By Ustaz Mark Bang
Why are some people choosing to be ignorant? Perhaps they know the trouble that knowledge would cause.
Perhaps they are new (to the environment or the company). Perhaps they want to avoid more questions (signs of intellect, yet not enough enthusiasm to be helpful). Perhaps they know what searching for answers will involve, and they don’t want to spend that time. All of these are signs of the diversity that we have as a human species. Without people like the ones you’re asking about, we would not appreciate others who are knowledgeable and helpful.
One way to look at life is to see everyone you meet as someone who has something to teach you. It makes you open to continually learning something. It also keeps you humble; I have seven earned degrees, but I have learned so much from those who didn’t even finish elementary school. If you ask most people one of these three questions, you will learn something: “What do you wish other people knew about the problems you face doing your job?” “What gives you the greatest moments of life satisfaction?” “What is the funniest thing you saw when growing up?” One of those questions will hit pay dirt, and you will be smarter than you were before meeting this person. Ignorance has at its core the word ignore. That implies willfulness. A person is choosing to remain uninformed or worse, misinformed or disinformed. That means they are probably choosing to not listen to anyone who doesn’t share their willful ignorance. That’s annoying for a person who pays attention to the conversation in their head but not to what the other person has to say, or ignores them or insults them. And they embrace easy answers because they like the feeling of knowing more than actually knowing. They might find it difficult to get from where they are to where others are. There’s a learning curve that can be daunting. I know someone who is enthused by a cluster of conspiracy theories.
Ignorant” doesn’t necessarily mean stupid or deliberately uneducated. The word comes originally from Latin and for most of its history has meant “unaware” or “not knowing,” so you really have to look at the education system to work out why so many people have such a dreadful general knowledge or grasp of current affairs.
A good example of this is the current Trump-voting base, who tend to come from farming and “rust belt” areas where high levels of education have not been necessary in their employment and family life. In conjunction with this, a majority of these people live in somewhat closed communities where they don’t feel the need to learn much about the outside world. They sit comfortably in their limited social circle and families. These are not bad people, and many are just as bright as anyone, but because of limited contact with the “mainstream” world and lack of education, they are quite literally “ignorant” in the sense of not knowing. The role of evangelical churches, which tend to thrive in these areas, is another factor in holding people back. Liberals in the USA, on the other hand, tend to live in urban environments and are better educated as they work more as professionals, middle-class workers, and innovators; interact with a wider range of people; and have better access to current, high-quality information.
Let’s put it this way: the ones who warn about its dangers the most, telling everyone not to be ignorant of history lest it repeat itself, are themselves risking a repeat of history. Seriously. How many anti-socialists really know just what happened to cause the October Revolution and not just the bite-size summary they were taught in school? How many are sure their practices will ensure it won’t happen to the United States?
Let’s lay it down: Russia in 1917 was not that prosperous for the common citizen. Almost all of Russia’s wealth was possessed by the aristocracy; the government was an absolute monarchy with a cult of divinity around the Tsar. Aristocrats dined in palaces, with not a care about how their own servants were getting by on meager pickings. Sure, there was a sizeable middle class, but like everyone at the time, the elite stamped on them with anti-Semitic laws and practices, which affected a lot of them because Jews have historically been a significant element of the urbanite classes in Europe. By the eve of the Russian Revolution, a devastating war, a recent famine, and the lack of counteraction by the Russian aristocracy saw wheelbarrows of money being used to buy bread and queues around the block for groceries.
Dial the clock back over a hundred years to the original socialists, the original left-wingers calling for power to the people; radical members of the Sans-Culottes, the common citizen class. France was a land where conferences in the French government had three main parties of equal representative proportion. One for the priesthood, one for the nobility, and one for everyone else. Since the first two would usually see eye to eye, the third was largely ignored when discussing matters of state. Anything that didn’t favor the more privileged echelons of society was shot down with a quick 2/3rds majority from a nobility-priesthood coalition.
The common classes made up some 90% of the population, got a third of the seating in the government, and were squared up against a coalition that represented some 5–10% of the population but two-thirds of the Senate. Add a famine and a losing war bankrupting the nation to the mix, and heads literally would roll. And if that weren’t bad for the people who cared about that sort of thing, bad harvests coupled with an experiment in giving merchants complete control of grain prices led to a famine so bad in 1775 it inspired conspiracy theories among Parisians that the aristocracy were hoarding all the grain for themselves.
Even America’s own history gives a warning: the Great Depression of 1929 brought the United States dangerously close to being like Russia a decade and a half earlier. With the dollar collapsing, homelessness skyrocketing, shantytowns in city parks, and dust storms a few years earlier devastating farms across the country. Thanks for reading, and never hesitate to read the next part coming soon. “Public Staunchest Ally”
The writer of this article is a human rights activist, writer, and professional teacher.