Some Americans have a new fetish: ignorance… (a 2-part series)

Ignorance gone viral, the death of personal accountability, and the successive gradations of epistemic failure in our conversation.

Never before, it seems, have people worn their ignorance like a badge of honor as they do now in our social media ecosystem.  For many, it seems “cool” not to know something.  Like it was in high school, only the “sell-outs” study or research an issue.  Being willfully ignorant is today’s version of “sticking it to the man!”  It is as if knowing something about anything betrays your inner nerd.  Ignorance has taken on a persona of its own; there is a deeply narcissistic and prideful quality in its public manifestations.  

Choosing the right word is so 1990s… or should it be the 1890s?  In 2017, conversational immodesty is hip and edgy; the sexual currency of our conversations are word-gasms.  In the orgy of social media, people compete in order to see who can produce the most promiscuous, sluttish, and loose string of words possible.  Being true to the cause means that you don’t dare attempt to ‘make sense’; coherence, logic, and evidence is for losers, geeks, and goody-two-shoes.  

There can be no greater proof of our fetishism of ignorance than the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency.  While Hillary Clinton’s language was lifeless and nauseatingly predictable, perpetually cagey and utterly flavorless, Trump is the virtual porn-star of an orgy of ignorance and ADHD.  Hillary represented a style of speaking that had been in its death throes for a while.  The beautiful irony is this: while her stance was presented as a string of politically hypoallergenic talking-points, it became the anaphylactic equivalent of a speech-allergy millions of Americans had developed from overexposure to the politically-correct drivel that has been sweeping our nation.

When Trump speaks, it is like watching someone set knowledge on fire.  His language is a frenetic, mostly monosyllabic word-salad; the conceptual equivalent of a talking Frankenstein.  While Hillary’s speech symbolized a linguistic mausoleum of calcified PC-tropes, Trump’s language is an epistemological conflagration of civil discourse and droves of his supporters could not care any less.  The same orgiastic word-minions, for whom ignorance is their new family crest, are those who hear him as the voice of their anger, fear, and resentment; the very things that drove them to the polls to deliver Hillary her shocking defeat.  

Where does this go from here?  Stay tuned… part 2 coming to timeline near you soon.

We have no center anymore… the labels of “democrat” and “republican” are bankrupt

The political is now a binary of illiberal extremes; the “right” is increasingly rabid and the “left” is so regressive that both sides may be irredeemable at this point.

In our current climate, almost nothing should be more obvious than the absurdity of labeling oneself as a “democrat” or a “republican.”  Only those who are enamored with the sound of their own partisan BS could possibly think that this duality still has any merit or consequence.  I suspect that more and more people sense how imbecilic and farcical it is to pretend as if any issue could be easily and neatly bifurcated in such a way.  “Liberal” and “conservative” don’t fare much better because these terms are loaded with such emotional baggage that they have become nothing more than ways to end a conversation rather than serve as a starting point.  We need a new “center.”  But how?

If you have gotten this far, this post is for you — an individual who refuses to succumb to the intellectual retrogression that has gone viral in our culture and inevitably leads one into a pit of confusion and factional hysteria. Allow me to suggest a possible pathway out of this cerebral chasm; I will attempt the reclamation of a very misunderstood word… “liberal.”

To say that this word is encumbered with connotations is an understatement. Highly uninformed folks on the right will shudder at the sight of it just as thoroughly ignorant folks on the left will get dewy-eyed at the sound of it.  Ready for the facts?  Democrats and Republicans, left and right, “regressives” and “neo-cons” are ALL “liberals”...  Is this crazy talk? Allow me to make sense of it.

We are all sons and daughters of what is known as the “liberal” enlightenment (Google it… you might be surprised by what you learn).  The Framers of the Declaration and the Constitution were greatly influenced by the likes of Thomas Paine and John Locke, among many others.  In a nutshell, liberalism is a philosophy that encompasses concepts such as: property rights, civil rights, liberty, equality, individualism, and rationalism, often with close attachments to the idea of progress, market economics, and internationalism.  

These *liberal* cornerstones are no less important today than they were in 1776; there is not a progressive, a conservative or an “alt-right theocon” who wouldn’t defend their right to own property, pursue being an entrepreneur or practice freedom of their religion to name only a few.  So-called “conservatives” and “progressives” are merely particular flavors on the broad spectrum of general principles that constitute liberalism.

Ultimately, it may be the case that rescuing the tradition of “liberalism” is a hope whose ship has sailed.  The reclamation of “liberal” from the burdensome and politically-laden term “left” may be impossible at this point.  I have tried to furnish a new perspective on the issue and one can only hope to reinvigorate the public’s interest in the tradition that is the thread that makes up the fabric of this country.  We need a new center for our politics; the very possibility of intelligible and productive discourse seems to depend on it, indeed, require it.

The illusion of choice

Allow me to disabuse you of something: you didn’t have a choice this past November and I am here to tell you that you can stop pretending that you did, even though deep down, you should have already sensed this. Only the hardcore ideologues could go to the polls believing that they were voting “for” and not “against” someone. Ignorance is not bliss, it is ignorance; there will always and only be one cure for it.  

Sometimes however, the illusion of democracy is better than the alternative, even though it would be more accurate to describe our current governmental system as a Kakistocracy—government under the control of the nation’s worst or least qualified citizens. As Yoda would say, “A ship of fools, we most certainly have.”

I also want to help those of you who may be burdened with the guilt of not voting; those of you like me who were so sickened by all three candidates (remember “What is Aleppo?”) that the act of getting in your car to go to the polls was truly absurd; I feel your pain. Are we un-American? No. Are we unappreciative of our unique history and our democratic ideals? Again, no. Publius’ words live on in my home. Interestingly however, there are many people who seem to have developed a deeply shortsighted notion of our ‘right’ to suffrage. To some, not voting gives them a whiff of the unpatriotic; it stirs up some vague and instinctual pejorative feeling which makes them want to swing their moral hatchet.

Allow me to bury this particular hatchet. The aforementioned reaction is the product of ignorance; it is the result of a failure to understand the distinction between a “right” and a “duty.” While it is within your ‘right’ to research this distinction if you want to, it is not your ‘duty’ to do so… catching on?  Let me also point out that there is no affirmative right to vote in the constitution although many will speak as if there is. Some folks are also under the delusion that if enough people did not vote, somehow democracy would disintegrate; it can only be a lack of political imagination which allows someone to believe this. For those who hold themselves hostage to this belief, may I suggest that voting — or not voting — is much like the relation between vaccinations and “herd immunity”: as long as enough people get the vaccine, the likelihood of a pandemic is almost nil.  

So take a deep breath and relax; regardless of how you “exercised” your “right,” the fascinating experiment that is America will continue; Trump will be on television to greet you everyday, just as Hillary would have been.  

Let me close with the following quote: “It is apodictic that a vote does not lose its constitutional significance merely because it is cast for a candidate who has little or no chance of winning. Nor do we think it loses this character if cast for a non-existent or fictional person, for surely the right to vote for the candidate of one's choice includes the right to say that no candidate is acceptable.”  Dixon v. Maryland State Administrative Bd. 4th Cir. Md. 1989