Given that it’s back to school this
week, it’s appropriate that education’s on my mind, although it’s education in
a grander, societal sense. In the Trump era we say the words “How stupid can he
be?” and—worse—“How stupid can we think he are?” and—horrifying—“How stupid can
you be to support him?” a lot more than we’re comfortable with. And we lived
through the Dubya administration, remember?
Being
a news junkie, I can’t shut it off, nor can I shut off my repugnance. Not for the
horrors that so often make the headlines, but more often I’m struck dumb by the
dumb. The evidence of the uneducated, stupid actions or stupid people, by the
wilfully ignorant never ceases to move me. The wilfully ignorant feel it’s
right to think what they want to think—ironically—and to form opinions before consulting evidence. Usually they
avoid evidence completely.
Click
on your news app, your radio, your phone. Go anywhere. Right now you are going
to hear about climate change deniers, whooping cough anti-vaxxers, and Nazis.
They may not all be stupid people, but they’re exercising the right to act
stupid by ignoring the obvious and the documented that would educate them out
of the cave of their own wilful ignorance.
Nazis.
Seriously.
Santayana
said “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and Wells
said “History is a race between education and catastrophe” but I don’t know how
either would take people who know they don’t want to know better. What do you
do with someone who refuses to learn? It makes me think of Homer Simpson
smashing a plate over his head rather than listen to rational thought.
War
is the last resort of any but the sadistic and the violently stupid. It’s humanity’s
worst creation, a petty, ugly thing that we’ve convinced ourselves is more
glory than gorey. Usually, those in power us it as an excuse to attain
something, or as a distraction.
I
say again: Nazis. Seriously. The people in the news are Americans entitled by a
racist, sexist billionaire president with the morals of a rapist and the
intelligence of a damp throw-rug, but they’re everywhere. Idiots who call
themselves Nazis because it comes with more fear and fewer syllables than “White
Supremacists” and because it represents something they can take pride in,
because they’re wilfully ignorant enough to think there’s anything proud about
National Socialism.
Nazis
were themselves idiots, ideologically-speaking. They followed the hackneyed
racial profiling that a failed Austrian artist literally made up while killing time in jail as a means of justifying
violence. Fact-checking was a heinous crime in the Reich.
(Are
we getting tired of the Hitler/Trump parallels? Well then he should quit living
them.)
These
modern Nazis had fathers and grandfathers who fought against facism, who fought
against the wilfully ignorant who goose-stepped along behind another big talker
who said a lot of nothing. A modern Nazi is either a moron, or a sad little
coward who needs to convince himself he can control a world he barely
comprehends. Easy answers to complex questions are for the stupid. Racial and
cultural superiority is for the stupid. And not learning from the past means
you’ll be an embarrassing clip in your grandchild’s history class someday.
Southern
Alberta is experiencing an outbreak of whooping cough and the strain of this
defeated disease is finding its legs in the unvaccinated, chiefly fundamentalist
population. It’s the part of the province rife with the homeschooled, the
modern-denying Mennonite, the traditional Dutch. People who insulate themselves
from their world, its knowledge, from education, from the obvious.
It’s
enough to make us secular folks with religious tolerance choke on our own sweet
numbing booze as we watch faith raised as a wall between the believer and common
sense. Why think when you can pray? Why learn when you can just believe? When
did being on your knees before your god make people suck?
Faith
is taking the place of what is known, and that sort of insularity is especially
ignorant, especially wilful.
And
lastly, there’s the criticism that makes me feel a bit of a pariah given the
updates daily from Texas, but given as well how much bad climate news is the
norm, there’s no good time to talk about it. Our world is changing and we
changed it, the crises has begun. BC is suffering a historical wildfire season,
most of Western Canada is suffering what could be the beginning of years of
drought, and the Gulf Coast spits out yet another beyond-record hurricane.
Extreme weather is the new normal, and yet as the planet we live on that
sustains us rejects the poisons we spew into it, the wilful ignorant still
claim that this is “Just the way it is.” As if mass extinction and cataclysmic biosphere shifts are, hey,
business.
Of
course this leaves the door wide open for the greedy and the stupid—The Trump
villains—to step in and continue the planet’s degradation unchecked. People
aren’t just unaware of the disaster, they’re denying it, denying the facts in front of them. Wilful ignorance
means to form your opinion on the changing climate, drawing pale reference to the
Ice Age (years versus centuries, uh huh) or some Haliburton spokesman who made
sense once and, hey, how else you gonna get the oil outta the ground? Life goes
on, game’s on.
Wilful
ignorance can be beaten because it’s usually not malicious, it’s mostly just
lazy. As education takes a hit in this age of unreason, though, we have to ask
ourselves not how stupid are we, but how stupid are we willing to be?
