Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit

by Max Kemmerich

"Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit" by Max Kemmerich is a polemical cultural critique written in the early 20th century. It charts how human folly—above all religious literalism and institutional dogmatism—has warped judgment and public life, illustrating its case with pointed historical anecdotes and learned references. The likely focus is on exposing the intellectual and moral costs of unexamined authority, especially where biblical infallibility is invoked. The opening of the book sets a modest scope in a foreword, then argues that treating the Bible as an absolute measure of truth is a test of intelligence: either one renounces verbal inspiration where facts contradict scripture, or one commits a basic error of reasoning. It dissects papal power claims built on “Tu es Petrus,” contrasts clerical shrewdness with secular credulity, and parades the absurdities of medieval scholastic hair-splitting and rabbinic casuistry as symptoms of authority-bound thinking. A long series of early modern and modern examples follows—Protestant tracts on angels as matchmakers, Paradise as a feudal fief, faith in the womb, reasons God gave no savior to fallen angels, the timing and season of Creation, denial of antipodes, global deluge physics, the persistence of geocentrism, “scriptural geology,” and even a biblicized evolutionary fantasy about Adam—showing how blind literalism stifles science and common sense. At the start of the second chapter, the author pivots to asceticism, distinguishing sensible self-discipline from self-destructive mortification, critiquing temperance absolutism and rigid fasting rules. He then sketches striking cases of extreme diet and self-denial among early Christians and Manichaeans, strict Orthodox fasts, and grotesque strategies to combat sexual desire, including self-injury and neurotic avoidance of women.