Vincible Ignorance

Vincible Ignorance

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  - MLK

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”  - George Orwell

By J.M. Hamilton (3-14-2015)

Debate classes and clubs in high school and college present an excellent opportunity.  Not only does debate teach research and writing skills, but it sharpens oratory skills and critical thinking.  In particular, logic and concise and cogent analysis are imperative to any successful debater.  But perhaps of equal importance, organized debate teaches individuals the ability spot flaws in an opponent’s thinking, logic, or argumentation.  Fallacious reasoning surrounds us, not only within the debater’s arena, but in our daily lives.  And it is our ability to spot faulty logic, fallacious reasoning, and even sophistry, that can help one navigate through this world.

Out of all the fallacies that are out there, one stands alone in exhaustive usage by today’s GOP.  It is the fallacy of invincible ignorance.  Ignorance, of course, envelopes all of us to varying degrees (after all, who is omnipotent… save the Goddess above?); but the GOP has taken the fallacy of invincible ignorance and turned it into an art form.  Nescience, today, is being used as political cover by right-wingers to justify: bigotry, homophobia, denying science, continuing failed economic and bellicose foreign policies, and to rationalize revisionist history. 

Now before we get into enumerating the many ways in which Republicans utilize nescience to justify a multitude of disingenuous and harmful policies for the nation, a quick digression.

If you drill deeper there’s actually a dichotomy or subset of this particular fallacy.  There’s invincible ignorance and vincible ignorance, that is to the say, in the case of the latter, ignorance that is possible to defeat.  And how does one go about defeating vincable ignorance, or culpable nescience?   By picking up a book, by reading the paper, and by visiting that most useful of search engines, Google.  Now, I know there are many critics of the information contained within the internet, but if you run a search on a particular topic, and you’re able to come up with three or more independent and reliable sources, confirming the same set of facts, the odds are high that it’s true.  This dichotomy is important because it will come up again, at the tail end of this piece.  Remember, there’s invincible ignorance, based upon answers that we have yet to, or may never, learn, and vincible ignorance, that is based upon knowledge that some people willfully refuse to learn (often as a matter of political convenience).

With that said, let’s visit the many ways in which today’s GOP uses invincible ignorance to defend their policies:

1) Climate Change:  It’s not enough for the GOP to utilize ignorance to deny man made climate change.  Not only do Republicans say that they are not “scientist,” hence have no way of knowing whether or not climate change exists; but they have taken it a step further, and actually, paid off “academics” to prove their point.  That’s right, the Koch Bros. and Exxon, have contributed significant funding to a scientist to produce reports with an, alleged, desirable outcome (that is, favorable to the interest of carbon producing industries, big oil and big coal).  That a key GOP patron, Exxon, has already admitted that there is man-made climate change, is irrelevant to many within the GOP.  And when it cannot buy off academics, it appears that Florida’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott, is editing academic papers, making sure that words like “climate change” are stricken from academic research and dissertations.  Apparently, per the GOP and SCOTUS, the only persons allowed to practice freedom of speech in America today, are wealthy plutocrats holding vaults full of cash, particularly when it comes to opining about the environment.  After all, everyone understands: Exxon knows best.

2)    A Threat to Higher Education:  Wisconsin Governor, and prospective GOP candidate, Mr. Scott Walker, recently decided to align himself with ignorance, when he advocated and supported substantial cuts to higher education, with budget reductions for the University of Wisconsin.  Bucky Badger must be pi$$ed.  But is Mr. Walker really aligned with ignorance, or is there political calculation in his plans to gut the University of Wisconsin’s funding?  My guess is it is the latter, since it is fairly well established that those with university degrees, and graduate degrees in particular, are far more likely to vote for the Democratic Party.  Heh, if you cut off higher education, you keep people nescient, less educated, more easily exploitable, tuned into Fox News, and more likely to vote Republican.  Is Governor Walker, who does not possess a college degree, practicing invincible ignorance or is it simple cynical political manipulation?

3)    Raptors on the Ark:  The next example is priceless, and it is as scary as it is humorous.  My niece is in grade school and attends a private Christian school in Tejas.  I was home for Christmas and the topic of Noah’s Ark came up.  She told me that she was taught at school that there were dinosaurs on the ark.  The image of carnivores, like T-Rex and raptors, running around on the ark made me pause; but what my niece is being taught also ties into the belief that the world, to some Christians, is only 4,000 to 10,000 years old (much like the world was once flat).  That these religious opinions make their way into children’s textbooks as fact – without an alternative/scientific counterpoint - is disturbing, but it doesn’t stop there.  Some fundamentalist Christians, and Deep South Republicans, are also hijacking early college education textbooks in history, so American history is revised to gloss over less appealing parts of our nation’s past (like slavery and manifest destiny, and how white’s perverted Christianity, in some instances, to rationalize same), not unlike totalitarian nations’ deployment of revisionist history.  Find an inconvenient historical fact, or science that doesn’t agree with one’s literal interpretation of the Bible…. That’s easy, apply invincible ignorance, and discard the facts and rewrite history.  This is very important because evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are the GOP’s core political base; and the GOP has become so unappealing to many Americans that you know they better damn well continue to pander to the religious- right.  Personally, I prefer to think of knowledge, enlightenment, and science as a gift from our Goddess, but too many Christians view them as a threat.

4)    Abdicating Foreign Policy to a Foreign Head of State.  The GOP presumably isn’t smart enough to develop its own foreign policy, so it has abdicated responsibility (just as Mr. Romney said he would back in 2012) to Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu.  And while Israel is a great ally, the idea that U.S. foreign policy interests may not be entirely aligned with Israel’s never seems to dawn on the GOP.  Of course, the GOP, like Mr. Netanyahu, has never seen a war that it does not like (especially since Republicans, and their sons and daughters, rarely do any fighting).  So scuttle Obama’s pending nuclear treaty with the Iranians, they must…. All the better to start another war to please the GOP’s true owners, the MIC, Big Oil, and the Wall Street cartel – who will only be too happy to finance the war.  And Israel is the big winner in all this.  P.M. Netanyahu can always depend upon the GOP to land the U.S. in another endless and failed, Middle-East nation building exercise, at American taxpayer expense.  As for the GOP’s base, the evangelicals….?   They eat this up, as it’s just another war that will lead to an “end of days” scenario, and the rebuilding of the Temple Mount.  Another GOP led disaster of a war is on the horizon, if Republicans get their way, despite the U.S. having achieved domestic energy independence many times over.  But the price is too low at the pump… Exxon and the Koch Bros. need another Middle-East war to jump start fuel prices.  There’s a method to the GOP foreign policy ignorance and madness, it’s called answering to their masters.

5)    Banking Deregulation and Trickle-Down Economics:  Banking deregulation directly led to the global financial pandemic in 2008.  Trickle-down economics (aka tax cuts for the rich) has led to deficit spending, wage and wealth concentration, a dearth of aggregate demand, and stagnating wages.  The negative repercussions of both trickle down economics, bank dereg., and the failure of the Congress to govern, are a Federal Reserve produced liquidity trap, and a lost Japanese decade of subpar economic growth brought to America, despite recent improvements in the economy.  Regardless of the economic mayhem banking dereg caused as recently as 2008, the GOP has been successful is sneaking banking dereg language into omnibus spending measures and congressional bills, since taking both houses of Congress in 2014.  Republican governors have also applied trickle-down in state after state, with the same ruinous results:  credit rating downgrades, deficit spending, increased debt, and cuts to social spending.  All of which are born on the backs of Mr. Romney’s parasitic 47%.  Yup, the rich keep getting richer, and the poor – and what remains of the middle-class – keep getting scrod.  And the GOP utilizes invincible ignorance to pretend that their fairy tale laissez faire policies still work.

We could fill another several pages with example after example of where the GOP buries its head in the sand, and deploys invincible ignorance, but we’ll save those for another editorial and another day.  Suffice it to say, the GOP used to be on the cutting edge of ideas and political intellect, and now time, extremism, and repeated failure have left them with little more for defense, than nescience and obstruction. 

As for the dichotomy mentioned earlier in the piece, between invincible ignorance, and vincible, or culpable, ignorance…. Well, that actually goes back to Catholic teaching, in particular Pope Pius IX, and possibly, as far back as Thomas Aquinas. It seems that some Catholics have argued that while invincible ignorance – nescience that we do not have the ability or due diligence to address – is not a mortal sin, that vincible ignorance - or nescience that we do have it within our power to address and throw down…. May in fact be a mortal sin, particularly when it is accompanied by a willful and a stubborn refusal to learn.

But who am I to judge.

Reminds me of Santayana’s remark, with my own personal twist:  Those who cannot learn from history, and science, are destined for extinction.  It also reminds me that ignorance is bliss, particularly for the 1%.

The GOP seems to be practicing, knowingly, vincible ignorance.  Time and time again, in the face of overwhelming and mounting evidence to the contrary, the GOP simply refuses to learn.  Worse still, this malign ignorance all too often appears to be based upon a desire, and deployed, to enrich an elite few at the expense of many.   After all, while the GOP’s ignorance appears to be willful, nobody could possibly be that consistently fatuous.

There’s a lot of good Republicans out there who need real guidance and leadership.  Senator John McCain still shows flashes of leadership and straight talk; and Senator Rand Paul gave me high hopes, up until he joined 47 U.S. Senators in deciding to perform an attempted coup on President Obama’s foreign policy.  Sorry boys and girls, until you can win back the White House, you are not in the driver’s seat on U.S. foreign policy; but to win back the White House, the GOP needs to prove to the nation that they are capable of sailing something more than a ship of fools, like the ship of state.

P.S.   

John Oliver recently did a piece on HBO where he commented on how the citizens of the U.S. territories of Guam and American Samoa are “Americans” in name only, despite serving in the U.S. armed forces in highly disproportionate numbers.  Watch it here.  I bring this up because this seems to be consistent with the type of commercial colonialism that is prevalent in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and that the U.S., particularly Republicans, likes to beat its collective chest over.  To wit:  The U.S. is the only world power who has not imposed its will upon foreign nations, and sought out territorial conquest and hegemonic control. 

But let’s be clear on this point, the U.S. and multinationals do not do this out of some higher benevolence; but rather, U.S. corporations engage in commercial conquest globally, with the support of the U.S. military and State Department, so that labor, tax, and regulatory arbitrage can be committed by U.S. and global multinational interests.  That’s right.  The name of the game in the latter half of the 20^th and early part of the 21^st centuries is the exploitation of third world and emerging markets, w/out taking on the expense and responsibility of governing these countries.  (Besides, if you give U.S. territories and third world countries the vote, that just might upset the U.S. balance of power, away from our two party system and the White race.  Israel faces a similar challenge with the Palestinian question – demographics and birth rates favor the Palestinians.)  Make no mistake about it, American multinational corporations – much like London’s 18^th Century, East India Company before it – are engaged in a profitable game of commercial conquest. Unlike the East India Company however, today’s multinationals have no interest, neither does the U.S. government, in physically taking over these countries; and multinationals certainly have no interest in providing social services, establishing the rule of law, mandating human rights, or getting involved politically (and in so much as territorial, and third world, politics and politicians’ ambitions and goals do not conflict with U.S. multinational business interests and profits, that’s all the better). 

There's a reason why there are only fifty stars on the American flag, that goes beyond aesthetics, and that number is highly unlikely to grow any time soon.  

Selah.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2015