Conservative America's Cult of Ignorance

Isaac Asimov made the following statement: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”  We are currently seeing an epidemic of the embrace of ignorance where facts simply do not matter or, if they cut against the agenda of the current occupant of the White House, they are labeled as "lies" and news stories that point out the dishonesty of Der Trumpenführer and many of his fellow Republicans, then they are "fake news."  Such ignorance resonates most strongly with so-called conservative.  In the political realm, this means Republicans intent on prostituting themselves to the Christofascist element in the GOP base. 

So what is the drive force behind this phenomenon?  I would argue, the Christofascists themselves who reject anything that questions their childish, myth based religious beliefs.  Science and education are enemies of Christofascist belief.  By tying themselves to the Christofascists, Republicans now increasingly reject knowledge, science and true experts.  The result? The views and opinions of the ignorant are given the same stature as those of experts and the educated and society as a whole is the loser.  We have seen this before in history and then, as now, Christianity (at least in America) is the culprit.  The learning and knowledge of ancient Rome that did not support the Christian myth in its infancy was subsequently rooted out and books were destroyed.  Those who failed to conform to Church dogma were heretics to be literally killed.  The end result?  The Dark Ages.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the cult of ignorance that now dominates much of the political and social right wing.  Here are excerpts: 

In 2014, the Washington Post polled Americans about whether the United States should engage in military intervention in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States and Russia are former Cold War adversaries, each armed with hundreds of long-range nuclear weapons. A military conflict in the center of Europe, right on the Russian border, carries a risk of igniting World War III, with potentially catastrophic consequences. And yet only one in six Americans—and fewer than one in four college graduates—could identify Ukraine on a map. Ukraine is the largest country entirely in Europe, but the median respondent was still off by about 1,800 miles.

Map tests are easy to fail. Far more unsettling is that this lack of knowledge did not stop respondents from expressing fairly pointed views about the matter. Actually, this is an understatement: the public not only expressed strong views, but respondents actually showed enthusiasm for military intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of knowledge about Ukraine. Put another way, people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about the use of U.S. military force.

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.
 Attacks on established knowledge and the subsequent rash of poor information in the general public are sometimes amusing. Sometimes they’re even hilarious. . . . . When life and death are involved, however, it’s a lot less funny. The antics of clownish anti-vaccine crusaders like actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy undeniably make for great television or for a fun afternoon of reading on Twitter. But when they and other uninformed celebrities and public figures seize on myths and misinformation about the dangers of vaccines, millions of people could once again be in serious danger from preventable afflictions like measles and whooping cough.

The growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.

Any assertion of expertise from an actual expert, meanwhile, produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy. Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous. This book, then, is about expertise.

[T]he result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing. 

The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine

In checking out some blogs that are daily reads, I found the image above and a post on Nobeliefs.com that debunks the myth that Christianity has fostered knowledge, science and medical advances.  The sad truth is that more often that not, Christianity has been the enemy of knowledge, science and medical advances.  The Dark Ages that swept over Europe and other areas where Christianity flourished derive in large part from Christianity's rise and the concerted effort to wipe out and destroy anything that challenged religious dogma.  It's a phenomenon we see today fueled by those who want to teach creationism as science and in cretins like Kim Davis in Kentucky.  We see parallel events in the Middle East where ISIS has adopted tactics akin to those once utilized by Christianity. These are some relevant quotes from the post:

From its very beginning, the Church has served as a stumbling block against scientific progress. By the time Theodosius proclaimed Nicene Christianity a state religion in 380 CE, progressive science had already stopped. Richard Carrier (through personal correspondence) puts it this way: "Even pagans, though cherishing their scientific heritage (unlike Christians who generally did not), and applying that heritage more avidly than their Christian peers, appear to have given up on advancing science. And then pagans slowly died out, leaving only Christians who were even less interested in such advancement or how to achieve it." Up until this time, Greek and Roman science and medicine stood at the pinnacle of reasoned thought. Although the Christians conserved their own biblical and religious exegesis, they did little to conserve pagan scientific writings to the same degree. The little that the Christians did save just barely survived. As Kenneth Clark wrote, "What with prejudice and destruction, it's surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth." We owe the real foundations of science to the ancient Greeks and Romans, not to the Christians.

A Christian mob murdered the mathematician and philosophy teacher, Hypatia, in 415 CE. I use this date to mark the beginning of the scientific Dark Ages, and its end at the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century because of the almost total lack of progressive science done during this period (most scholars today refer to the Dark Ages as the Early Middle Ages. See notes below). Hypatia's death serves as a convenient marking point, not because she died as the last pagan (pagan persecution lasted for centuries after) but because she lived as the last non-Christian of any merit that would teach science in the Western Christian world. Moreover, around this time, the Western Empire had begun to die. The Renaissance marks the approximate time when science began its catch-up with the ancient pagans.


It came from scientific and enlightenment minds that influenced religion to bend its ways to concede to science, not the other way around. The Renaissance and the period of the Enlightenment came as a result from people beginning to reject certain religious beliefs. Renaissance means 'rebirth' and represented a cultural movement based on humanism to regain ancient classical sources that the Church had long suppressed or ignored. Moreover, the Renaissance inspired new ways of thinking about, not only science, but literature, philosophy, art, politics, and religion. The Age of Enlightenment (beginning approximately around the 18th century) represented the time when reason trumped religion as the primary source for thought. It resulted in the first concepts of secularism and the blasphemous idea that one does not need religion at all for workable investigations into nature.


The graph(†) above represents an approximate graph of the advancement of science through time. For critics, please see a further explanation of the graph: click here. 

The Christian Dark Ages represents a time in the history of Europe where scientific advancement not only halted but went backwards. The hole left by the Dark Ages bears the imprint of scientific ignorance that lasted longer than the Roman Empire. Imagine where scientific advancement would stand today if not for the scars left by Christianity.

The Poison of Fundamentalist Religion

A piece in the Washington Post looks at the one of the suspected killers in the massacre in Paris and the image that emerges is that of a loser who finally succumbed to the influence of a radical Islamic preacher and allowed himself to become radicalized.  Rather than blame himself for his failings, he came to believe western society was the culprit behind his failure in life.  Anything rather than admit he himself and his own bad choices might be responsible for his seemingly dead end life.  The mindset reminds me of the professional "ex-gays" - most of whom in my opinion seem to have been drug users and losers in general - before they "found religion" and latched onto the ex-gay game to find purpose and, most importantly, respectability at least in limited circles.  

I compare Chérif Kouachi with professional ex-gays because in both cases the embrace of fundamentalist religion was their solution to failed lives.  What is most striking to me about Islam is that it once supported a culture that valued knowledge and learning until the fundamentalist strain grew and dragged Islamic culture backwards in time.  Much as Christianity led to the Dark Ages in Europe and the loss of knowledge that had spread across the Greco-Roman world.  Indeed, it was the Muslim societies that preserved knowledge during Europe's descent into ignorance and kept learning alive until Europe began to rise again during the Renaissance.

One has to wonder when and how fundamentalist Islam will be forced to die.  Like fundamentalist Christianity, which in America wants to embrace ignorance and outlaw anything that questions the ignorance and superstition that are its hallmarks, fundamentalist Islam fights against knowledge, learning, tolerance towards others, and is steeped in hate.  With access to knowledge at an unprecedented level, what psychosis and mental instability drives someone to embrace ignorance, hate and violence towards others?  And why is fundamentalist religion seemingly always part of the path to such actions?

Again, I can only believe that a world free of all religion would be a better place for mankind.  If we want to end human rights abuses across the globe, a first step is eliminating fundamentalist religion.