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Whenever we complain about stupidity, what we usually mean is someone or something is willfully ignoring or is mindlessly oblivious to something obvious. Whether something is obvious or not depends somewhat on your general understanding of the world. So if we declare that an idea is stupid, what we mean is either 1) It's based on an understanding which we reject, or 2) there's something immediately untenable about it, so much so that anyone who claims to hold it is either lying, refusing to think, or has something seriously wrong with them. It follows then, I think, that people who spend a lot of time raging about stupidity are people who find it difficult to understand other people and other ideas. Complaints about stupidity are often themselves quite stupid. Stupidity is still a real phenomenon though, and sometimes it deserves comment. Here, for example, are the two great but stupid ideas of our time:
1) Freedom, taken as the ultimate goal or as an end in itself. Freedom is only worth having insofar as it makes us free to do what is worth doing, and what we ought to do. As an ultimate goal without any regard to what is worth doing - dismissed in a post-modern fog of "what's true and good for you isn't true and good for me" - it becomes the freedom to be free so long as it doesn't infringe on the inviolable freedom of other free and equal supermen.
2) Equality, taken in the empirical sense. People are different and those differences matter. Those differences cannot be papered over, nor can they be legislated out of existence, or erased under the right conditions. At the level of particulars, there is no good reason at all to believe that the distribution of intelligence, inclinations, or aptitudes is uniform between the sexes or between racial groups, and plenty of good reasons to believe the contrary. Nonetheless, if you make brief and entirely defensible comments about this simple truth it's enough to get yourself dismissed from your job and targeted for a witch hunt.
The two ideas that so dominate our contemporary politics, morality, and cultural discourse - so much so that to question them is to place oneself outside the pale - are stupid. That is, they are either willfully ignoring or are mindlessly oblivious to truths that should be obvious.
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Killing women and children first.
The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a few exceptions, the American press has done little to remind us what Allied bombers wrought 60 years ago over the skies of Dresden and other German civilian targets, or over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And of course, there’s no hint of repentance. We were engaged in total war. The war had been forced on us by aggressive, inhuman regimes, of whom we could only demand unconditional surrender. In the face of so many extremes, of governments which could rape Nanking and slaughter the Jews, to win we could rightly resort to the most extreme of means. There was a powerful inner logic driving us to exterminate all those civilians. And so we did it. And so we refuse to regret it. And so we plan to do it again.
...It’s easy to lose sight of reality, when we’re dealing with such numbers. So let’s think of it this way: Every child who died from our bombs was as innocent as Anne Frank.
People who angrily respond to this with, "But the Germans and Japanese did the same and much worse besides," are missing the point entirely. For starters, it is we who now stand in a position of dominance over much of the earth, and our ability to discern the right path and to follow it will have a decisive effect on the rest of the world, and will determine whether our future is to be that of a nation intent on justice or of one devolving into just another large scale criminal enterprise, like most of the world’s now-fallen empires.
We Americans have to face and accept responsibility for the simple fact that what we did at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, etc., was wrong. I'm quite aware that not everyone grants this as a fact or that it is simple. The simplicity I'm referring to is not to the actual historical decisions, but to the principle: it is wrong to target noncombatants in war. It is wrong to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians in one fell swoop. It is wrong, and maybe what needs to be said more than ever in our current cultural climate, it is wrong even if there are putatively good reasons to do it. If it isn't wrong, then our fight with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply becomes a question of who struck first, who had the greater provocation, who was more of a victim - we have no principled reason to disagree with their methods.
I'm not trying to say that the circumstances surrounding the decision made by Truman in 1945 were such that doing the right thing should have been easy. Nor do I seek to judge the moral culpability of those who made the decision and those who carried it out. It was not an easy decision, and anyone who says it would have been if he had been the one to make it is fooling himself. There is much that can be said and has been said about the extenuating circumstances surrounding the decision. What we, as a people, must not and cannot ever do is say that it was right.
It's important that we not ever say that because the sins of the past remain as temptations in the present. Someone who believes that stealing is wrong may, faced with the right combination of temptations and circumstances, steal anyway. But someone who doesn't believe stealing is wrong at all will certainly do it regularly. I think the great flaw - possibly the fatal flaw - with the American people is our tendency to think that if something really, really needs to be done, it must therefore be the right thing to do. It's a far lesser sin to occasionally fail to live up to the moral law than to reject it altogether.
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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing [or words to that effect]." - Edmund Burke
That statement is rubbish (and it's quite likely Burke never actually said it.) One reason why it's rubbish is that it's so often invoked by good men who are arguing in favor of evil actions. "If we do nothing, then the evil men will bomb our women and children. Therefore, let us bomb his women and children first so that evil may not triumph." It's one of liberal modernity's favorite games:
Fat Man and Little Boy vs. a land invasion to secure an unconditional surrender with millions dead.
Abortion on demand vs. treat women as chattel.
Invade Iraq vs. surrender to Islamic terrorists.
Torture prisoners vs. surrender to Islamic terrorists.
Embryonic stem cell research vs. sanctimonious anti-science moralizing that causes endless preventable suffering.
Euthanasia vs. being responsible for suffering.
McCain vs. Obama.
Vote vs. engage in armed revolt.
Crafting false dilemmas can be fun. Everyone can play.
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