Willful Ignorance and Its Consequences

While most of the people I know may allow others to make outrageous “truth claims” out of whimsy or sport, we do not accept “truth claims” based on clear and demonstrable ignorance. In consequential matters, we expect a quality of intellectual curiosity, informed opinion, and mature reflection. And, we assume that no one will fall back on so-called “received knowledge” or “blind faith” arguments as a means of ending all further debate.

This is not the nature of the today’s culture, however, where a series of unique circumstances has led us to allow others not only to employ willful ignorance in debate but to take seriously the absurdities of willful ignorance as well. Here are a few brief examples of how some modern historical factors have led to this condition. Some of these are sinister in their calculation; some are the consequence of distensions or corruptions of well-intended cultural change.

1. Modern corporations have manufactured “truth sets” about themselves and their products that involve constructed “realities” in which societal truths are distorted in order to advantage the corporations profit motive. For example, auto companies, through the design of their products and their advertising, promote a sweeping ideal of the good and successful life – a life centered on the automobile.

2. Radical Christianity today has “dolled-up” traditional beliefs, added a guitar player and folksongs to create a glaze of modernity, converted sports arenas into churches to emphasize the popularity of their beliefs, re-done the message of “The Fundamentals” so that “name it and claim it” greed becomes God’s wish, re-invented Middle Eastern History (e.g., John Hagee), and trimmed down the real sources of truth sources to one -- The Bible. The consequence is a contrived alternate universe of belief that appears doubt free and complete in its simple answers to complex problems.

2. Modern politicians have lost almost all sense of public responsibility under the bright light of “celebrity” status and under the easy pressure of corporations with whom they are familiar and even chummy and to whom they are beholden. “Stakeholders,” they willingly admit, trump “citizens” in every important way.

3. Post-modernism, which has legitimately questioned the perspectives from which truths are often derived, has fallen under the pen of acolytes not up to the task of retaining the complexity and integrity of the best intellectual claims of post-modernism. As a result, all truth has become all too relative to all too many people.

4. The decent quest for ethnic, racial, and cultural equality over the past three-quarters-of-a-century has been corrupted into an argument on behalf of a wide range of behaviors and truth-claims based on ethnicity or race or cultural distinction, despite the fact that some of these claims can be authentically challenged by arguments from perspectives other than group identity.

5. Modern education, in its noble attempt to democratize education and bring everyone inside the tent of knowledge, has succumbed to a bizarre reductionism in which “anyone’s opinion on anything is as good as anyone else’s.” Thus, we now have both a juvenile and an adult population who, several times a day at least, bring an end to a conversation or discussion with one word – “whatever.”

During the so-called “town meetings” in the United States this past summer, we saw some extraordinary examples of “willful ignorance.” Bald racist statements, threatened violence, and a shout-down-the-opposition style of free speech employed to deny intelligent discourse and the right of others to speak freely were standard fare. Unable to articulate an argument or use historical examples correctly, “socialism” was easily confused with “totalitarianism” (a word too big for the ranters to handle in any case) and public interest with “communism.” Energized by some assumed “higher truth,” many of this right-wing crowd showed no temerity or embarrassment in telling the citizens of other countries (especially Great Britain and Canada) that they suffered under failed health care systems and that socialized health care was to blame (i.e., “universal, single-payer health care”; most of them seemed incapable of comprehending that complex concept well enough to delineate what they actually hated).

The media’s favorite example of opposition to the current Congress’s health care reform was voiced by a woman who – by chance, I think – began her peroration against health care reform assuming the role of an indignant sufferer who already had had something highly invasive thrust upon her. She ended with the usual “socialism” and “Russian dictatorship” references. Two things interested me in her brief “speech”: her crescendo of anger and her admission at the very beginning of her rant that she did not usually have much interest in, or knowledge of, politics or political affairs. No commentators seemed bothered by either her rage or her admission of ignorance of “political” matters. Journalists and ordinary citizens alike have no cultural language to initiate challenges to the heart-felt opinions of person’s like her– no matter how grossly absurd and incorrect those opinions are. Emotion and theatre trump sanity and reason every time.

No realm of human knowledge is so exemplary in exposing willful ignorance as the extensive lack of political knowledge among members of a democracy. Perhaps I read too much George Orwell when I was younger because it was Orwell who convinced me that everything is political. He made that claim on several occasions in clear prose and implied it in almost everything he wrote. Like many others of his generation, he also got to see how willful ignorance of political matters and head-in-the-sand morality led to the horrors of WWII and its dress rehearsal for WWII – the Spanish Civil War. In my own experience, students (and others) used to tell me individually that they “were not political.” I usually tried to convince each of them that everyone, through either action or passivity, was political. In class, I would rant more damningly on the subject.

No society -- no matter how rich and secure – can afford the luxury of willful ignorance. Yet, that is pretty much where popular politics stands in the U. S. In an earlier blog, I compared the right-wing campaign against health care reform -- supported by willfully ignorant followers -- to the processes at work in Nazi Germany in WWII. Calling someone or something “Fascist” or “Nazi” has become a hackneyed cliché, and almost all listeners and readers dismiss the speaker or author for employing mere hyperbole when those epithets are used. For that reason, and to avoid being willfully ignorant and irresponsibly angry myself, I propose to argue that a substantial number of people on the far right of American politics are indeed acting in a fascistic manner, a manner that would be at home in 1921 Italy and 1933 Germany. There are caveats, of course. Not all of what is happening in opposition to American health care reform fits that definition. But too much of it does, and that ranting opposition is not simply the result of the heartless economic interests of corporate America or the political interests of the Republican Party. This is not to say that some “putsch” has begun. But I am claiming that radical right-wing behavior has taken on the attributes of something more than colorful extremist speech – speech at which some may laugh (e.g., “The Daily Show”) and others simply weep.

Let me elaborate by referring to two specific essays that address the issues at hand: one by Umberto Eco, regarding Fascism; the other by Erik Hoffer, the very popular author of The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). Eco is a professor of semiotics – not political ideology. Hoffer, a longshoreman and not technically a philosopher, thought and wrote extensively on the psychology of adherents to mass movements of all sorts. I am drawn to both partly because they employ historical experience as a legitimate guide and partly because, in regard to the subject of blind believers and followers, they considered these issues from the viewpoint of public intellectuals, not as academics with some puny professional thesis to promote.

In a small article in the New York Review of Books (1995) entitled Ur, or Eternal Fascism, Eco laid out fourteen specific “features” of fascism. To call someone or something fascist, Eco noted, was to apply Wittengenstein’s observation that games cannot be precisely defined by firm rules but must be understood as having broadly shared characteristics which constitute an ineffable “family resemblance” to one another. Fascism, for Eco, depends on a similar set of resemblances. It is politically, ideologically and philosophically “discombobulated,” he says, but it is firmly fixed in many of its emotional manifestations. Of the fourteen general points that Eco identified with eternal fascism, at least ten apply to the all-too-visible angry right-wing in the U. S. today. And, as Eco argued, of his fourteen points “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

Hoffer’s arguments complement Eco’s. No matter what their belief, Hoffer claimed, “true believer’s” are alike in believing there is “one and only one truth.” Eco also saw his eternal fascists as people for whom “truth has been spelled out once and for all.” Ironically, having been given the right to be taken seriously as a consequence of modern conditions of relativism, these people insist on absolute truth. True believers tend to follow a few leaders, Hoffer observed, and they are notable in their lack of humility.

In relationship to today’s angry right-wing extremists opposing health care reform (and many other “liberal” things), Eco and Hoffer offer some enlightenment.

1. The “town-meeting” extremists are completely uninterested in rational discourse or attempting to discover solutions to problems apparent to the rest of the population. They are not open to argument. They make absurd claims and charges. But, as Hoffer noted, “Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.” Eco more subtly defines this as attachment to a “syncretic” culture in which internal contradictions and incompatibilities may appear but in which the dominance of some “primeval truth” will always prevail.

2. The “town meeting” extremists and the vast array of right-wing radio talk show hosts are angry and filled with hate. Why? Because, as Eco points out, “disagreement is treason” in eternal fascism. Disagreement implies “diversity,” something they also oppose, as can be seen in their hatred of Muslims and Mexicans, and so on and on. Fascists have a “natural fear of difference,” Eco notes, and they may pretend that the mother country is under siege. Hoffer, too, observes that attempts to shame or belittle or poke fun at such extremists does not work and is simply “more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.” Just think of Rush Limbaugh, who DOES speak for this minority, and apply the above.

3. Right-wing political and economic extremists proclaim that all they want is freedom. “Freedom” has been their mantra in all debates, despite the fact that the freedom they advocated in health care meant more dictatorial authority in the hands of their insurers, and likely more costs to everyone in society, including the economy in general. But the “freedom” they speak of is not one that involves toleration of speech or press or political association. They make no apology for opposing representative government, another of Eco’s conditions of “eternal fascism.” Why this apparent internal contradiction of being “for freedom” but against its practice? Hoffer contends that true believers find that affective “freedom is an irksome burden . . . We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’”

4. These right-wing adherents offer no complex solutions to complex issues because they are not interested in being autonomous human beings (truly free persons) struggling with difficult, sometimes irresolvable problems. Their “’Leader’ pretends to be their interpreter,” Eco argues. So, all that these right-wing followers have to do is use a few words that they believe are so obnoxious as to turn people away from any reform – words like “communism” and “socialism” and, laughably, “liberalism.” “All of the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco claimed, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” The final word on this matter belongs to Hoffer in his description of the antithesis of the true believer:

“Free men are aware of the imperfection of human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.”

The right-wing in the U. S. today should not be taken lightly. Allusions to them as “fascistic” are not entirely misplaced. The cruelties of Mussolini and the Nazis need not be repeated for fascist tendencies to be in play. And, we should all heed Hoffer’s understanding of the truly free person. In doing so, however, we must take “willful ignorance” as a serious threat and a social disease that must be cured insofar as possible.

As postscript, here are a couple of recent quotations peeled off the internet on the matters above:

“ Hopefully, the attempt to restore 1953 America will not turn into an attempt to impose 1933 Germany.” (JohnG – Paul Krugman, “Comments of the Moment” list, Aug. 30, 2009, NYTimes)

“ If ignorance is bliss, why are these people so angry?” (Len Kaminsky, cited in Paul Krugman “Comments of the Moment” list, Aug. 30, 2009, NYTimes).