On Ignorance

I have had a lot of polarised experiences lately from reading about people and from listening to them. It seems somehow that the smart are getting smarter and the dumb dumber.

I am amazed almost daily by the progress achieved by humanity. Each week the Economist obituary introduces me to a true hero or heroine. When I work with youngsters I am impressed time and again. The rate of progress in behavioural sciences is awe-inspiring. Just browsing on Wikipedia can give me such pleasure, for the increased range of fascinating knowledge so readily available and the brilliance of fellow humans. This is truly an enlightened age.

But then there is the other side. Each day I witness breath-taking ignorance, often openly expressed with pride. It is often the ignorance of ignorance that gives me pause.

Some examples are in order. Two weeks ago I was on a train from Philadelphia that broke down. As usual in these situations, people actually started talking to each other. It appears that the rolling stock on this line is prone to breakdown, since many seem to have witnessed it before. Poor Amtrak came in for a lot of criticism, not surprisingly in the circumstances. But out poured all sorts of other theories. Apparently, the main reason for poor infrastructure in the US is that the country invests most of its funds into propping up other economies! Someone claimed this, at typical New Yorker volume, and many seemed to agree, while no one demurred.

Yesterday, our daughter came home from school and asked if Italy and France were safe to travel to. Seemingly one of the kids at school had mentioned a plan to travel to those countries, and the principal, no less, had almost tried to bar her from the trip, on the grounds that the places were too unsafe.

Then we can add in all we read on discussion fora or as comments to articles. Many people are struck by how mean this material is, but I find the ignorance more astonishing. The contributors really believe what they write, and what they write is just so far away from anything that could remotely be true as to make me wonder how they ever exercise their brains at all.

So I’ve tried to draw some conclusions. First, I’m not so sure things are any more polarised than they ever were, it is only that now more beliefs are more visible.

When I heard about the unsafe France and Italy story, my first reaction was that the perpetrator had no right to his responsible position. I still think that. But then I thought about something that happened to me in 1985, when I was living in Northern Ireland, during what is known as the Troubles, when the place was close to civil war and many killings happened each year.

Northern Ireland was probably the least safe place to be in Europe at the time. By contrast, the rest of Ireland might have been the safest. Nothing ever happened. Few lived there, the place was just full of fields and pubs and villages and simple living in the rain. One Friday at lunchtime in the Shell canteen I happened to mention to some tanker drivers that I was going to the south for the weekend. They looked at me in horror. Quickly I wondered if I had made a political faux pas, but soon they revealed their true belief: they told me it was not safe there.

So probably things have not changed all that much, it is just that more of us has wider windows into the lives and opinions of others. Comment sections did not exist thirty years. Then again, nor did Wikipedia, and the Economist and other information sources worked with a much narrower range of sources. So we weren’t blessed with so much of the best of humanity, yet we were spared from some of the most ignorant.

Another factor may be that the ignorant have got louder. Before, we were less encouraged to be curious, and maybe with were a bit deferent and shy in expressing our opinions, more in awe of experts or even more senior family members. But now so much information, factual and otherwise, is available everywhere, so we all have a temptation to become part of the noise. Generally I celebrate that, and I love the way education has moved from facts to enquiry, but clearly there are downsides.

With the cacophony and with modern social media, are we talking more than listening? Are we being selective in what we pay attention to in order to keep the noise manageable, and not challenging our chosen sources enough? There is an idea going around that with all this complexity we tend to limit ourselves to voices that reinforce our existing prejudices.

A possible outcome is that we are all more open to be brainwashed. We used to trust the BBC, and know what to trust and what to ignore from Labour and Tories. Now we are confused and get lazy. Fox News can claim that Birmingham runs under Sharia Law and a lot of people choose to believe it.

This has uncomfortable consequences for democracy. We can see how politics in polarising and becoming nastier in democratic countries. We like to blame gerrymandering and the corrosive effect of money. But none of this would matter, indeed it would not even happen, without the ignorance and apathy of the general public.

Democracy should be stronger than ever, thanks to the wide availability of information, improvements in education and the breakdown of social deference. Even technology can help, for example via instant referenda. But the truth is much more sordid. Many are not fit or at least not interested, and the crowd can be swayed by populism or biased media, often driven by hidden money. The result is corruption, cynicism and cronyism, all the things that democracies like to accuse non-democracies of suffering from.

Some elites react by circumventing democracy. The EU commission, central banks, civil services and even armed forces are all guilty of this. In the short term, this can protect the public from their own incompetence, but in the longer term it only goes to feed the cynicism, with bodies such as the EU becoming targets for anger.

What can be done? Obviously the temptation to limit democratic rights has to be resisted – it is that sort of elitist logic that originally denied votes to women or black people. We also have to be careful not to overpraise a system like China’s, where a seemingly benign elite appears to have made a better job overall of running the country than most democracies.

No, somehow we have to find a way to muddle through. It will be healthy to be honest about the failings of democracy. In the longer term, further improvements in education and technology might help us pass a positive tipping point.

In the meantime, those of us that care owe it to democracy to make efforts to protect the system from its worst failings. Whatever our preferred policies, we have to find the energy to fight the influence of money, cynical gerrymandering or raising hurdles to be eligible to vote. We should withhold our votes from those seeking to undermine democracy in those ways. We should campaign to place decisions closer to where the impact will be felt, which generally means smaller national parliaments but larger local ones and more cross-border ones. This stuff is much more dull than taxation or immigration policy – but in the end it is this stuff which could prevent the whole democratic edifice from collapsing.

Another individual step could be to celebrate ignorance rather than to condemn it. We are taught that “I don’t know” is a weak answer. Far from it! Embracing ignorance is humble, and invites curiosity to learn. Similarly, let us all try to challenge our assumptions as often as we can, and encourage others to do the same. If such values could become even stronger in our education systems, then so much the better.