We live in a stupid age. I mean that in the sense of the word given by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for whom “stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.” Stupidity, for Bonhoeffer, has nothing to do with intellectual ability and everything to do with the stupefying effects of power on a populace. To be stupid, he wrote, is to be so cowed by “the overwhelming impact of rising power” that one is unable to take “an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.” Thinking requires taking some kind of inner distance from whatever one is doing in order to critically reflect on the world—as the phrase goes, we stop and think. Authoritarian violence makes us stupid because it demands quick obedience to constantly-shifting rules, preventing one from ever stopping to think about those rules. It’s easier (and safer) to check out and go with the crowd.
The crowning stupidity of our age (at the time of writing) is the current war with Iran. No one prosecuting it seems able to or interested in bringing it into the realm of reason and justification. The two closest things to reasons we’ve been given are opening the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war began) and getting assurances that Iran would not build a nuclear weapon (which we had until Trump tore up the agreement in his first term; on top of that Iran’s supreme leader had maintained a fatwa against nuclear weapons right up until we killed him). The sole aim of this war appears to be making things as they were the day before the war began—a kind of anti-reason cementing irrationality at the heart of the enterprise. This war is truly stupid in Bonhoeffer’s sociological sense: a cascade of violence hostile to thought itself.
If the war’s aims are stupid, its execution is somehow even more so. In his attempt to keep the markets calm (while perhaps also engaging in some insider trading), Trump has tried to wage the war exclusively on weekends, issuing deranged threats on Friday evenings only to rescind them with promises of negotiations on Monday mornings. Most stupid of all are the press briefings by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, with his bizarre compulsion to talk in Operator Podcast clichés: a numbing stream of warfighters executing maximum lethality via high-intensity kinetic engagements. Hegseth, more than anyone else, embodies Bonhoeffer’s description of the stupid person:
