We live in an age of ignorance, but can decide to fix this – today

Summary:  One of the great themes of the FM website is our clouded vision, the American people’s inability to clearly see the world and our susceptibility to propaganda. It’s central to almost all of our large problems. It’s one of the most important issues of our time, for I doubt that reform remains impossible for a people so confused and gullible. Today we have an incisive essay about this by Charles Simic, a poet and keen observer of our society.

Matthew 7:5: “… first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Contents

1. The Age of Ignorance
2. My comment on Simic’s essay
3. About the author
4. For More Information

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“Age of Ignorance“

by Charles Simic, Blog of the New York Review of Books
20 March 2012
Posted with their generous permission.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught.

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Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

Even regional history has gotten a short shrift. Students who come from old New England mill towns, as I have discovered, have never been told about the famous strikes in their communities in which workers were shot in cold blood and the perpetrators got away scot-free. I wasn’t surprised that their high schools were wary of bringing up the subject, but it astonished me that their parents and grandparents, and whoever else they came in contact with while they were growing up, never mentioned these examples of gross injustice. Either their families never talked about the past, or their children were not paying attention when they did. Whatever it was, one is confronted with the problem of how to remedy their vast ignorance about things they should have already been familiar with as the generations of students before them were.

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success.

No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?

In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:

• Christians are persecuted in this country.
• The government is coming to get your guns.
• Obama is a Muslim.
• Global Warming is a hoax.
• The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
• Schools push a left-wing agenda.
• Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
• Obama hates white people.
• The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
• The safety net contributes to poverty.
• The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.

One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt.

What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.

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(2)  My comment on Simic’s essay

“Yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”
— Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods Of Reform” (1900)

Simic’s essay says what I’ve said in dozens of posts, but more eloquently. However at the end he concludes with the standard trope of partisan writing in America: it’s all the bad people on the other side. Note that the material before does not remotely justify such a conclusions. To mention just one point, conservatives do not control State and local school boards across the country, to have created the “dumbing down” he accurately describes.

As I have shown so many times, liberals see this phenomenon clearly at work in conservatives. And vice versa. Neither see it in themselves, even when their own analysis shows the deep roots of our ignorance and gullibility — on a scale and to a degree without precedent in our history (these things are human characteristics, present to varying degrees always and everywhere).

Nothing will change so long as each side considers this a problem of their foes. Correct diagnosis of ones foes but blindness to our own faults empowers our foes, as the 1% laugh at our divisions and confusion. Only when reform starts within ourselves can we regain control of our political machinery.

Where this begins I do not know. But a willingness to see clearly, no matter how disturbing the view, might be the best starting the point.

(3)  About the author

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Simic’s recent works include Voice at 3 a.m., a selection of later and new poems; Master of Disguises, new poems; and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a collection of short essays that was published by New York Review Books as an e-book original. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 was published in March 2013.

— From his bio at the NYRB, which also lists his reviews published there.

(4)  For More Information

(a)  Posts about the importance of clear vision (neither Left or Right is “reality-based”):

1. Does America have clear vision? Here’s an “eye chart” for our minds., 15 June 2009
2. Facts are an obstacle to the reform of America, 20 October 2011
3. Examples of America’s broken vision. Here’s why we cannot clearly see our world., 21 October 2012
4. What does a “broken OODA loop” look like?, 23 October 2012
5. Learning skepticism, an essential skill for citizenship in 21st century America, 1 December 2012
6. Who lies to us the most? Left or Right?, 25 February 2013
7. Learning to see beyond the American Pravda, 24 May 2013
8. Remembering is the first step to learning. Living in the now is ignorance., 29 October 2013
9. The achilles heel of both political parties, waiting to be exploited by reformers, 7 November 2013
10. The missing but essential key to building a better America, 21 November 2013 — Clear sight about our condition
11. Swear allegiance to the truth as a step to reforming America, 24 November 2013
12. Today you can take the first step to reforming America, 6 February 2014 — Seeing the world clearly is revolutionary

(b)  Posts about ignorance and delusions of the Right:

1. Can Obama turn America into something like Zimbabwe?, 22 February 2010
2. About the political significance of the conservatives’ health care propaganda, 23 March 2010
3. More use of the big lie: shifting the blame for the housing crisis, 29 December 2011
4. Seeing the world through conservative eyes, 15 February 2014
5. A look into the GOP mind: untethered from reality and drifting in the wind, 3 March 2014

(c)  Examples of the Left’s exaggerations and misinformation about climate change:

1. More propaganda: the eco-fable of Easter Island, 4 February 2010
2. Kevin Drum talks about global warming, illustrating the collapse of the Left’s credibility, 17 December 2012
3. Lessons the Left can learn from the Right when writing about climate change, 12 December 2012 — More from Phil Plait
4. Fierce words about those “wacky professional climate change deniers”, 20 January 2013
5. A powerful story about global warming in Alaska that has set Twitter aflame, 23 June 2013
6. The North Pole is now a lake! Are you afraid yet?, 3 August 2013
7. Climate science deniers on the Left, captured for viewing, 29 September 2013
8. Why the Left is losing: another example of incompetent marketing, 26 February 2014
9. The Left sees “Climate buffoons” and “deniers”. What do they see in the mirror?, 7 March 2014

(d)  Posts about propaganda, molding our minds:

1. Successful propaganda as a characteristic of 21st century America, 1 February 2010
2. A note about practical propaganda, 22 March 2010
3. The similar delusions of America’s Left and Right show our common culture – and weakness, 26 March 2010
4. Programs to reshape the American mind, run by the left and right, 2 August 2010
5. The easy way to rule: leading a weak people by feeding them disinformation, 13 April 2011
6. Facts are an obstacle to the reform of America, 20 October 2011
7. Our minds are addled, the result of skillful and expensive propaganda, 28 December 2011
8. Who lies to us the most? Left or Right?, 25 February 2013
9. We can see our true selves in the propaganda used against us, 14 May 2013
10. A nation lit only by propaganda, 3 June 2013
11. The secret, simple tool that persuades Americans. That molds our opinions., 24 July 2013

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