The Modern Phenomenon of Ignorance to the Third Degree

I recently had an altercation with a typical graduate of our American system of education. That is, I got into it with a self-satisfied ignoramus. The topic was the vast areas of general knowledge that college freshmen are innocent of, although even stating the problem in those words is somewhat optimistically misleading.

A farmer in the New Hampshire that Robert Frost lived in might — might, I say — be ignorant of Shakespeare, in the sense that he had not read the man’s plays. Perhaps he had encountered only a speech or two here and there, such as Marc Antony’s brilliant dissection, by innuendo, of the motives of Brutus and Cassius, who are, he says, “honorable men” — and he says it so often, we know he means us to understand that they are treacherous and ambitious double-dealers. My father, who though he was a very intelligent man was no reader of books, which were rare to come by when he was growing up, would often quote lines from that speech. He had read Julius Caesar in high school. Still, if you’d ask him whether he knew a lot about Shakespeare, or even knew more than a very little, he’d say he did not. (VIDEO: Satan Club to Convene at Connecticut Elementary School)

That, we may say, is ignorance in the first degree. If you look under your car’s hood and you see steam coming up from somewhere that is not the radiator, you say, “That’s no good.” You have no idea what to do, though — you are ignorant in the first degree. But if you were a savage in the jungles of Borneo, staring at the very same vehicle, with the same steam, you would not only be ignorant of what to do, but you would not know that there was such a thing as an automobile in the first place, or if you did know, you would have a vague idea that it was magical, not subject to the rules that govern the rest of human life. You would be ignorant in the second degree. This kind of ignorance is by no means limited to savages or even to uneducated people. The atheist who would not know how to begin to pray, and who has no notion of what moves the soul of the man on his knees, but merely guesses, and wildly at that, is ignorant in this second degree, as is someone whose knowledge of mathematics beyond arithmetic is so minimal, he is unaware of the existence of whole fields of inquiry. The mathematics of surfaces, locations, and shapes — topology — is for him what the engine is for the hunter in Borneo.

Ignorance From a Lack of Will

Obviously, nobody can know everything, and nobody can even enumerate all the fields about which he knows nothing. But there is a kind of ignorance that transcends these two, in that it involves not the limitations of time and place and environment and intellectual capacity, but the force of will itself. I will call it ignorance to the third degree.

Let me give an example of it from someone with whom my interlocutor would never suspect he could be compared. I was once at a pleasant gathering of Christian believers after a tent meeting. There I met a young woman who was well-spoken and naturally intelligent, but who knew nothing of Christian history and had no wish to know. Her name was Monica. That prompted me to ask her if she knew about the most famous Monica in history, indeed the first Monica we hear of, the mother of the great bishop, Augustine. She did not. So I spoke a little about Saint Monica, whom I admire deeply, but she put a stop to the conversation. She said that she did not believe she could learn anything from reading Augustine. The Bible was all in all to her, so it did not matter what Augustine said about it, or what Monica did, except that it pleased her to hear that she was a good woman and very possibly — not certainly — a true Christian believer. (READ MORE: Our Ignorant Education Secretary Misquotes Reagan)

I nodded, sadly. But I did not press the issue. It wasn’t the place, and perhaps I was not the man to reach into that cave. It wasn’t that someone along the way had failed to teach her about Augustine. It was that someone along the way had succeeded in teaching her that she need not bother with men like Augustine. She did not get defensive about it, though, nor did she put herself forward as a public intellectual, so her ignorance to the third degree was neither aggressive nor obnoxious. It was, at least at that moment, merely impenetrable.

That was not so with my interlocutor. I mentioned that, over the course of my nearly four decades of teaching college freshmen, I had gotten from them quite an accurate idea of what they were taught and what they were not taught, and, more to the point, what they were at least introduced to, and what their teachers had not bothered with at all. That last category included — includes — most of the great poets writing in English before 1900. In a class of 20, you will be fortunate to find more than one or two, if any at all, who recognize the name of Alfred Tennyson, let alone who have read his poetry and can say something sensible about it. For people whose mother tongue is English, this is simply appalling. It is, surely, a missed opportunity of titanic proportions. In the case of Tennyson, we are dealing with a splendidly accessible poet, beloved by countless people on both sides of the ocean, farmers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and professionals, young at heart till the day he died. Not to know even that there was such a person is like growing up in Germany and not knowing that there was a fellow named Beethoven.

Proud of Not Knowing

But ignorance to the third degree is beyond embarrassment. He laughed. Why should people know about Tennyson? So what if my monocle popped off, said one of his supporters, who evidently thought that Tennyson was haute culture for snobs, thus unwittingly demonstrating her own ignorance.  All that the “canon” was for — they were his scare quotes — was to foist off as “classics” — his, again — works to spread Western colonialism all over the world. Somebody should have gotten word to Augustine, who profited from the works of the Platonists, that Greek philosophy was all about machetes hacking a way for trade through the Congo. Or to Shakespeare, when he wrote about the history of many a hapless or treacherous English king, he was really all about making Chinese people forget Confucius.

You do not come by this sort of ignorance by nature. By nature, man desires to know. We cannot search out everything in the world, nor should we be blamed for pursuing our most passionate intellectual interests, wherever they lead. But it is another matter to be proud of not knowing, indeed to slander the objects of knowledge, while you pretend to know “all about” them, explaining them away, dismissing them as wicked, stupid (my interlocutor waved off Plato by asking why we should bother with all his mistakes), irrelevant, dull, even a malignant force as we march boldly into the future. You have to be taught these lines of deliberate ignorance. You have to be schooled and schooled into them. Whole university departments are given over to little more than making education impossible by smearing the possible objects of study and making the victims feel superior about it. (READ MORE: Robin Hood Becomes a Communist)

It is bad enough when you open your arteries to pay for schooling that does not deliver education. It is incomparably worse when you do it to pay for schooling that sets about making the graduates ineducable. A mind that has not been opened is bad enough, but you can open that mind; you can introduce the person to some object of beauty and wonder. But here we have minds that have turned against the noblest creations of the human mind, foreclosing any knowledge of them; gluing the clam shut and encasing it in cement.

There may be an ignorance to the fourth degree, whereby the very means of knowledge are traduced. But that is another essay. 

The post The Modern Phenomenon of Ignorance to the Third Degree appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.