ignorance

Ignorance


My friend Dr. Mardy Grothe writes an interesting and insightful post each week. Indeed his offering is the first thing I read Sunday mornings.

His comments usually focus on literary issues in a most clever way. However, last Sunday he uncharacteristically dipped a toe in my accustomed pond. His piece is so good that I asked permission to share a portion as a guest essay here and Mardy graciously accommodated my request, much to your benefit.

You can find him at http://www.drmardy.com/. I recommend that you look for the “Subscribe” function.

This Week’s Theme:
“How Has the Ignorance of Others Affected Your Life?”

This past week news reports  detailed a Tallahassee, Florida charter school principal being forced to resign after [three] parents of students in her sixth-grade art history class filed a formal complaint about their children being exposed to a “pornographic” image. The image in question, it turns out, was a photograph of Michelangelo’s statue of “David.”

This kind of thing is now routinely happening in Florida, thanks to the innocuous-sounding “Parental Rights in Education” bill that governor Ron DeSantis pushed through his rubber-stamp legislature in July of 2022 (this was the legislation critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill). If you currently live in one of the American “red” states, expect similar ludicrousness to be coming to your area soon, as Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country have begun to eagerly champion the cause of “Parent’s Rights in Education.” Sadly, we’ve now entered an era in which it has become easy to get a book banned or a teacher fired because something that reasonable people would consider acceptable has offended someone’s sensibilities. It all brings to mind an observation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote in Proverbs in Prose (1819):

“Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.”

I’m sure you can recall from your younger years when you first witnessed some local ignoramus complaining about evolution being taught in public schools or offering a totally fallacious theory as the absolute truth. We called such people “crackpots” back then, and as I grew older, I learned that almost every neighborhood or community has at least one. All crackpots have one thing in common: there is simply no reasoning with them. A 1910 issue of Life magazine captured a truth about them when it cited an unknown author as saying:

“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.”

Like all groups, crackpots have their “influencers” as well, and they have been successful in infecting countless others. Just think of the millions of holocaust deniers around the world. Or the millions of U. S. citizens who believed that a duly elected American president was born in a foreign country and was therefore ineligible to occupy the nation’s highest office. More recently, thanks to what is now routinely described as “The Big Lie,” there are tens of millions of Americans who believe that Joseph Biden is also an illegitimate U.S. president.

Ignorance has been historically regarded as simply an absence of knowledge, but this new kind of ignorance—a willful ignorance—is like a metastasis of the original condition. Thanks to the philosopher Karl Popper, it might be viewed this way:

“Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge
but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know,
issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.”

This week, reflect on how the phenomenon of willful ignorance has shown up in your life, and how you responded when it did. As usual, you will find a number of quotations below to assist you in your reflections:

“To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”

— A. BRONSON ALCOTT

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is great.”

— SAUL BELLOW

“Ignorance is an evil weed,
which dictators may cultivate among their dupes,
but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.”

— WILLIAM BEVERIDGE

“The highest form of ignorance is to reject
something you know nothing about.”

— WAYNE W. DYER

“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power;
but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?
Knowledge slowly builds up
what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

— GEORGE ELIOT

“Stupidity’s the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.”

— WILLIAM GADDIS

“Ignorance is not bliss.
Ignorance is impotence; it is fear; it is cruelty;
it is all the things that make for unhappiness.”

— WINIFRED HOLTBY

“Reason obeys itself;
and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

— THOMAS PAINE

“Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind;
one of its characteristics is that
it doesn’t recognize itself as ignorance.”

— JANE SMILEY

“The people who are scariest to me are the people
who don’t even know enough to realize how little they know.”

— THOMAS SOWELL

For source information on these quotations, and others on the subject of IGNORANCE, visit: DMDMQ.
My Thought of the Week

“Ignorance 
is a problem to be corrected,
and not exploited for personal or political gain.”
Speaking of Ignorance

Click me

The Tennessee House of Representatives put another notch in their Ku Klux Klan lynching rope last Thursday. The super-majority Republicans were shocked, shocked! I tell you, to have witnessed three representatives participate in a peaceful protest with students who, not too surprisingly, don’t want to be shot dead by yet another school shooter, as had happened in Nashville two weeks earlier.

For their temerity to speak up for safety and to the horror of the proper decorum Republicans, two young Black men and one White woman, all duly elected representatives, were put on trial to be expelled from the House for their peaceful participation in a peaceful, albeit noisy, protest demonstration that was conducted because kids don’t want to be shot dead.

All three legislators did the same things during the protests, but only the two Black representatives were expelled. The White woman kept her seat in the House. Could this be a more blatant demonstration of racial discrimination?

Many of us had thought we might have moved past this kind of horrific display of racism, but of course, we were only fooling ourselves. Racism and White supremacy were on display for all to see and this was nothing less than a

legislative lynching

.

Perhaps the Republicans in the Tennessee House, working as they do in the city where 3 little kids and 3 adults were just murdered and in the state where the Ku Klux Klan originated, think they can get away with this. After all, not long ago one of their members recommended a return to lynching.

How is it that people still have to do this?

But they’re wrong.

The whole world is watching and condemning them. We the People won’t allow for their hatred to remain in control. That’s especially so for our Millennials and Gen-Zs and a few of we Boomers who still remember our idealism. Just imagine running a political campaign against the haters in the 2024 election. The campaign writes itself.

Isn’t it odd that people still have to raise a fist in a declaration for equality and respect? No, that didn’t end at the 1968 Olympics, because we are still a nation that tolerates systemic bigotry.

But the ignorance infusing that awful alt-right deed in Nashville on Thursday will prove to be counter-productive to the haters. You and I and so many of us will see to that.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

     

    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Cluelessness


Struggling to Understand

New York Times Senior Opinion Staff Editor Alexandra Sifferlin wrote a piece on Monday triggered by the Covid-19 death of sports journalist Grant Wahl while covering the World Cup in Qatar. Her story was not about his death. It was about the “anti-vaxxers [who] were quick to blame his death on the Covid-19 vaccine.”

Questions pop off the page, like why would people believe fact-free conspiracy rumors about the vaccines, canards that were spread by non-doctors and non-scientists and hateful rumor generators? Think: injecting bleach. And why would anyone invade the grief so many are feeling and dump cruelty on these innocents? Wait: this gets worse.

Sifferlin continues, “Céline Gounder is an infectious disease doctor and epidemiologist [i.e. a doctor and a scientist] and has been a prominent voice on the Covid-19 pandemic. She is also Wahl’s widow and has been sent numerous emails and voice mail messages blaming her for his death because of her support for vaccines.” Cruelty amplified.

Let this stand as a placeholder for so many forms of anti-social behavior that have become commonplace, like:

neighbors yelling vitriolic slurs at school board meetings

bullies making death threats to citizens doing patriotic things, like being poll workers

thugs committing murder – mass shootings or otherwise – that are encouraged by people broadcasting loathing in order to inflame anger and hatred

I’ve just begun reading Andy Borowitz’s new book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber (see Fine Print #5 below). In his introduction he writes,

“We’ll retrace the steps of the vacuous pioneers who turned ignorance from a liability into a virtue. By relentlessly lowering the bar, they made it possible for today’s politicians to wear their dunce caps with pride. Gone are the days when leaders had to hide how much they didn’t know. Now cluelessness is an electoral asset and smart politicians must play dumb, or risk voters’ wrath. Welcome to the survival of the dimmest.”

The standout part of that is that cluelessness is mandatory or politicians will “risk voters’ wrath.” That means that the driving force of politicians’ proud ignorance is a public that wants them to be clueless. What’s going on with us that we rejoice in being uninformed and, worse, dumb? And why wouldn’t we want our leaders to be smart – smarter than the average bear – so they can make good choices for us?

We must want to be clueless and dumb in order to believe absurd conspiracy idiocy, like that there are giant Jewish space lasers igniting wild fires in California, that the moon landings were faked, that there is a Hillary Clinton sex trafficking operation in a non-existent basement of a DC pizza restaurant and all the rest.

Surely, there’s more to this than cluelessness. Ignorance doesn’t explain the ongoing undermining of our democracy by people proclaiming themselves to be patriots. (See: “oxymoron” with emphasis on the “moron.”) It doesn’t explain thousands trashing the Capitol Building and preparing to lynch the Vice President and Speaker of the House and defecating in the Rotunda. It doesn’t explain thugs in camo carrying AR-15s strutting around the entrances to polling places. Love of ignorance is a prerequisite for all of that, but it doesn’t explain the fear and rage and cruelty.

I’m a Boomer and distinctly recall President Kennedy declaring, “College is America’s best friend.” Of course, there were practical reasons for that, such as that we were in a cold war against a belligerent Russian bear and we needed smart, well educated people to be technical geniuses so we could defend our nation. Nobody argued for cluelessness. Nobody declared war on wisdom and learning, but that’s changed.

What’s going on that we cram theocracy into our public schools and steal public school tax money and give it to fund parochial schools? Why did we let George W. Bush get away with his attack on the First Amendment by shifting government education funds to “faith-based initiatives?” What’s going on that some opportunistic politicians are Big Brothering our schools to limit what children can learn and they’re burning books? How come some seem to want us to return to the massive ignorance that existed prior to the Age of Enlightenment?

Somehow a great deal has changed and we have a profound disdain for wisdom and learning. Far more dangerous is the anger toward people who think. We’re in an age of visceral primacy, where “Me getting what I want is all that matters and I’m pleased to stomp on anyone who sees things differently. Fie on education, learning and critical thinking!”

How did we elect pretty-face-empty-head Ronald Reagan? Why did we elect doofus frat boy George W. Bush? Why did we fall for an obvious con artist, Mr. 30,000 lies? Why don’t we want all of our presidents to be smart and well informed? Also, patriotic.

What has happened that we seem to prefer rage over everything else? Are we to return to some semblance of appreciation for learning and wisdom and of one another, or will we continue until the few of us left are living in caves? If we are to drop the primacy of cruelty that endangers us all, what has to happen? How will that come about?

I’m struggling to understand this.

Do Some Supporting

The mouse is now Speaker of the House and the legislative terrorists – the “Tear-Down Party” – are in control of him. Brace yourself, because this is going to be an extremely turbulent two years.

As those fifteen embarrassing elections were happening in the House of Representatives, I emailed my congressman, Brad Schneider (D-IL10), with a simple message:

Hang in there! Gotcher back as you fight the good fight.
.

He sent an appreciative reply.

There are a lot of people in Congress who do that every day – they fight the good fight. That’s in spite of the fact that they hear every day from people who are mad at government and mad at them. They get irrational demands thrown at them. They get hate mail. They get threats.

I figure that now and then they need to hear from the people who know they’re doing the right thing. They need to hear a thanks for standing tall in the face of cruelty and oppression and madness. They can use some validation that they’re on the right side, reassurance that they’re representing us properly.

So, I have a suggestion and a request: Call or text your senators and congressperson and let them know that you appreciate them fighting the good fight and that you have their back. https://www.house.gov/ and https://www.house.gov/

And if they’re on the wrong side, call or text them and say that you see them for what they are and what they’re doing and that you have the back of whoever opposes them.

Classified Documents Found in Biden’s Old Office

I’m shocked – SHOCKED! – to learn that Fox-Never-Was-News is horrified by a revelation about a Democrat.

O’ the stupefaction of it all!

An Update On the Rotary of Northbrook Coat Drive

Ref: The last section of this post.

Text pasted from Rotary:

The Final Count.  831 winter coats plus around a dozen boxes of gloves/hats/scarves/boots.  In terms of winter coats, we are confident this is more than last year. Most have already been distributed to 9 charity organizations/locations, with the final boxes (pictured below) for World Relief Chicago, PADS, and a fifth dropoff at Connections for the Homeless all scheduled for next week.  Two Men and a Truck will donate transportation for these boxes for a fourth straight week. So far, five organizations have received at least a first installment of coats:  Refugee One, Stock the Shelves, Connections for the Homeless, Ethiopian Community Association (refugees), and Deerfield Free Store.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bunch of people will be warmer now. Thanks and kudos to all who contributed!

  • ————————————
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!

The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
  5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

JA

 


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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