Mindlessness and Uprootedness

 

I want to think about what Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt wrote about thoughtlessness/stupidity, mass culture, and what happened in Germany with the Nazis and what is happening in America with Trumpism. I would like to connect that with Simone Weil's understanding of rootlessness and Arendt's understanding of mass society and Wendell Berry's focus on community. Bonhoeffer and Arendt show how evil depends on the collapse of thinking; Weil shows how uprootedness prepares that collapse; Berry seeks the cure in the restoration of rooted forms of life in which persons learn attention, responsibility, and judgment. Together they can help understand not only what happened with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century but what is going on in the USA and many other places today. 

     Modern mass politics becomes dangerous when uprooted people lose the habits of judgment that come from real membership in a community. Then they become vulnerable to slogans, resentment, fantasy, and obedience. For Weil, a “root” is not merely a location or ethnic identity. It is a living participation in a human world that gives the soul nourishment. A person is rooted when he belongs meaningfully to a community that carries memory, obligations, work, customs, stories, and a sense of the good across generations. Roots connect the person to something enduring beyond private appetite or isolated choice. In The Need for Roots (a great book), she argues that uprootedness is a disease of modern civilization. Industrial capitalism uproots by reducing labor to mechanical function and mobility. The modern state uproots by centralization and bureaucracy. Ideological politics uproots by replacing concrete loyalties with abstractions. Even education can uproot when it teaches people to admire what is distant while despising their own inheritance and place. For Weil, uprooted people become spiritually vulnerable. They hunger for belonging, grandeur, and meaning. That hunger can then be manipulated by nationalism, revolutionary ideology, or mass propaganda. In this sense, totalitarianism feeds upon uprootedness. People deprived of living communities seek substitute forms of collective identity.

       This connects with Wendell Berry’s understanding of community. Community is not sentimental or merely geographical but I would say that for Berry it is our nature to live in community, we can only flourish in a community. Community is a network of mutual dependence, memory, and care shaped over time through shared practices: farming, craftsmanship, worship, storytelling, neighborliness, and stewardship of place. Berry contrasts this with the modern economic order, which treats people as interchangeable consumers and workers. Mobility, gigantism, and abstraction destroy what he calls “membership.” Berry would agree with Weil that uprootedness is not simply psychological loneliness. It is the destruction of the conditions under which we become fully human. Human beings learn responsibility, judgment, fidelity, and affection through durable local relationships. Without these, the self becomes thin, unstable, and susceptible to manipulation by mass culture and centralized power. (Berry’s many essays on this theme are essential reading.)

      This leads naturally to Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s political thought – especially The Human Condition (another great book) – differs in tone and framework from Weil’s and Berry’s, but there is a deeper convergence. Arendt stresses that human beings disclose “who” they are through words and deeds in the presence of others. A person is not fully revealed in isolation. Human identity appears in a shared public world where people speak, act, remember, judge, and tell stories about one another. For Arendt, politics at its highest is not administration or ideological mobilization. It is the space where plurality appears. Plurality means that human beings are equal in dignity yet irreducibly distinct. The public realm exists so that distinct persons may appear to one another through action and speech. This is why Arendt fears mass society. Mass society destroys the intermediate spaces between isolated individual and centralized state. It dissolves genuine public life into conformity, consumption, bureaucracy, and mass opinion. In loneliness and atomization, people cease appearing to one another as concrete persons. They become functions, demographic units, ideological categories, or masses.

     Here the connection to Weil and Berry becomes clearer. Weil emphasizes the soul’s need for rooted participation. Berry emphasizes membership and local community. Arendt emphasizes a public world where persons can genuinely appear to one another through action and speech. All three resist abstraction and depersonalization. Weil stresses the spiritual conditions of belonging; Berry stresses the cultural and ecological conditions of belonging; Arendt stresses the political and existential conditions of belonging. All three fear forms of modernity that dissolve concrete human worlds into centralized systems and mass structures.

       Indeed, Aristotle argued long ago in the Politics that the political community (polis) exists not merely for survival or economic exchange but for living well together. Political life requires mutual recognition, friendship, deliberation, and shared concern for justice. A city that becomes too large ceases to be truly political because citizens no longer genuinely know one another or participate meaningfully in common life. Although Aristotle does not formulate this exactly in the language of “rootedness” as the Greek did not know uprootedness except through the punishment of exile (the terribleness of which we cannot really understand today), he would surely be appalled at mass politics/society . Political community depends upon limits, visibility, memory, and reciprocal recognition. Human beings cannot share a common world on a near infinite scale. Once society or the economic system becomes excessively large, bureaucratic, and impersonal, politics degenerates into management, manipulation, faction, spectacle, or mass administration.

    Arendt’s thought owes a lot to this Greek intuition. Her “public space” resembles, in some respects, Aristotle’s polis: a space where persons appear before one another as distinct beings capable of speech and action. Berry also argues that genuine community requires scale, memory, and continuity. Weil argues that the soul itself requires rooted participation in such worlds.

      Taken together, I would formulate the common insight like this: Human beings become fully human not as isolated consumers or abstract citizens of mass society, but through participation in concrete communities where persons are known, remembered, judged, loved, and called to responsibility. Where for better or worse everyone is “a someone.” Their words and deeds matter. They count for something. They play a part in keeping something bigger than the self going.  When those communities dissolve, loneliness and rootlessness create the conditions for ideological politics, manipulation, and the collapse of judgment.

 

. . .

 

    Bonhoeffer’s “stupidity” is not low intelligence. It is the surrender of personal judgment under social pressure. The stupid person speaks in slogans because he has been inwardly occupied by a collective force. That is why Bonhoeffer thought stupidity could be more dangerous than malice. Arendt’s “thoughtlessness” is similar but not identical. Eichmann was not, in her account, a demonic monster (Eichmann in Jerusalem). He was a man who did not truly think from the standpoint of reality, conscience, or another person. He used clichés, rules, career logic, and bureaucratic language instead of judgment.

      Nazism and Trumpism – as terrible as Trumpism is, I am not equating the two; Trumpism is wicked but not nearly at Hitler’s level; just interested in the mindlessness that attaches to both movements – was not caused simply by “stupidity” or “ignorance.” It was made possible by humiliation, rootlessness, propaganda, mass loneliness, resentment, and the collapse of judgment. The similarity is to be found in slogan-thinking, resentment politics, fantasy over reality, loyalty to the leader over truth, and the replacement of civic judgment by mass affect. It is silly to believe people just got stupid. It is important to understand the social causes of the phenomenon. This is the matrix, plus the dumb-making technologies that replaced community membership, and problematic ideology of American political culture i.e., if you didn’t win Monopoly, you are a personal failure; anybody who is not lazy can win; the winners deserve everything they have (including the power, it seems, to keep changing the rules of the game for their benefit). And there are other considerations. But all of this becomes toxic in mass society, and indeed are part of mass society.

. . .

In my studies (many years past) I read some work of the sociologist C. Wright Mills and found true his thesis that the material base of capitalist society has not corresponded to America's Lockean liberal political culture for a long time, and functions as ideology in the sense that is obscures reality to the benefit of the current power structure. I think he is also relevant to the thinkers I tried to bring together above.

     The core of Mills’ argument is that America continued to speak the language of classical liberal individualism long after the underlying social reality had changed fundamentally. The official American self-understanding remained Lockean: free individuals, small proprietors, independent citizens, local democracy, rational public debate, equality of opportunity, government accountable to a public of active citizens, etc. But the actual social structure had become one of large bureaucracies, corporate concentration, managerial systems, mass media manipulation, centralized military and political power, and psychologically passive mass society. In other words, the inherited liberal vocabulary continued to function symbolically after the social conditions that originally sustained it had largely disappeared.

    This is very close to ideology in the Marxian sense: i.e., a set of concepts and self-descriptions that conceal and thus legitimate the actual structure of power and social relations. Americans continued imagining themselves as independent yeoman citizens while increasingly functioning as organization men, consumers, employees, spectators, and mass individuals shaped by institutions far beyond their control. Thus  Mills thought the old liberal language itself was part of the problem. The rhetoric of “freedom” and “individual choice” can mask dependence upon enormous bureaucratic and economic systems.

   Like Arendt, Mills distinguished between a true public capable of rational discussion and a mass manipulated through centralized media and institutional power. In The Power Elite he argues that the public has increasingly become a mass: that is, people no longer meaningfully shaping political life but consuming political imagery and narratives produced elsewhere. A gigantic bureaucratic-technological-commercial society may preserve democratic forms formally while hollowing out the lived substance of citizenship.

     Mills explains structurally what Weil experiences spiritually, what Berry experiences culturally, and what Arendt experiences politically. All are diagnosing different dimensions of the same transformation, namely, the replacement of rooted communities and public life by mass bureaucratic society organized around centralized economic and technological power.

. . .

Another piece of the puzzle.

   Neil Postman argued that the dominant forms of media in a society shape not only what people think about, but the very habits of mind through which they perceive reality and exercise judgment. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Postman showed that a print culture fosters linear reasoning, patience, abstraction, memory, and the ability to follow sustained arguments. A society shaped by books and serious reading tends to produce citizens capable of reflection and rational public discourse because reading itself trains attention and inwardness. In works such as The Disappearance of Childhood and Amusing Ourselves to Death, he argued that the rise of television fundamentally changed these habits by privileging images, immediacy, entertainment, emotional stimulation, and fragmented attention over careful reasoning and sustained thought. Of course, the present media system (social media, etc.) radically exacerbates this problem.

     For Postman, this transformation has far-reaching cultural and political consequences. A public shaped primarily by entertainment media gradually lose the intellectual and moral habits necessary for independent judgment. Political life becomes theatrical, emotional, and slogan-driven rather than reflective and deliberative. In this sense, Postman’s analysis helps explain the kind of “thoughtlessness” that Hannah Arendt feared and the loss of inward independence that Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as “stupidity.” (Think of the Nazi use of mass media.) His argument is not that non-reading people are unintelligent, but that a culture dominated by passive and image-based media weakens the capacities for attention, memory, reflection, and rational dialogue upon which a healthy democratic and communal life depends. I agree with this.

. . .

       Another writer who I think provides another part of the puzzle is Christopher Lasch , who fits naturally into this constellation because he diagnoses the psychological consequences of the same social transformations that Weil, Arendt, Berry, Mills, and Postman describe from spiritual, political, communal, sociological, and media-theoretical perspectives. In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch argues that modern capitalist mass society gradually produces a personality structure marked by insecurity, dependence upon approval, emotional shallowness, loss of historical continuity, and obsession with self-image. Narcissism for Lasch does not primarily mean vanity in the ordinary sense. It refers to a fragile self cut off from stable traditions, durable communities, meaningful work, and intergenerational continuity. The narcissistic personality constantly seeks affirmation because it lacks deeper forms of rooted identity and belonging. It is a self-defeating defense mechanism against a wound to human nature. 

    This connects directly to the dissolution of community. In a society where local bonds, family continuity, religious traditions, craftsmanship, civic participation, and stable public life weaken, the self increasingly turns inward while paradoxically becoming more dependent on mass culture and external validation. Lasch therefore complements Berry’s critique of uprooted consumer culture, Weil’s analysis of spiritual rootlessness, and Arendt’s fear of lonely mass individuals detached from meaningful public worlds. Lasch describes the psychological interior of Arendt’s “mass man.”

    There is also a connection to thoughtlessness. A narcissistic culture weakens the capacity for genuine self-transcendence, sustained attention, historical memory, and concern for a shared world. Public speech becomes therapeutic, performative, and image-centered. The self increasingly experiences reality through mirrors of approval, consumption, media identity, and emotional reaction. This harmonizes with Postman’s account of entertainment culture and Bonhoeffer’s concern that people lose inward independence under the pressure of social forces and collective narratives.

     Lasch also helps explain why mass politics can become emotionally intense while intellectually shallow. Isolated and insecure individuals often seek identity through symbolic political belonging, moral performance, resentment, or collective outrage rather than through rooted participation in stable communities. Political movements then become substitutes for the forms of meaning once provided by local community, religion, family, and shared civic life.

    Together the thinkers I have discussed form a remarkably coherent critique of modern mass society and its effects on judgment, community, and human flourishing.  There are others equally important, Lewis Mumford and E. F. Schumacher, for example.

. . .

    I think there is a metaphysical dimension to this. In The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke develops a relational interpretation of Thomistic metaphysics. Being as such is not conceived as static self-contained substance but as intrinsically self-communicative and expressive. To exist is to radiate actuality, to enter into relation, to make a difference in the world. As Clarke emphasizes, being is inherently “diffusive of itself” (bonum est diffusivum sui). A being that made absolutely no difference, had no effects, entered no relations, disclosed nothing of itself, would effectively be indistinguishable from non-being.

        For example, the sun exists not merely as a self-contained object hidden within itself, but precisely as something radiating energy, light, warmth, and gravitational influence outward. Its being is manifest in the difference it makes. If the sun emitted no light, no heat, exerted no gravitational pull, affected nothing whatsoever, then there would be no way in which it could meaningfully be said to exist within the universe. Its existence is inseparable from its actuality and effects. Or consider a tree. A tree exists not as an isolated metaphysical point but as a center of relations and activity: drawing nutrients from the soil, giving shade, producing oxygen, sheltering birds, altering the landscape, participating in an ecosystem. Its being is expressed through its active participation in a larger whole. The fuller its actuality, the more richly it enters into relations and communicates itself outwardly. This is  what Clarke means when he writes that being is inherently self-communicative. Existence is dynamic and expressive. To be real is to have actuality, and actuality naturally radiates outward into effects, relations, and participation. This is why he argues against conceiving substances as sealed-off entities existing entirely “inside themselves.” The more fully something exists, the more it overflows into activity and communion with other beings.

       This has implications for the social and political concerns I am trying to trace. Mass society can be understood not merely sociologically or psychologically, but metaphysically: persons cease genuinely to appear as concrete centers of action, meaning, responsibility, and relation. They become interchangeable units within systems. Their words and deeds no longer meaningfully shape a shared world. In Arendt’s language, they no longer truly “appear” before one another in a public realm where unique persons disclose who they are through speech and action. They become socially invisible even while physically surrounded by millions.

     From Clarke’s perspective, this is a diminishment of participation in the fullness of being itself. Human beings are relational substances whose actuality naturally seeks expression in knowledge, love, work, dialogue, friendship, memory, and community. Belonging is therefore not accidental to human existence but rooted in the metaphysical structure of personhood. To belong means to participate meaningfully in relations where one’s existence genuinely matters and makes a difference.

      This also shows why uprootedness and mass society feel unreal or spiritually empty. If one’s actions, words, judgments, craftsmanship, or presence seem to have no meaningful effect upon a shared world, then one experiences a kind of metaphysical attenuation. One is reduced to function, consumption, administration, or spectacle rather than genuine participation in being. Berry’s “membership,” Weil’s “roots,” and Arendt’s “public space” can all be understood as conditions under which persons become fully actualized as relational beings whose existence is disclosed and affirmed through meaningful participation in a common world.

     And this would explain why mass society so often generates both loneliness and ideological fanaticism. Persons deprived of meaningful participation in real communities seek intensified forms of collective belonging elsewhere. Ideology offers a substitute metaphysical significance: the individual suddenly feels part of History, the Nation, the Revolution, the Movement, Humanity, Progress, or some other totalizing abstraction. The hunger beneath such movements may partly be the hunger to matter, to make a difference, to participate in something larger than isolated private existence.

        Clarke’s metaphysics provides a deep ontological foundation for the concerns of Weil, Arendt, Berry, Bonhoeffer, Mills, Postman, and Lasch. The crisis of mass society is not merely political or cultural. It concerns the distortion of the very conditions under which human beings participate in reality as personal beings whose existence becomes actual through meaningful relation, expression, and communion.

 

 Sources

 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

 Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Edited by Norman Wirzba. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.

 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. Translated by Reginald H. Fuller et al. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.

Clarke, W. Norris. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

 Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

 Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

 Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

 Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

 Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

 Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.

 

 Quotes

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” — Simone Weil

 

“A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community…” — Simone Weil

 

“Who is uprooted uproots.” — Simone Weil

 

“The community, in the fullest sense, is the smallest unit of health.” — Wendell Berry

 

“If what one does helps to destroy community, then it is immoral.” — Wendell Berry

 

“A person dependent on somebody else’s knowledge does not know what he himself knows.” — Wendell Berry

 

“Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” — Hannah Arendt

 

“Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere.” — Hannah Arendt

 

“The disclosure of the ‘who’ through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web…” — Hannah Arendt

 

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination… is the fact that loneliness… has become an everyday experience.” — Hannah Arendt

 

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

“Against stupidity we are defenseless.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

“The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

“Under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence…” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

“Man is by nature an animal that only thrives in a political community.” — Aristotle

 

“A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence.” — Aristotle

 

“The city-state comes into existence for the sake of life and exists for the sake of the good life.” — Aristotle

 

“Experience shows that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be well governed.” — Aristotle