As I look back over the course of my life, I am struck by the deterioration of the political and religious discourse within America and around the world. I think about the milestones that my lifetime on this planet has witnessed (e.g. putting men on the moon, the construction of the interstate highway system, the development of the internet, etc.), and I am struck by the palpable decline in respect for science and learning which has occurred throughout that same period. I find myself bewildered by the rise of religious and political extremism, and the headlong plunge to embrace conspiracy theories and obvious falsehoods.
Moreover, what was not always apparent to me while I was living that life is brought into sharp focus as I contemplate the course of events of the last sixty-plus years. Sure, I was vaguely aware of the fact that respect for learning and science was not what it had once been, but the damage that this lack of respect was wreaking on our society was obscured by all of those advancements I've already noted. Slowly, an awareness of an approaching darkness dawned on my consciousness, and I could clearly discern the outlines of the damage which our widespread ignorance of history and science has inflicted upon our conversations about religion and politics. Even so, like the frog who starts out in a pot of room temperature water that is slowly brought to a boil, I have wondered if the realization came too late - Is a new Dark Age inevitable?
That our current situation has been long in the making is brought into sharp focus by an article that appeared in Newsweek magazine in January of 1980 entitled "A Cult of Ignorance." The piece was penned by Isaac Asimov, and it makes plain that he discerned the importance of this trend long before I did. He wrote: "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.'"
Asimov went on to note that during the 1960s America went through a period where the slogan was "Don't trust anyone over thirty!" According to him, the new slogan for the America of the 1980s became "Don't trust the experts!" He continued: "We have a new buzzword, too, for anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around. People like that are called 'elitists.'" see A Cult of Ignorance - Newsweek
In a piece posted two years ago by Brian Ferguson of the Mormon Church entitled "The Rise of Ignorance," we read: "The problem is that our modern tools of communication allow the voices of the ignorant and the biased to be just as loud as the voices of the informed and the impartial. Sadly, a strong case could be made that ignorant voices are now louder than informed voices. One result of this is that the ignorant, the bigoted, and the dangerous can now easily find each other and band together — often reinforcing each other’s worst instincts." see The Rise of Ignorance - Insight: Seeing through the Dark Glass
And that brings us to the month of May in 2021, and the bewildering world that I can see from The Teacher's Roost At White Cedars. A world where masks and vaccines are shunned and ridiculed in the face of a pandemic which has already claimed over three million lives. A world where climate change is denied and ridiculed in the face of mounting natural weather related catastrophes. A world where people insist that evolution is a disproven theory, that the world is just over six thousand years old, and that an ancient book written by humans about God is inerrant and more reliable than archaeology, paleontology, biology, physics, geology or history in explaining earth's past. A world where intolerance, prejudice and bigotry are exalted; and love, compassion and compromise are seen as the hallmarks of weakness and depravity. For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope I'm wrong; but I can't help but wonder when I see what's going on around me: Has ignorance triumphed?
