What Does the Christian Do With "Stupid"?
Does ridicule have a redemptive side, and can we take responsibility for it?
In the peacebuilding space, where I work (and which I try to represent consistently), we’re always reminding ourselves to be careful about our language. Even in our most frustrating moments, we remind each other never to shame, dehumanize, belittle. Research shows shame makes things worse. It provokes angry, even violent responses from those defensive of their own identities as “heroes,” “leaders” or “good guys.” Shame is ultimately ineffective and even counterproductive in building peace.
This insight, though, can contribute to perceptions of peacebuilders as kind of toothlessly neutral, as among those ineffective moderates who cringe to call out stupidity when they see it. The reticence to call someone a “deplorable” can be interpreted the same as if one had actually said “very fine people on both sides.”
Adding to the complication is the demonstrated effectiveness of shame and ridicule within social movements. Strategic humiliation was an enormous part of the Otpor! movement’s success in Serbia. In Uganda, poet Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was jailed for calling a member of the ruling family a “plump moustached pachydermatous inebriated curmudgeon.”
“Colonizers used politeness to control and subdue us,” explains poet Stella Nyanzi. “This is why radical rudeness emerged. It was in defiance of this passively courteous subjugation.”
Most striking perhaps, at least in terms of recent global optics, are stories of Ukrainian women scolding young Russian soldiers near the beginning of the war. Some of these altercations have supposedly led to Russian soldiers surrendering.
Christian peacebuilders, too, find Biblical precedent for using ridicule as an onramp to regeneration and redemption. And we can feel especially ambivalent about this after seeing the role shame has played shaping both our religious culture and our current politics.
And yet, even if we’re committed to not adding fuel to the fire, I think many of us feel a deep desire to call out certain things as stupid. To not let power and injustice escape ridicule. In fact, it feels like there’s something irreducibly Christian about the impulse itself; just ask Catholic writer Tony Ginochio, who has some pretty exasperated words for what he sees as a disastrously incurious and out-of-touch clerisy. As JPM Walsh says of those Powers and Principalities subjected to the rule of the cross, “They will be discredited. Confounded, they will find themselves a laughingstock. They will have to accept their proper place in the scheme of things, and acknowledge [they are] not the whole story.” There’s a part of me that really wants to participate in that unfolding, and I’m not convinced it isn’t God coming alive in me.
So then, quite bluntly: “What is the Christian to do with stupid?”
Let me suss out what I think is at stake here. We’ll start with defining “stupid.” It can denote the obvious: a lack of intelligence or mental capacity. An inability to reason or learn. It can also name the moral exasperation we feel in a situation resulting from someone else’s lack of judgment: “This [turn of events] is so stupid.”
That second bit–the moral bit–is especially interesting, and gets at one of the major sources of polarization in America right now: the perception (or the perception of the perception, really) of stupidity rather than evil across the aisle. Yet though these gripes are framed as distinct, “stupid” still takes on a certain moral connotation for many. Many conservatives think educated liberals look down on them for a kind of engrained slow-wittedness that inevitably goes hand-in-hand with bigotry. Meanwhile, they also find liberals plenty “stupid” for shutting themselves up in their ivory towers with others who think exactly like they do while they all power trip together.
This moral weight of stupidity actually implies, I think, a kind of positive content in the background every time we call something “stupid.” We are naming how we believe things ought to be, and that with a distinct moral clarity. Something is “stupid” because it (to our eyes, anyway) very obviously departs from better courses of action. So we’re not only claiming things could be better than, that bad things are not inevitable, but also that things would be better if certain people didn’t act so stupid. After all, saying “Don’t be stupid” implies that the other person is and can be intelligent. And this might even suggest that things aren’t actually very far away from the ideal. If stupidity is the only thing separating us from a better outcome, then that means—according to the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan—that we’re often only one insight, one “I get it” moment, away from initiating a process of real change.
This is good news if we consider “stupid people” as not living up to their full potential as the image of God–something they’re fully capable of. If we really think most people are just a few insights away from change–that today’s bigot is tomorrow’s ally–shouldn’t we be treating their ignorance as an earnest problem with potentially tremendous payoff if we rectify it?
Well yes, Lonergan says, but this is also where “sin” kicks in and makes things especially frustrating. “Just as insight can be desired,” he writes, “so it can be unwanted. Besides the love of light, there can be a love of darkness.” Lonergan charmingly (I think so, at least) treats sin and stupidity as synonymous. The human condition we call “sin” manifests materially as the tendency to choose against our best interest (which is knowing the world rightly). We repress what is inconvenient to the smooth and closed horizon we prefer to truth. We “brush aside” discomfiting insights and their attendant questions with “an emotional reaction of distaste, pride, dread, horror, revulsion.” You can thus add a third synonym to sin and stupidity: bias.
Because the biased or obstinate person does not want to receive insights we believe obvious and urgent, moral questions become especially exasperating. It is not only that they lack information which might expand their horizon, it’s that they refuse this information. We all suffer from a deep-down tendency to know additional information (a new concept, another’s experience, a risk of empathy) might change how we think, and so we avoid that knowledge. It is a means of avoiding responsibility for what’s real, and the consequences of this are often quite violent–everything from the “banal” evil of looking the other way when someone is suffering, to the more serious sins of lying, resentment, and group-based hatred. Stupidity has terrible consequences.
Heading off these consequences ought to be the goal of ridicule. We can call things stupid while intending reform, reconciliation, and peace. We call out sin for what it is, but our urgency is rooted in a respect for human capacity and the conviction that each of us can, in fact, know better, to the glory of God. Telling someone they “ought to know better” can be powerful and convicting, if–and this is a big if–we love them enough to mean it. To believe in their capacities as a person and grieve their falling short. To then invest in what it might take to help this person be more attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible. That is what the Christian does with stupid.
The problem is, we usually don’t love the other enough to mean it redemptively when we call them “stupid.” We are biased and obstinate, too. Only rarely do we intend to call the other forth from the tomb of their obtuseness, asking them to rise to the occasion of their own humanity. More often we’re doing the colloquial thing: suggesting they’re incapable of the reasoning that would lead them to better decisions.
This is the trap of “groaning,” and it holds a mirror up to us more than to anything else. We allow the epithet of “stupidity” to express despair and contempt. We suggest there is no saving these people from their abysmal idiocy; best to cull them completely. In fact, we don’t want them to do better. We would be, like Jonah, quite disappointed if such people actually made strides towards authenticity and opened up to the insights they’ve been repressing! But consider how, when we default to the explanation that our enemies are irreparably stupid, we also lose moral ground: after all, if someone is literally too dumb to know better, how are we supposed to hold them responsible for their actions? If we want to hold people morally responsible for their poor judgments, we have to consider them capable of doing better. And for most people, this will require treating them, patiently and consistently, as though they also want to do better.
Now, obviously, this won’t happen for everyone. Keeping human dignity in view does not magically solve the problem of obstinacy, the “love of darkness.” Removing irresponsible people from posts where they can make decisions is a very good idea. But again, a lot comes down to the spirit of such an ouster. As we mentioned in the last post, a la Rene Girard, there can be a sometimes frustrating symmetry between what is done out of love and what is done out of hate.
When a church deposes a pastor, for example, are they really believing in that leader’s capacity to repent and be restored to the community? Do they believe a grave betrayal has occurred, not only of the congregation’s trust, but of the minister’s own capacity as an image-bearer, which is also their hope? Or are they using them as a scapegoat, a “fix-all” for more deeply rooted problems that the community is unwilling to address? A band aid of innocence for a deeper wound?
There’s much more to say here about the relationship between stupidity, irresponsibility, and evil. We’ll talk more about that in coming weeks. Suffice it to say for now that I believe the Christian has a unique responsibility to know what they mean by words like “stupid,” in the greater context of human dignity, and to ridicule power and bigotry towards redemptive rather than sacrificial ends.
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While "peacebuilding" is generally a good thing, I'm not sure that it's always the best frame in dealing with our highly conflicted environment in which a large swath of people deal in bad faith. I prefer compassion for those who are afflicted, particularly those afflicted by the powerful as a starting point. Someone pointed me to a (buddhist derived) three-fold character of compassion--1) tender 2) mischievous 3) fierce. 1 being what we usually think of-comforting people in pain, etc, 2) is most often a way to point out the way someone's behavior/speech contradicts their good values--i.e. gentle ribbing, or ironic observation. This is most often in relatively friendly contexts--though I sometimes use it about our wider church, even if some of the targets don't like me. 3) is fierce on behalf of someone else who is suffering and might not be felt by the target of the fierceness as compassionate at all.
I point this out, because sometimes shaming is what's called for--provided that the target is capable of feeling shame and responding to it. And certainly stupidity needs to be called out--stupidty is not a cognitive lack, but a choice to leave out important, wise considerations, for selfish reasons. The world is filled with plenty of stupidity, so we have to choose our battles--what's important enough and what can my speaking have a positive influence about, at least in some small measure?
Thing is, I think of compassion as not being about feeling (I avoid using the word "love" most of the time because it's too easily associated with the personal flow of desire, pleasure, etc). If I'm doing something serious, it's important to see whose benefit it's for--and if it's mostly just me and my party I shouldn't do something that will cause pain, upset or humiliation. And even if I do something for clear reasons, I have to be particularly aware of the danger of sanctimony--my reading of Jesus is that he confronted sanctimony as much as he did demons. The people who defeat peacebuilding more than anyone else, are those who are sanctimonious about their own actions--or against those of others.