Ignorantia

The other day, an item crossed my News Feed, with the intriguing title, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ignorance, But Were Afraid to Ask."

The article turned out to be a book review in The Washington Post about a recently published volume called, the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies. Reviewer Ilya Somin states that the work, "is probably the most extensive one-volume compendium of knowledge about ignorance to date. It includes chapters on numerous different types of ignorance, including ignorance in science, health care, literature, philosophy, economics, and many aspects of government policy. It also includes contributors from multiple countries, and many different disciplines, including economics, political science, philosophy, sociology, history, and law."

Somin goes on to say, "The realm of ignorance is so vast that no one volume can fully cover all of it. But this one probably comes closer to doing so than any other published in recent decades."

Somin, a Professor of Law at George Mason University, remarks on a chapter in the book that he contributed. "The chapter emphasizes how rational ignorance can be harmful in situations where individually rational behavior can lead to bad collective outcomes. For example, it is often rational for individual voters to be ignorant about politics; but an entire electorate of mostly ignorant voters can be a real menace."

The discussion of ignorance reminded me of this passage from Charles Dickens', A Christmas Carol:

From the foldings of its robe, [the Spirit of Christmas Present] brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."

The knowledge of ignorance has attained academic recognition from the loftiest citadels of Ivy League universities, to online credit courses you can take for fifty bucks.

One such course, offered by the Australian National University, is simply titled, "Ignorance! - Find out what ignorance is, where it originates, what people do with it, and its roles in society and culture."

The prospectus states:

Ignorance! provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how people think about unknowns, how they deal with them, and how certain kinds of ignorance are enshrined in cultures and social institutions. Over 5 weeks, we’ll be taking you on a tour through ignorance in all its varieties and guises. Ignorance is everyone’s business. Ignorance is relevant to every discipline and profession, and to everyday life, both at work and at play. No matter what domain you study or work in, this course will have something to offer to you.

I even considered enrolling, if for no other reason than to find out what my own “ignorance profile” is, but the course actually received very negative reviews. One attendee said:

This course isn't about ignorance, rather it is an example of its many nuances. The "instructors" are merely video images and the day to day administration of the course is left to staffers who engage debate by "unenrolling" anyone that offers a different opinion from theirs, or who challenges their "understanding" of what ignorance is. The "students" by and large seem "blissful" and god forbid anyone point out any actual examples of ignorance in their posted comments, least you be thrown out. I have participated in quite a few "moocs" [Massive Open Online Courses] and while I find most to be utterly useless, this one is pure IGNORANCE.

The branch of science, called agnotology, is the study of culturally induced ignorance, including the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.

One insidious example of the deliberate production of ignorance is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science (in reality, pseudo-science), the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.

Agnotology focuses on the causes of culturally induced ignorance such as deliberate mainstream media neglect, corporate manipulation as in the tobacco reports, governmental secrecy and suppression of information, and culturo-political selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness. Meaning the public has a short attention span and memory.

And as if this was not enough, agnotology has spawned the discipline of cognitronics, which aims at analyzing the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization, and at coping with these distortions.

The availability of large amounts of knowledge in the information age may not necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry. Instead it allows many people to cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs. The Internet of Things (IoT), and emerging digital entertainment, such as VR (Virtual Reality), keeps people distracted from new knowledge.

P.J. O'Rourke, long time writer and editor for The National Lampoon, said, “No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

I have always thought that ignorance and pride go hand in hand. T-shirts loudly proclaim: IGNORANT AND PROUD OF IT. "I have the right to be ignorant" could stand as the motto of the average American. It seems there's a scientific basis for this known as the "Dunning–Kruger Effect," which states that "difficulty in recognizing one's own incompetence leads to inflated self-assessment."

Continuing in this vein, we are all familiar with the saying, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Individuals with superficial knowledge of a topic or subject may be worse than people who know absolutely nothing. Charles Darwin observed, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Counter-intuitively, ignorant people work hard at maintaining their ignorance. Wikipedia points out that, "Ignorance can stifle learning, especially if the ignorant person believes that they are not ignorant. A person who falsely believes he or she is knowledgeable will not seek out clarification of his or her beliefs, but rather rely on his or her ignorant position. He or she may also reject valid but contrary information, neither realizing its importance nor understanding it." I need only say two words: Fox News.

Dutch-American historian, journalist, and award-winning children's book author Hendrik Willem van Loon, cynically pointed out that, “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.”

Famed professor of biochemistry and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. A constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, [is] nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

Social media personality and author Mark Dice has made a career conducting "man on the street" interviews which have garnered millions of views on YouTube. His account was actually deleted by YouTube for a time, but has since been reactivated. Dice approaches random people on public venues, and elicits responses to such questions as:

"What do you think of the passing of Martin Luther King, the first African-American to walk on the moon?"

"What do you think about Obama endorsing White House economic advisor Karl Marx for president in 2016?"

"Should overlooked Founding Fathers and signers of the Declaration of Independence, such as John Wilkes Booth and Joseph Stalin get a little more credit?"

"How many stars are there on the American flag?"

"Can you name an author of a book? Any author?"

"Would you like to try a free sample of a new bottled water on the market? It's imported from Japan by the Fukushima company."

"If we had stricter gun control laws would Lee Harvey Oswald not have been able to shoot Jesus? What year did Jesus die?"

Seeing is believing, so I won't give away the answers, except to say the most popular response to this last question was "the 1300s."

You can see all the videos at YouTube.com/MarkDice.

The word ignore means to refuse to take notice of or acknowledge; disregard intentionally; fail to consider.

To be ignorant is to be ignore-ant - to willfully ignore. Ignorant, from whence we get the pejorative ignoramus, also means discourteous or rude.

The popular phrase, "ignorance is bliss," comes from the poem, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1742), by Thomas Gray: "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

Synonyms for bliss include joy, happiness, ecstasy, elation, rapture, and euphoria. To attain bliss is to reach a state of perfect happiness, so as to be oblivious of everything else.

I'm not sure about the happiness part, but the vast majority of people are sure oblivious.