What Ignorance Looks Like, Part II: Willful Ignorance

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This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

New York Times, SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI, April 21, 2009

I thought I would write about this in the abstract, starting with my shock that this story hasn’t created an ongoing scandal. Imagine that you went to the doctor and he or she was unsuccessful at treating your disease. That’s upsetting enough. Now imagine that you read an interview with that doctor and he or she says that reading medical journals is a waste of time. That’s a scandal.

So this is doubly freakish and bizarre. We had a government that chose to ignore history; more than that, a set of officials at the highest level who thought that history was unnecessary. It just doesn’t occur to them. Then we have the mainstream media– today busily debating the ‘hundred days’ faux issue– that collectively cannot seem to recognize and criticize basic incompetence.

I am thinking much more concretely this morning, however, because I have been trying to deal with a student who thinks writing about “global warming” is inappropriate. It’s not hard to see where this is coming from: years of silly right wing propaganda suggesting that global warming isn’t real and so on. I disagree but that’s not what is so upsetting.

What is upsetting is that this student has a workable hypothesis– it may be unlikely in the extreme that thousands of scientists and thousands of experiments are wrong, of course, but it is still a hypothesis– that he refuses to examine. One problem, of course, is that he’s too ambitious. Global Warming is a very complicated theory with a lot of different kinds of supporting evidence.

I would not expect him to try to address everything of course or to be systematic in any sense. But he could pick one aspect of global warming, review the evidence, and then conclude with his (now well-informed) opinion on the science. Yet it seems to be that process– a careful review of assumptions– that he, and the Bush administration, finds so loathsome. That’s a scandal.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

What Ignorance Looks Like, Part I: Pretty Prejudice

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Ignorance and bigotry are all mixed up with our usually unspoken ideas about class, and race, and gender. In the United States, when we think about ignorance and bigotry we all too often unfairly call up the image of a poor white Southern man. We are like a general who can’t win any battles because he’s still trying to fight the last war.

That’s why this Ms. California video is so compelling; this is the new, modern face of prejudice: feminine and pretty, self-effacing and even apologetic. Bigotry, at least the public sort, is no longer aggressive, masculine and arrogant. (No doubt the old bigotry survives in all sorts of other, less public places.) Ignorance, now, is “just an opinion,” ‘the way my family was raised.”

Yet it’s still bigotry and it’s still hateful and violent. As a friend of mine always says, why do they care? What is it about a certain Christian ideology that makes a simple fact of life– homosexuality– into moral depravity? I don’t think there’s a good answer in the end. Why did these same families find so-called mixed marriages so repulsive three generations ago?

Posted in: Online Places, Writing

A Burning House

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African American communities are not the only ones that suffer from the slow death of journalism. Civic engagement in the larger American polity is withering too, and for the same reason. Newspapers are folding not because they are unprofitable, but because even after cutting actual journalism to the bone, they don’t bring in the fifteen and twenty percent returns that the bubble economy has accustomed investors to. A well-run newspaper can consistently bring in a seven to nine percent annual return on investment, which in pre-bubble days was considered just fine. The very few newspaper corporations that remained family owned, or that went nonprofit are doing journalism as well as ever.

Forty-some years ago, Dr. Martin Luther wondered aloud that all his life’s work might have been the integration of African Americans into a burning house. King answered his own question by declaring that if that was the case, we would have to be the firefighters, not just for ourselves, but for the whole American polity…

Black Agenda Report, Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 04/15/2009

I think you could dedicate an entire blog to the “push from the left” drama that seems to be so characteristic of the first few months of the Obama presidency. Obama is a consummate liberal, more interested in repairing the system than profound changes to its basic assumptions, but he’s also pragmatic and interested clearly in ideas.

That means the possibilities, at least until he establishes a longer record, are going to seem wide-open. That also means there’s going to be a lot of dreaming going on in the next few years, as well as a lot of hand-wringing. I am trying to keep my eyes on a few potential changes, or kinds of changes, that I think might create real shifts in power.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a good example, because it would allow, if not encourage, certain kinds of democratic organizing and power. Media reform is less well defined, but it too could create substantive change. What I like about Dixon’s post, however, is his notion of “reasonable” profit. The cliches about so-called old media– that they are unprofitable, especially– are just not true.

What’s really driven economic change over the last three decades isn’t profit as such, it’s greed. In other words, the idea of profit has lost its “reasonable” basis. “Reasonable” is relative, of course, and I am sure this sort of cultural shift happens regularly, but Dixon’s point is an important reminder. We won’t stop the slash and burn economy until we try to define a reasonable profit.

Posted in: Writing