Things that matter

Thirteen year-old Alabama
boy arrested for repeatedly
soliciting decoy prostitute.

As far as I know, virtually all cultures have folk sayings, parables, and such that most often offer advice or supposedly helpful information gathered from centuries of experience. We have many of these, such as “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” “You can’t cheat an honest man,” and of course many, many more. But we also have some that seem to me to be basically, even obviously, absurd: “Ignorance is bliss,” for example, or “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
It is true that we live much of our lives in ignorance. In some cases it just doesn’t seem to matter much. For example, if you are a bowler, you might be aware that your bowling ball weighs either 14, 15, or 16 pounds. But you probably don’t know that the bowling alley is supposed to be 62’ 10 3/16 inches from the foul line to the pit. Or that the pins must be set precisely 12” apart, or that the number one pin must be 2’ 10 3/16 from its center to the pit. Similarly, if you play golf you probably don’t know that a golf ball weights 1.620 of an ounce, and the diameter must be no less than 1’.6.80,” or that the hole should be 4 or 4 ¼ inches in diameter. Only a professional baseball player might possibly know the circumference of the ball is 9 to 9 ¼,” and weighs 5 to 5 ¼ ounces. And if you play pool you are probably unaware that the balls weigh 5.5 to 6 ounces and have a diameter of 2.25 inches, while the corner pockets are 4.5 to 4.625 inches wide, but the side pockets are 5 to 5.125 wide. It is possible to be extremely good at all of these games without knowing any of these basic facts and many others. These are things of which you may be entirely ignorant but it just doesn’t matter. While you might not say your ignorance here is bliss, you can probably safely say your ignorance doesn’t hurt you.

Having just watched the video, Food, Inc., I have to observe that what you don’t know about your food supply certainly is hurting you, and you will not attain any state even close to bliss. In fact, not knowing how your food is genetically modified and corporate farmed may well be making you sick. Monsanto is clearly the worst offender what with their genetically modified seeds and attempt to be the sole source of our seeds, plus their various pesticides, insecticides, and what have you. Tyson Foods is another dangerous offender, and we are just now beginning to wake up to the fact that something desperately needs to be done to regulate these corporate giants. In fact, the idea that only a handful of giant corporations are now producing most of our food is dangerous in the extreme and never should have been allowed in the first place.

And speaking of ignorance, it surely would have been a great help had Bush/Cheney known more about Iraq and Iraqi culture before lying us into our completely unnecessary and illegal “war.” It seems they weren’t even aware there were two major religious factions, Sunni and Shiite, nor did they know anything about the culture in general. It strikes me as obscenely ironic that they apparently studied carefully just what kinds of torture would be the most efficacious to use on Iraqis, but knew next to nothing about anything else.

Similarly, we entered Afghanistan with little or no knowledge of that country and its culture. We apparently just assumed that a country organized entirely by tribes and clans would happily give up their thousands of years of living that way to eagerly embrace democracy they hadn’t even heard of and had no interest in. Nor did we know anything about tribal hospitality that made it virtually impossible to simply give up Osama bin Laden at our request. Here again, we are presumably learning a great lesson, ignorance is not bliss, and what you don’t know can and will hurt you badly.

Culture is a strange thing, as once you become enculturated you tend to act pretty automatically. We do not, in our ordinary daily lives, think much about what we are doing, or why we do it. We do not ordinarily challenge our cultural beliefs or question why we do not eat horse or dog meat, or try to shower every day, or eat with knives and forks. These behavior patterns are just part of us, part of our daily lives, things we tend to live our days without consciously thinking about them. This mode of life seems to work pretty much okay, but only as long as we do not engage with other cultures which do things differently and do not necessarily share our beliefs. Throughout all of our relatively brief history we have refused to even acknowledge that other cultures may have things to offer us, or to treat them even with basic respect. American exceptionalism may be a comforting belief for us, but it has been a terrible disaster for most others. Have we learned anything from our violent history? I don’t think so, we seem to be just as arrogant and ignorant as always. President Obama has an opportunity at the moment to admit to our shortcomings and set us off on a much more realistic course, but it is unlikely the corporate powers that rule us all will allow it. Our ignorance is their bliss.

LKBIQ:
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould

TILT:
A modern supermarket probably has as many as 47,000 different items.