Ignorance

These single word titles remain with me. I’m sure they’ll pass with time. This one is especially risky in its implicit pejorative tone. Be that as it may, let’s begin with the New Monastic Individuals banner.

Christopher Marlowe makes his assertion—actually a moral imperative—from the perspective of the peak of the Renaissance, a 300 year period marked by a resurgence of learning from classical models and by general reforms in education. One could almost say it was a remarkable period in western human history very much the opposite of the period we’ve been moving through over the last 30 to 50 years. We’ve been sort of De-Reannaisancing. I think we can extrapolate from Marlowe’s remark that ignorance is a sin, because it is so easily remedied; that is, one does not know, because one has not attempted to know. Ignorance, therefore, results from Sloth, one of the Seven Deadlies.

Before going farther, let’s remember that ignorance is not the same as stupidity. Stupidity is the lack of intelligence, the lack of an ability to learn. The individual lacks capacity not resources. No manner or degree of effort or help would change that status. Often, of course, the word is used pejoratively, as in “That was a stupid thing to say.” But we are all in some ways judgmental and those kinds of remarks do slip out.

From my perspective, humanity suffers from two kinds of ignorance. The first kind, what I’ll call naïve ignorance (which could be redundant but sometimes redundancy works for emphasis). This is the ignorance of the child. From lack of experience and human interaction and the lack of a successful learning progression (both formal and informal) the person simply doesn’t know and/or, as Herr Cheney said, doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Given the capacity to learn (see above on “stupidity”), the naïvely ignorant individual will whittle away at that ignorance and move on to knowing.

Then, of course, we have the willfully ignorant. Our society seems to be spawning them at an alarming rate. These are individuals (and they often form kindred groups) who have the capacity to know but are determined not to exercise that capacity. Why would any human being do that? The causes vary.

In some cases the individual has decided it’s too much trouble, it takes too much energy and too much time, and, besides, he has other important things to do, like friending, texting and surfing or just watching TV. In addition, some justify it by asserting that belief, the absence of thought, gives them better insights and peace of mind; they are, in that way, willfully, blissfully ignorant. And then there are the arrogantly and defiantly ignorant. These are the humans—the Tea Partiers or Latter Day Know Nothings, for example and other groups are legion—who stand proudly behind their willful ignorance of everything from knowledge of the actual Tea Party and its social and economic context to what is actually causing the daily widening of the income gaps among their fellow citizens. These people actually think that too much thinking is the cause of so much of the misery they witness everywhere. And they dare you to release them from their ignorance.

I could go on to discuss how media play handmaiden to this pandemic of ignorance, but that would become far too academic. My fear is that we all have become too complacent about this plague of ignorance. It reminds me of the plague scene in Monty Python where the death workers pull their cart up to each house and matter-of-factly shout, “Bring out your dead!” Have we become that way about ignorance? Has it become so pervasive, so culturally ensconced that we feel it is part of what being human means?

BTW—"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." -- George Bernard Shaw