The Perils of Ignorance

A free society depends on a shared knowledge of objective reality

We are all born ignorant, but to stay ignorant is a choice, without some form of education you are lost. —(Chinese Proverb)

There is a recent trend on Twitter of people posting various iterations of the statement, “I trust Joe Rogan more than Dr. Fauci”. Yes, it’s true- many Americans trust a B-list standup comedian and popular podcaster more than they do a scientist who’s devoted his life to the study of infectious diseases and to serving the public. This apparently makes perfect sense for these people; for me, it’s a reason to be, as they say online, “SMH” (shaking my head).

Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.

I grew up in the days when science was revered. In the 1950s, Americans were becoming accustomed to technological progress- television, polio vaccine, rockets carrying satellites into space. A popular children’s show of those early TV days was Meet Mr. Wizard, which featured a man in his garage demonstrating basic scientific phenomena using ordinary household materials. It was widely accepted that science was a trial-and-error affair. In school, we were taught the meaning of the scientific method. We learned about the great American inventors, beginning with Eli Whitney and including notables such as Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and the Wright Brothers.

There are myriad reasons why the nation’s faith in pursuing an understanding of objective reality began eroding in the 1960s. The confluence of these reasons led to the replacement of the skepticism necessary to critical thinking by a cynical mistrust of expertise. Of course, suspicion of educated elites has been a feature of American life since Europeans began arriving here.* Belief rather than the reliance on knowledge acquired through an empirical approach has always been part of the American character. Snake oil salesmen, con artists, populist politicians- we’ve had them all and more. Organized religion is another example: Mega-churches, televangelists, cults. It is not surprising that this country has more unique Protestant denominations than any other on the planet. There’s money to be made in the preaching business and lots of people willing to pay to have their souls redeemed. In his 2017 book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, the writer Kurt Andersen pointed out how fond we Americans are of what he termed “magical thinking”.

And that brings us to two current trends in the magical thinking world: One is the opposition to public health measures by a segment of the public- the anti-mask/ anti-vax crowd- that rejects the science and demonizes the scientists. The consequence is a cohort of Americans who feel horse dewormer is a more effective preventative for the covid virus than a vaccine developed by a worldwide network of medical scientists who based their efforts on decades of research into mRNA vaccines.** That some people may be skeptical of medical science should not be shocking when you consider the history of climate change denial. The consequence is the virus continues to spread and mutate into novel variants, prolonging the pandemic.

The other popular trend of magical thinking is the widespread embrace of conspiracy theories. Such delusions periodically infiltrate the nation’s zeitgeist, whether it be the witch trials in colonial times, the suspected plots of Freemasons in the 18th Century, or the faked moon landing in the 1960s. The proliferation of mass communication technologies, especially social networks, has facilitated the spread of such fever dreams. Examples abound: Bill Gates is responsible for inserting tracking chips into covid vaccines, Democrats are operating a pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizzeria, and JFK Jr. is going to reappear and become Vice-President when Donald Trump is reinstated as President. “Crazy”, you say, but several hundred people waited in Dealey Plaza in Dallas last month for the reincarnated Junior to reveal himself. Spoiler: Their patience was not rewarded.

To write off these trends as the chimeras of a lunatic fringe is to minimize both how widespread these types of beliefs are and how serious a threat they pose to a democratic society. The early leaders of the Republic, especially Jefferson, stressed the need for an “enlightened citizenry”.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816

Our traditional reliance on public education is mired in controversy. Both the funding and the curriculum content of public schools are subject to local control, opening the way for minorities determined to push for ideological outcomes. Sham issues such as the kerfuffle over the teaching of Critical Race Theory become a pretext for changing the subject matter taught to our children. We are beyond religious zealots demanding the teaching of creationism on an equal footing with evolution (remember ‘intelligent design”?). Now there are calls for banning books found unacceptable by ideologues in local communities; and in some cases, the more extreme elements urge the burning of some titles. A sanitized telling of the nation’s history is being pushed, a history that minimizes the role of slavery and the systemic racism it embedded in American life. Even basic civics is no longer taught in most of the nation’s schools.

This downgrading of education damages our political system. The Constitution, however imperfect, has served to maintain the world’s longest enduring democracy for nearly two-and-a-half centuries. But ignorance of the responsibilities of citizenship that accompany the rights we are granted in order to live in a free society leaves people susceptible to being conned by would-be authoritarian leaders. While we might assume that providing more information to people will lead to better understanding and decision-making- Jefferson’s “enlightened citizenry”- studies show the opposite is more likely: Provided with more information on an issue, people are likely to cherry-pick those bits which conform with their prior views, a behavior labeled “confirmation bias”. Again, the proliferation of misinformation in this time of ‘alternate facts’ makes the task of picking through the daily deluge of information to arrive at a reasonable conclusion very difficult.

The Trumpist “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and the subsequent coup attempt on January 6 are manifestations of this threat. This goes hand-in-hand with the misinformation campaigns and the social media memes designed to convince the least enlightened among us that there is something rotten in Denmark: How do we trust the outcomes of elections when loud voices tell us there is fraud? The loss of trust in political institutions and the destruction of truth is the historic hallmark of fascism. When the domain of shared reality is no longer accepted as legitimate, the path to an autocratic leader is opened.

The experience of the 20th Century showed us that fascists come to power not via a coup, but through an election. Hitler and Mussolini proved this; in this century, autocrats such as Hungary’s Orban and Turkey’s Erdogan both won democratic elections. Once in power, authoritarian leaders set out to eviscerate the democratic institutions of the nation. In today’s United States, there is no doubt that the Republican Paty, in the thrall of Donald Trump, is walking the path to authoritarian government by policies intended to limit access to voting, the essence of any democracy.

This does not mean that the search for truth ends. That has never happened- the Dark Ages were followed by the Renaissance. Many issues in life are complicated, and some of us want simple, concise answers rather than doing the hard work of observing and thinking. Of course, such a lack of curiosity flies in the face of human experience: If humans were not capable of learning and adapting, we could imagine that our lives would not have changed much over the centuries.

There are no simple solutions to the current situation. The incremental steps needed to improve the quality of public education, for example, would take years, and that assumes the will to do so can be mustered. Convincing the part of the public that has been propagandized by mass media and social networks is an arduous process: Challenging a person’s beliefs is not as simple as presenting evidence.

“You are entitled to your own views, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” -Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger

What is needed is for individuals to make the commitment to think critically about complex issues, to develop hypotheses through observation, to gather information, to study and form conclusions, and to test those conclusions. That is how we pursue truth. Remember that a belief is something we might feel, but cannot prove.

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*As I’ve mentioned several times here, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism In American Life (1963) is a detailed description of this phenomenon from the early colonial era through the mid-20th Century.

**You can find a brief description of mRNA vaccines on the CDC website.

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