When Is Stupidity A Sin?
by Alice Von Hildebrand - January 29, 2008
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton writes, "A large section of the Intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of Intelligence." At first, this surprising indictment might be interpreted as merely humorous; after all, are not "intellectuals" those to whom we turn for enlightenment and guidance, those who are the luminaries of universities – castles of knowledge and wisdom? But upon thinking about it, one is bound to come to an inevitable conclusion: The places of "higher learning" have also been the nurseries of the most ponderous errors and the most devastating heresies that have plagued our world.
Chesterton is not the only one chastising intellectuals. Roy Campbell writes:
Now it is the intellectuals of this world, and Britain in particular, who have by far the least faith: and once faith is removed, credibility is its inevitable substitute. Man is a believing animal. If he is not allowed to believe sense – he believes any rubbish… (Bloomsbury and Beyond).
Carpenters, shoemakers, peasants, manual workers are guided by common sense. They have no pretension to have the key to wisdom. They do not raise questions the answer of which is above their capacities (Ps 130). The blue-collar worker is very unlikely to have any illusions about the quality of his work: If a carpenter makes a set of drawers that does not close, he knows he has done a bad job. If the food prepared by a cook is unpalatable, the culprit knows that he should go back to cooking school. If a tailor makes a suit that is much too tight for the person who has ordered it, he knows that he is a bad tailor. If a car does not work after a mechanic made repairs, the customer cannot be mistaken in telling him that he is a bad mechanic. Blunt, tangible results are more eloquent than words. The punishment is on the tailcoat of the fault.
Things are very different in the religious, spiritual, intellectual, and artistic spheres. These are domains in which we find both the greatest accomplishments and the greatest aberrations. Recall St. Augustine writing in his Confessions that when he joined the Manichean sect, he "swallowed" the greatest nonsense one can imagine. He writes: "I was led on to such follies as to believe that a fig tree wept when it was plucked… . If some 'saint' ate this fig – proving, forsooth, that it was picked not by his but by another's sinful hand – then he would digest it in his stomach, and from it he would breathe forth angels!" (III, 10). Only a very humble man can share with us the stupidity he swallowed when young; most of us would choose not to mention it. Here was one of the greatest minds of all times, and nevertheless he too could fall into the hands of religious charlatans.
Through history, man has "adored" animals of all sorts, the sun – even humanity, as Auguste Comte noted. Today, modern man, inebriated by his mind-boggling technological feats, is tempted to adore himself: There is nothing greater than man. Finally he has become aware that he is god. This is uttered during a period in which the most abominable crimes ever committed against human beings have taken place.
One needs only a superficial knowledge of the history of philosophy to realize that "intellectuals" have given birth to innumerable errors and stupidities. Dogmatic skepticism, subjectivism, "dictatorial relativism," idealism, and so on are the chaff produced by intellectual leaders. Plato remarked that philosophy suffers from a bad reputation because it has fallen into the hands of thinkers unworthy to be called "lovers of wisdom" – intellectual "quacks" who "prefer themselves to truth," those who see man (that is, themselves) as "the measure of all things." The tragedy is that those making these catastrophic mistakes are blessed (or cursed) with a great amount of what Plato calls "cleverness." They readily find arguments to buttress their position, however indefensible, because they are "glib," well-trained in rhetoric, and know how to hypnotize a gullible public by brilliance and pseudo-depth.
As a result, some of the most disastrous philosophical errors are not always easy to diagnose. One of the most successful means of spreading error is to couch it in such complicated language that many will swallow it because they assume that "complexity is depth." Many are they who assume that if they do not understand a text, it must be because "it is way above their heads" and therefore remarkable. Granted that Kant had an impressive mind, his Critique of Pure Reason is no easy reading. I knew an Austrian Jesuit who read him in French (the language of "clear and distinct ideas") because it was easier to understand. Because many of us cannot make heads or tails of his argument (and perhaps for good reason), we will give credit to the man who is giving us a piece of precious wisdom so deep that only intellectual giants can understand it.
Some great thinkers would never acknowledge that a text is difficult to grasp. The Arab philosopher Avicenna was an exception. He read Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it. Light finally came, thanks to a commentary by Alfarabi, and so he wrote his own long commentaries on "the Philosopher," as St. Aquinas calls him. Once in my course on metaphysics, I asked my students whether any of them had read this famous work. One of them raised her hand. "Have you understood it"? I asked. The answer: "Of course." I could not help but mention the difficulties that one of the greatest Islamic thinkers had in interpreting it. Had my student had a rightful claim to her assertion, one would truly believe in progress!
Kant's influence has been enormous, and is still poisoning many thinkers. He has been refuted again and again, but this does not necessarily eliminate the poison. Downright errors (materialism, skepticism, relativism, subjectivism, idealism) are blind alleys that are always tempting to the human mind. Heresies and errors keep repeating themselves periodically in the history of human thought while donning more fashionable clothes, but they remain basically the same.
