There are moments in history when the deepest danger to a culture is not ignorance but the loss of the capacity to live in the truth.
In the midst of the 20th century’s upheavals, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a striking insight into this danger.
Writing from prison during the Nazi regime, he observed that the greatest ally of evil is not hatred or cruelty, but what he called “stupidity.” By this, he did not mean a lack of intelligence, but a loss of the human person’s freedom to stand before reality, to judge rightly and to act responsibly.
Bonhoeffer expressed this with characteristic force. He asserted that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. In his experience, malice can be resisted and exposed. Stupidity, however, renders a person closed to truth itself. The stupid person, he wrote, is not simply uninformed; he has become “an instrument,” carried along by the spirit of the age, no longer able to hear, judge or respond freely.
That insight speaks with particular relevance in our own time.
We live in an age rich in information yet often poor in wisdom. We have unprecedented access to
