Ignorance is Not Bliss

Scarcely had I learned to read “Run spot, run,” when, at dismissal time one day, my mother showed up by the schoolhouse door. We walked a few blocks to the public library where I was issued a card and learned how to checkout books.

From then on, every Monday, I walked there, selected a couple of books to read for pleasure and, unaccompanied, walked the half mile or so home. Looking back, even I find it hard to believe I was permitted such freedom and responsibility at that age, but times were different then. I thought nothing of it. The walk was a valuable learning experience in itself.

I did enjoy the books, and, over time, my store of knowledge grew while vocabulary and English usage skills improved effortlessly. Soon I could read most anything. Mature comprehension took a while longer to evolve. As it did, I found myself synthesizing facts and concepts and reading between the lines. I’m sure all that reading was instrumental in helping my brain cells to develop more of their potential.

Having been denied college, my parents placed a high value on education and actively cultivated intellectual curiosity in themselves and in their kids. They exposed me to all types of music and literature. They stressed the importance of studying history and understanding current events in context. At the dinner table, blessedly free of electronic distractions, we discussed the politics of the day and major social issues. My parents elicited my juvenile opinions. They then proceeded to model critical thinking skills. They encouraged me to fact check and to apply critical analysis and common sense to whatever I read or heard and to consider the reliability of an information source.

The development of a more insightful mind was furthered by my early religious training. The Jewish tradition regards scripture as neither literally true nor the final word on any subject. It interprets the Bible metaphorically. This approach requires the intellectual capacity to think abstractly. It encourages re-interpretation in light of current knowledge. In short it trains you, as my father used to say, to “use your head for more than a hat rack.”

In my blog, “Live Free And Die” I described how it suddenly dawned on me that ignorance is not the sole province of a small bunch of country bumpkins. In the blog, “It’s The Stupidity, Stupid” I elaborated on the fact that composite IQs of the populations of Red states are generally much lower than those of Blue states. Many fall significantly below the average IQ. An average IQ will get you through life, but it does not support the synthetic mental functions required for abstract and critical thinking.

I doubt many MAGA mothers in Mississippi send their first graders to libraries. Why the IQs in Red states are lower is probably a matter of debate, but it’s clear the cultural issues embraced by MAGA voters are influenced, in addition to prejudice, by an abysmal store of general knowledge combined with a dearth of logical thinking, lack of intellectual curiosity and dismissal of facts when they do not support beliefs. It’s not coincidental that hard corps MAGA voters are mostly poorly educated and/or ultra-religious fundamentalists who, even if they have the necessary brainpower to think logically, have been trained not to use it.

On rankings of attained educational level by religious group, ten fundamentalist Christian sects bring up the rear. I have long suspected that the tradition of literality embedded in their religious “study” stifles development of synthetic brain processes and predisposes them to gullibility and narrow mindedness.

Parents and our educational system too often fall short of their responsibility to produce literate citizens with solid grounding in history and civics. Twenty-three percent of Americans are illiterate or functionally illiterate. It doesn’t help that there is so much parental pressure on schools to not teach their kids the facts. On an internet history quiz that seemed pretty easy even to me who had no formal history education after high school, 77%— yes 77%,— failed. A 2012 survey showed that more than a quarter of
Americans think the sun revolves around Earth, only 39% knew about the Big Bang theory and only 48% knew humans evolved from earlier animal species. How can such a cadre of the clueless be expected to vote intelligently?

It’s frightening that our electoral and representational systems give the ignorant minority a disproportionate say in national politics. How can you vote intelligently for someone when you don’t even know what their job entails?

Ignorance is not the sole province of the unintelligent. Many brains are too filled up with popular culture to have much space left over for anything of substance.

Uninformed people will maintain, often very aggressively, that that their opinions are as good as anyone else’s. Plato contended that opinions can be neither right nor wrong, but they can be better or worse. The result of ignorance is worse opinions. Bad opinions lead to bad decisions like whom to vote for, whether to take a vaccine or to wear a mask.

Along with greed and prejudice, ignorance more so than any foreign power or extremist group ranks among the gravest threats to our democracy. Sadly, even the smartest among us have more than our share of it.