The world watches as Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, two adolescent political leaders, “the likes of which the world has never seen before,” threaten to start a nuclear war.
But it’s even worse than it looks, at least as far as Trump is concerned.
The man has established himself as the leader of a cult of ignorance, also the likes of which we have never seen before.
In his important and provocative book, The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, a Professor at the National War College and the Harvard Extension School, calls it “stubborn ignorance.”
It is more than an intentional disregard for what is true. “Stubborn ignorance” is rooted in a passionate disdain for knowledge itself.
“Never have so many people,” he says, “had so much access to knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.”
“Otherwise intelligent people,” he continues, “denigrate intellectual achievement,” as if there is some hidden virtue in rejecting the counsel and advice of experts.
Nichols knows that experts are not always right in the conclusions they reach, but in all instances they have a better grasp of a subject than the average Joe on the street.
Yet that average Joe doesn’t care. He or she will believe what she/he believes in spite of having no real knowledge of the issue.
This is the great danger we are facing from the Trump presidency, his nuclear saber rattling not withstanding.
He is trying to make ignorance appear respectable. Sadly, he is having success at it. Consider these facts.
A recent survey published in the Washington Post reported that a majority of Republicans believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because of three to four million fraudulent votes cast by illegal aliens.
They also say they would support postponing the 2020 election to correct the problem.
Of course, there is no problem to correct, but that doesn’t matter to members of the cult of ignorance.
The same holds true for Republicans who deny that carbon emissions are the major cause of global warming. After all, climate “experts” are promoting “junk science.”
Then there is the claim that Obamacare is a complete failure, despite 20 million people who didn’t have health insurance have it now, or the fact that the carnage of 45,000 dying annually has stopped.
Or how about this: “Overall, since the president took office, [he] has created more than 1 million new jobs, the unemployment rate is at a 16-year low, and consumer confidence is at a 16-year high — all while the Dow Jones continues to break records.”
Those claims were made by lead anchor Kayleigh McEnany on Trump’s newly established Facebook propaganda arm called “real news” (I guess Fix News was not doing a good enough job).
All of what she said was either false or claiming credit for something Trump had done nothing to affect, but again, in the cult of ignorance that doesn’t matter.
It seems the purveyors of ignorance have no shame, especially as they insist that any fact based information that exposes Trump’s falsehoods is “fake news,” a propaganda term right out the Nazi handbook.
What makes Trump different from any president before him, says Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, “is that he’s systematically trying to delegitimize the news as an institution because they won’t cover him the way he wants to be covered.”
So what can we do? Several things:
(1) To show respect for people whose knowledge on a particular subject is greater than our own and try to learn from them.
(2) With the help of experts to arm ourselves with knowledge and information to refute the outrageous claims Trump and his cult of ignorance are spewing out.
(3) To make clear to Trump supporters we know that not having any desire to harm others with their attitudes and points of view doesn’t excuse the harm they are doing.
(4) To accept the moral imperative that to remain silent at this point in our history is to be complicit in the damage Trump is doing.
These may not seem like much, but we have to trust that small acts of sanity will make a difference.
What we cannot do is to allow “stubborn ignorance” to get a pass in the name of people having s right to their own opinion.
Its influence is anything but benign.
The sooner we take responsibility for confronting those who belong to the cult of ignorance it represents, the better chance our nation and the world have of surviving the Trump presidency.
linnposts.com 