Ignorance is Not Bliss

There is a growing trend in our society that I find profoundly disturbing. Throughout American history, there have been waves of anti-intellectualism. The crest of this current wave, however, is deep and troubling and is breaking below on the foundation of our republic, hitting our shore with waves of destruction rivaling a Southern Pacific typhoon.

In an article this week on Salon.com, Brian Buehler writes on what he calls the "GOP's bubble of ignorance.” He is referring specifically to the politics of half-truths and apocryphal stories that seem to be a part of all politics these days, but the idea of a bubble of ignorance has far wider implications on practically everything in our current culture.

We are in an age where obvious truths are under attack from ideologues from all directions. News media outlets are so scared of appearing "unbalanced", they are compelled to present what are charitably called opposing views to things that any reasonably-educated person knows to be true. Entertainment has become a news source. Half-truths and outright lies are fed to us all, supporting our already formed opinions, like infant birds waiting for mom to spew food into our gaping mouths. Rumors and falsehoods whip around the world at the literal speed of electrons, taking on a life of their own, while what would be obvious truths are cast aside like so much road kill. Jung's Collective Unconscious has been replaced by the internet.

Look at the politics of today. Climate Change and the degree of human impact on its ever-quickening pace is not disputed by more than a handful of reputable scientists, yet lawmakers at every level pretend that it is still unsettled science. Evolution is demonstrably true, part of the music of the universe. Yet we fight over whether to "balance" it in our public schools with religious dogma.

The world has become a progressively smaller place, first with sea travel, then with air travel, and now with an electronic web that connects everywhere and everything with everywhere and everything else. However, we are fighting an internecine war over whether to teach our children what they need to compete in this interconnected environment. Those inside the bubble of ignorance are forcing local school districts to indoctrinate our children with their beliefs, rather than allowing them to learn the basic collective human knowledge amassed over the last several millennia. Those with the beliefs and the means to do so have even managed to steal from the not unlimited resources of public education to create semi-private schools that are prone to ideological bents. Others school their children at home, lest the kids be exposed to something they themselves don't believe. This isn't education - it is indoctrination worthy of a Maoist re-education camp. To make matters worse, standardized testing on rote material hides the fact that we are neglecting to teach our youth - our future leaders and voters and citizens - to think for themselves, ensuring that in this cross-national world that every US child would indeed be left behind.

If I was prone to conspiracy theories, I would suspect that there is a coordinated effort afoot to dumb-down the American body politic to make it easier for us to be swayed into doing the bidding of the Kochs and Adelsons of the world. Requiring Boards of Education to counter universally accepted tenets in fields from science to history to civics to literature, to instill doubt where there is practically none, is slowly robbing our children, our culture and our nation of its future far more and in much more insidious ways than the national debt ever could.

There is one underlying irony to all of this, I believe. God gave us a wonderful world, and an amazing capacity to try to understand the majesty of ourselves, our world and our universe. He has allowed us to begin to understand how life itself adapts and grows and evolves. We have only begun to glimpse the incomprehensible vastness and glory of the universe. We now understand that time as we experience it is meaningless in the face of geological and astronomical time, and how we have only been granted an infinitesimal piece of the vastness of creation. To look at these things, to stand in awe of the reality of our world, and yet to deny the wonders of that creation that are right in front of us, using the gifts of comprehension and thinking and expression we are blessed with strikes me as an incredible insult to God. If he made all of these things, and allowed us to see some of the wonders of creation, to deny that is to express to God that despite what we say, we reject the reality of what He has given us.

We are also denying reality in our political and social world. Things have gotten so contentious, so ugly, so scrambled, that it is easier to bury ourselves in media and distractions and our own little cocoons than it is to look with clear eyes at what is happening all around us.

John Lennon, who I believe for all of his faults did see things more clearly that most of us, wrote of what he saw around him in 1970. His words only grow more prophetic with time:

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV

And you think you're so clever and classless and free

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

A working class hero is something to be