Blind at midday

The other day, I was clicking around on a website called RhymeZone in search of a pithy phrase when the site’s pop-up algorithms went comically awry and served me an ad for Planned Parenthood.

It wasn’t an ad for its version of healthcare, but instead a political plug: a bright pink box dominated by a headshot of a dark-haired young woman—eyes lifted, chin defiant, mouth open mid-yell, apparently Speaking Truth to Power. Below the woman’s face, these words:

RIGHTS
FREEDOM
JUSTICE
ACCESS

Even beyond the gymnastic feat of cramming about five propaganda techniques into a 1-inch box, the ad was an impressive present-day answer to a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised nearly 80 years ago while writing from his Nazi prison cell:

Which is more dangerous, the scoundrel or the fool?

As a guide to understanding our political life, the answer to Bonhoeffer’s question seems crucial. Consider Planned Parenthood. Much has been written about its racist past—the organization itself has acknowledged founder Margaret Sanger’s “harmful connections to the eugenics movement” —and its racist present, which includes a documented concentration of child extermination camps in neighborhoods of color. Scoundrels!

On the theory that threats to abortion drive turnout among its voter base, the Democratic National Committee is doubling down on pro-abortion messaging. CBS News was shown a DNC memo that touted a 25 percent increase over 2020 in funding across every state party to put abortion top of mind. Democratic strategists surely sense Republican queasiness over the issue, a queasiness the GOP confirmed in July when it hacked the “right to life” plank right out of its platform. Democrats now intend to capitalize by shouting abortion in a crowded electorate. Scoundrels!

Surely such lethal scheming makes scoundrels the more dangerous breed? No, Bonhoeffer wrote: “Folly is more dangerous to the good than evil.”

One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved—indeed the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel.

Bonhoeffer considered folly more dangerous than evil in part because fools are the scoundrel’s foot soldiers: “Any violent display of power whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others.”

In other words, the fool is a dupe. A Svengalied chump who is not even aware he has sold what makes him human: his own agency. One feels, Bonhoeffer wrote, that when talking to the fool, “one is dealing not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him.” Catchwords like:

RIGHTS
FREEDOM
JUSTICE
ACCESS

Below that in the pretty pink ad, a button for fools:

GIVE NOW

The imago Dei for sale. The fool, Bonhoeffer wrote, is more dangerous than the scoundrel because “the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” It was evil that imprisoned Bonhoeffer, but fools who killed him. Scoundrels devise evil, but they need fools to carry it out. Some men are both. We are warned to stand clear.