On ignorance and stupidity

Last night I wrote in my blog that I did not understand how anyone in Idaho could possibly believe that Obama’s election would mean the end of the world. My wife, who is smarter than I am (but only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), said it was because I failed to understand that those people actually believe what they have been told by Bush/Cheney and their friends in the MSM. That is, things like Iraq has been a resounding success and now there is a thriving democracy, Afghanistan likewise, the economic meltdown is not the fault of Republicans who did everything they could to avoid it, and so on. My response was to ask, “How could anyone be that stupid?” “They are,” she said.
This has led me to reflect on the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Many years ago I had the experience of living for several months with a group of extremely “primitive” people in the Highlands of New Guinea. I never had any occasion to believe these people were stupid, but they were extremely ignorant. How could they not have been? They had no newspapers, magazines, books, radios, televisions, or the internet. They had no means of communicating with anyone more than a very few miles away, people who were essentially like themselves. They certainly thought about things and even employed perfectly logical thought. One example comes readily to mind. One morning my interpreter, who I thought was exceptionally bright and thoughtful, came to me and announced, quite seriously, “White women don’t menstruate.” Being by then accustomed to his occasional outbursts, I merely asked, “Why do you think that?” “No man would ever sleep with a menstruating woman,” he insisted. “White men (in town several miles away) sleep with their wives, so they don’t menstruate.” This is, of course, perfectly logical, given his premise I’m not certain he even believed me when I told him otherwise. In any case, it is clear there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity.
But there is, I submit, also a difference between ignorance and willful ignorance. The people I knew in New Guinea had no choice but to be ignorant. There was nothing they could do about it. Unfortunately, that is not true of people in the United States. Many of the people here in Idaho who believe things like, “Obama is a Muslim,” or “Obama wasn’t even born in the U.S.,” or Iraq is a functioning democracy,” or “Bush inherited a recession,” or Obama means the end of the world, and so on, could easily learn otherwise if they chose to do so. But they don’t. Many of these people, I know from experience, do not read at all. If they listen to the radio they listen to Rush Limbaugh only. If they watch TV they watch only Fox news. The little bits of misinformation they have they pass back and forth to each other. They make no real attempt to learn or know anything else. They are, in short, willfully ignorant. To me, such willful ignorance, which does not prevent them from proclaiming utter disaster at the hands of democrats, also means they are stupid. They have the means to find the truth, or at very least both sides of an argument, but they deliberately choose not to do so, and go on year after year voting even against their own best interests. Stupid is as stupid does.

LKBIQ:
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies


TILT:
Edgar Allen Poe was the first serious American writer to try to earn a living by writing alone.