse. We want to see what ideas guided and motivated them. And in the end we want to know just who formulated these bad ideas, spread them, and sold us on them, and why.

Thinking is a Moral Act. 

But, you might ask, What does it matter? They’re only ideas. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has one answer, summed up in the essay “Thinking as a Moral Act” (Chapter 2, reprinted in his book Available Light). “Thought is conduct,” Geertz says, “and is to be morally judged as such.” 

“Thinking is a social act, and one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts.”

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz

How could this possibly not be so, especially for ideas that are developed as the basis for policy decisionmaking that affects people’s lives? 

Bonhoeffer counterpoises stupidity and malice. But Geertz’s observation suggests their convergence. It’s easy to get lost in all the complications, and of course we want to be fair and charitable. There is, however, also a time and place for calling a spade a spade. 

Einstein supposedly said that “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity.” But maybe it’s worse than crazy. Continuing to act on the basis of ideas that are widely known to be wrong and that produce bad results—especially when the underlying motive for doing so is greedy self-interest—is in our present circumstance both stupid and immoral. 

Different Kinds of Stupid. 

It isn’t nice to call people stupid or crazy—we all learned that on the grade-school playground, or should have done. Nor is it generally helpful to beat ourselves up by turning such disparaging terms on ourselves. But let’s put nice aside just this once, and look at ourselves in Bonhoeffer’s terms in which “stupid” is a more grown-up, complicated concept. 

If people with high IQs still act and think in ways Bonhoeffer labels “stupid,” there must be different kinds of stupidity just as there are different kinds of intelligence. Nominally smart people may give in to denial or delusion—I’d like to think not as often those with less smarts, but I’m not sure that’s the case.  We can all recall brilliant thinkers who have spent their lives defending ideas that they’ve become fixated on, refusing to see their limits or to be open to counter-arguments. What Bonhoeffer says about stupidity being dangerous perhaps especially applies when smart people are being stupid—when they make their own blinders and put them on themselves.

Such problems, as Geertz’s observations suggest, and as the rise of German Nazism illustrates, can affect not just individuals but a whole community, or even a nation.  When people are stressed, economically insecure, frightened, they are apt to act with less intelligence or care. 

Highly developed and advanced societies can act stupidly if they refuse to let go of inherited mistakes; or if they fall or are pushed under the spell of narrow thinking, ideological obsession, mistaken dogmatisms, or policy prescriptions rooted in fear, greed or prejudice with the one reinforcing the others. What might begin as honest mistakes become moral failures and a kind of stupidity when people continue to push them or cling to them after their errors are known and their harmful consequences have become obvious. 

Let’s Take the United States, For Example.

National character, just like the character of individuals, has many sides. Like any country, the United States has its failings, its ups-and-downs. Now we’ve hit a particularly rough patch in the road. It’s a good time for self-reflection, and maybe for taking on a little more humility. 

In that spirit, I’m being pretty critical in this series of posts because we’re facing hard realities that need a hard look. The shifting cross-currents of the tumultuous global economy, and the fallout from domestic economic policies that create gross inequality and squeeze the middle classes, make many people insecure; and insecurity readily turns to anger. Fear and anger become fertile ground for demagogues to exploit. They also dampen creativity, openness, and the willingness to think outside the box—all qualities we especially need now. 

Knowledge can be a potent antidote to fear and anger. Knowledge is empowering. This much should be obvious: The better people understand the combination of circumstances, consequences, historical currents, understandable errors, and bad ideas that put us on the path we’re on, the better able they are to chart more intelligent course corrections.

Then there is the question of values. In the end, people make decisions and act on the basis of the ideas and ideologies they hold, and the values they care about. Most people are basically good, and want to be good. Being aware of the moral dimensions of policy ideas and actions can only help people choose ideas and policies with better outcomes. 

And while taking hard look at the issues, it’s important to remember also that America has much to be proud of. Among other things, Americans can be extraordinarily generous, positive, and innovative. The United States, my native land, has its softer, gentler, compassionate and more sensitive sides. With a little care and tending, they will flower and prevail over the rapidly-sprouting weeds of conflict and division. 

Ideas and Politics. 

I mentioned above that countries can make mistakes, be led astray, just like individuals. Sometimes their best ideas become their worst errors when they get misused or mis-applied, or out-live their time. Let’s look a little more closely at some of the foundational ideas of U.S. politics, and where they come from. 

The United States is arguably the world’s most advanced scientific nation—or at least remains high on the growing list. A long time ago our nation’s founders inherited some mistaken ideas—the best ideas at the time, perhaps, but mistakes nonetheless, as later scientific advances and social consequences revealed. 

Most nations evolve into being. The United States was different. It was born in revolution and more or less consciously designed as a constitutional democracy. That’s a bit of a simplification, I know; but it remains true that a lot of conscious thought went into the United States Constitution and institutions of government.  What ideas did the authors of U.S. civil, political, and economic life have to draw on? Well, for one, at that time Newtonian physics had much prestige as the cutting edge of science. 

Our nation’s forefathers borrowed ideas from Newtonian physics—even more, they worked within the world-view it embodied—as they set up the mechanics of government and economy for the new Union they conceived. They strove for a balance of powers in government, and for an economy that would work as an autonomous system.  They also drew on vastly simplified notions of evolution driven by a crude “survival-of-the-fittest” model. The (limited) scientific understandings of their day became woven into the fabric of the everyday life of the new democracy. 

In many ways it worked well. In others, not so much. Subsequent science has greatly complicated or even outright refuted some the premises the Framers worked with.  New more sophisticated understandings of complex systems and how they work is now available. In light of those advances, we can see where some of the mistakes lie, and how they’re causing trouble today. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

What mistaken ideas? Well, l et’s look a couple. For one, take a look at the one-time supposedly scientific, crudely Darwinian notion that other (that is, non-White) races are biologically inferior. It’s mostly forgotten now, but a lot of effort went into trying to prove that theory; and, we aren’t entirely over it yet. 

For another, consider human nature as defined in today’s still-dominant mainstream economic theory. This theory portrays human beings in all our complexity as the vastly simplified Economic Man. We have made significant progress on redressing some of the harms of the first; virtually none at all on the second. Let’s take a closer look at these two bad ideas. 

Two Bad Ideas

Scientific Racism. When American ideals of freedom and equality conflicted with the economic benefits of slavery, “the answer was simple,” observes one historian: define those with dark skin as inferior, limiting the definitions of “the people” and “all men” to refer only to Whites.  In this way the Framers contrived a constitution that “guaranteed white men the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution while preserving a thriving economy based on racial oppression.” Many disagreed with this solution on moral grounds, of course; but without a definitive counter-argument it was still possible to justify a slave-based economy with theories of race-based biological inferiority.

Later scientific advances—in particular, the discovery of culture bolstered by parallel progress in genetics and archaeology—provide an alternative explanation for human differences. Thus science moves on, shunting scientific racism into the historical dustbin of failed theories. Progress, to be sure; but the job isn’t done. 

When such ideas become entrenched, as racism did in the institution of slavery, they are devilishly hard to root out. People’s livelihoods, way of life, and even cultural identity can be at stake. In that case, it took a bloody civil war. But war never really settles issues of ideas and ideology. Neither does science, for that matter. At least not right away, and for some never. Some people will always believe what they want to believe, science be damned. 

Despite the Civil War and later scientific advances, people still fight today over those conflicting ideas and principles from our early national history revolving around race. On a drive through portions of the rural South a few years ago, we saw Confederate flags proudly flying on high flagpoles people had put up in their yards. These families are still fighting the Civil War. The fights over race in the U.S. today are vicious still, but largely more covert. Coded messages rather than bullets and bayonets serve as weapons; and the fights, thankfully, now range over the battlegrounds of politics and culture rather than bloodied fields—as I’ll discuss further in a moment. 

Economic Man. Another severely mistaken scientific idea from the same era, and first cousin to scientific racism, is the notion that all people are individuals first and foremost, governed when all’s said and done by the same basic human nature. 

Unlike racism, this notion lumps everyone together instead of dividing them into unequal categories. Based on analogies inspired by the universal laws of early physics, it became the model for today’s mainstream economic theory. As Raworth puts it, with a touch of humour (p. 111), Newton’s physics revolutionized science, and its prestige later “gave rise to “physics envy, misplaced metaphors, and painfully narrow thinking in economics.” This mistaken way of thinking about human nature and the economy became, and remains, even more entrenched at even deeper levels of our culture than racism. 

Economics defined in those terms—that economic outlook—shaped the emerging weave of our cultural lives. Over time it came to dominate almost every sphere from the family to education to health care, and more. Again unlike racism, it doesn’t have a widely-known name or label. Many scholars call it “classical liberalism,” but that’s confusing to the rest of us on a number of counts. It has been revived as “neoliberalism.” That term also is not widely understood—as I discussed in an earlier post. Let’s just follow Raworth for now, and call it the belief in economic man.

But science is progressive. That’s its nature. Science moves on, even as these early mistaken ideas become entrenched in the fabric of Western culture and economy. Later science definitively refutes the Myth of Economic Man that still lies at the foundation of economic theory. It belongs with racism in the trashcan of socially pernicious failed theories. Here I’ll quote Raworth again:

“Human nature,” she writes (pp. 22-23), “is far richer than this, as early sketches of our new self-portrait reveal: we are social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world. What’s more, it is indeed possible to nurture human nature in ways that give us a far greater chance of…” living rich, full, sustainable lives. 

Kate Raworth (2017, p.27)

Given the ongoing influence of economic man in our lives and institutions, it’s important to realize just how solidly science has knocked him out of the ring. But he keeps sneaking back in anyway—a zombie idea, a vampire of the mind. 

That’s a puzzle in itself. Why? Why won’t these negative ideas of human nature as naturally individualistic, greedy, calculating, and competitive just die the final death they deserve? 

Self-Fulfilling Ideas: Mythology Becomes Reality

The answer, like so much else in human life, is complicated. The gist of it is thatideas,when people believethem and act on the basis of these beliefs, can become self-fulfilling. We literally turn ourselves into the beings we believe that we are—whether or not these ideas are right to begin with or not. 

If we structure our lives and institutions around an economy based on the principles embodied in the figure of economic man, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves forced by those institutions to live according to the dictates of that image—that economy. We become economic man: individualistic, competitive, accumulative, self-interested and largely indifferent to others’ suffering caused by the gross inequities that our economy inevitably produces. The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. 

But, you might ask, if that is so, then how can we say that the theory is wrong? Didn’t I just say that we become what the theory says we are? It’s a bit of a paradox, a tautology—but that’s the nature of culture. If we believe it and act on it, the theory makes itself right to some degree. Well, you might persist: How then canit be wrong? 

The answer is that it’s wrong because economic man is not who we really are, and squeezing ourselves into that image harms and limits us. The theory posits that economic man is who we naturally are. There is no point, then, in trying to change, because it’s just human nature.  It is a whole other ball game if who we are is not defined by a fixed human nature, but rather by cultures that we ourselves create. This new understanding makes us responsible for who we are in ways that older theories of a given, fixed human nature do not. The advance of knowledge brings moral accountability more front-and-center. 

That’s the first part of the story. The second part is that once the system built around economic man is in place, those who benefit from it are those who most completely buy into its premises and live it. They become deeply invested in it. They wantto preserve it as it is—not just to protect their outsized wealth and incomes, but also their very selves. 

This is a more complicated picture that I’m painting here. But we are complicated beings; and with recent advances in social and cultural theory we now have more complicated understandings of who and what we are. 

Who are we, really, then? The very taproot of our human nature is sociability. Sociability rather than self-interested individualism isn’t just an outcome of civilization having tamed our original brute nature, as some people might still assume. As anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari explains in his bestselling book Sapiens (2016), ever since our earliest ancestors diverged from the Great Apes, walked upright, and developed larger brains, human biology and evolution “favoured those [early humans] capable of forming strong social ties” (p. 10). Sociability not only defines us as genus Homo, but also our genius.  We are the most social of animals. (Sociability, in fact, was integral to the very earliest evolution of life—but that’s another story for a different time.)

“Sorry, beg your pardon,” says Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago, and another one of my favorite anthropologists, “Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.” “Perverse and mistaken” are the operative words here. 

The problem isn’t just that Economic Man is a myth. Myth is the foundation for human society. “Any large-scale human cooperation,” Harari goes on to say (p.27), “whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” The real problem with Economic Manis that he’s a dangerous myth, a painfully limiting myth.

Before moving on, I want to say a further word regarding Harari’s observation that human culture and society are rooted in myth. I find that characterization both right and wrong, both illuminating and misleading. It is true that human society is built on stories—that the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live. But some stories are true, or at least more true than others. Calling allstories “myths” fails to make this distinction; it implies they all are equally ungrounded in reality. 

Let’s go back to Economic Man—who clearly is an entirely mythical being. Until, that is, he becomes incarnated in a society built on the notions he represents. But as far as representing basic human nature is concerned, Economic Man, as we saw above, is an entirely fictional character. 

One historian calls ideas like liberal individualism or Economic Man, “technical fables.” Another anthropologist refers to this idea as “a kind of normative charter” for liberal political, social, and economic life.  These are different ways of saying that we shouldn’t take those representations of human nature literally any more. We once believed them to be literally true; now we know better.  But at the same time, they continue to shore up our way of life. 

So, think about what these and many other social scientists and philosophers are saying: We know that such notions are false, they say; but we hang on to them anyway because they give order to our lives. That might make sense if we didn’t know any better—and, if the order they provide is working for us, is the best we can do. .

But what does recognizing the mythical basis of such ideas mean for us? Do we really want how we live to be propped up by zombie ideas when better fully alive ideas are available? More and more people are asking that very question in one way or another. For an excellent, clearly laid out overview of better ideas and how to act on them, see Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, that I mentioned above. 

So, Just Who Is Responsible

It’s not easy to change. That’s true for individuals; and its doubly or triply true for a powerful and in many ways successful nation like the United States. On the other hand, however, the need for some basic changes in how we live and govern ourselves is evident; and more and more people see this, feel it, and desperately or angrily want positive change—for some, any change, it seems. What’s in our way, then? Who is responsible? 

In a way, of course, we’re all responsible. But that isn’t much of an answer. It’s true—almost by definition. Also, if everyone is responsible, then no one is. We need to get more specific. 

The final post in this series tackles that question more directly, asking who, in particular, is in our way. Who most actively and effectively works agains the kinds of changes we so critically need to make?