Much has been said and written about the deleterious effects of political correctness, which makes it next to impossible to speak truth without meeting volleys of censorship and defamation.
Another cognitive tendency, however, is now reaching massive proportions, namely the pervasive refusal to learn, to ferret out facts from the welter of conflicting claims and competing opinions that obscure or deform the exchange of ideas on which the health of a democracy depends, in short, to seek truth. No less destructive to the existence of an informed public than the scourge of political correctness, the lassitude that afflicts us is no doubt, or at least in part, owing to an increasingly dysfunctional educational system at all levels from primary to post-graduate, and operates in conjunction with a widespread cultural propensity to a sort of epicurean laziness that comes with prolonged affluence and an entitlement mentality.
Three recent instances of willful ignorance got me thinking once again about this noxious contagion from which we suffer.
The first was a personal encounter on a Facebook chain in which I misguidedly sparred with an academic colleague on the subject of Islam. My colleague took exception to an article I had posted, “How to Defeat Terrorism,” in which I put forward a series of severe but sensible measures to reduce the incidence of jihadist attacks. I had set terror squarely in the camp of canonical Islam and provided textual evidence to support my contention. My interlocutor accused me of proposing a Nazi-type “final solution,” of thinking in black hat/white hat terms, and of mischaracterizing Islam, which he asserted was 90% based on the bible and which honored the prophetic figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
When I pointed out that he was quite mistaken, that Islam had misconstrued these august personages and substantially perverted the message of the holy scriptures, and that he had little accurate knowledge of either the authoritative sources of Islam or the bible in any detail, he was affronted. My knowledge of these matters, while by no means panoptic, is the fruit of 15 years of study, as my correspondent knew from books and articles I had published; nonetheless, he dismissed my information as amounting to nothing more than “ten minutes on Google.” He offered no counter-argument or substantive engagement. He had obviously gleaned his comfortable point of view from watching TV, reading our liberal newspapers, and conversing with his academic peers — and maybe, from ten minutes on Google. And he wore his ignorance proudly.
But he was not yet finished. He proceeded to contradict himself, stating that the Judeo-Christian tradition, which a genial Islam had duly respected, was responsible for atrocities like the Third Reich. When I responded that one can’t have it both ways — the Western tradition is either benign or culpable — and that Nazism was a pagan incursion into the democratic life of the West, he could only resort to evasion, once again displaying a profound lack of investigative grounding. He then signed off, ending our correspondence with an offhand insult. Why should I have been surprised? After all, the academy has proven to be among the most remiss of our institutions in the pursuit of truth.
