There was a guest editorial in the Press Register this morning by a writer from the Times Picayune decrying the verbal and racially charged abuse by some members of The University of Southern Mississippi’s pep band during an NCAA basketball playoff game. One of the opposing player’s name was Angel Rodriguez, and several members of the USM pep band were chanting, “where’s your green card?” Quite coincidentally, the journalist points out, the Mississippi legislature is in the midst of adopting yet another draconian immigration bill, one much like the one recently passed in Alabama, though not as aggressively punitive as the writer puts it. Obviously children learn behavior from their parents. The hierarchy of the university have apologized profusely, and Mr. Rodriguez, a U.S. citizen, has accepted the apology. His comment was that “some people are just ignorant.” That hits the nail on the head. I looked up the word ‘ignorant’ in the Oxford English dictionary, and more than simply meaning a lack of knowledge, there is also an implied willfulness…willing to lack knowledge….a disposition of close-mindedness.
Throughout Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament we are asked to live a life towards maturity, and that maturity has everything to do with the pursuit of knowledge. We hear the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs tell the aspiring faithful “to come and learn from me…eat the bread I have made, drink the wine of knowledge I have mixed…lay aside immaturity and live.” Jesus refers to his disciples(learners) as children…immature persons on a quest for wisdom and therefore the means to live dignified lives and lives that enrich the world around them. The pursuit of knowledge, this maturing, was held sacred by the Greeks which has been handed down generation to generation in the West for millenia. The same is true for other cultures…that knowledge informs faith, and faith matures the soul.
So whence this proliferation of this modern willful ignorance. I have an acquaintance in Dothan who thinks Global warming is a myth; that people of other religions are going to hell; we don’t discuss religion or politics needless to say. Certainly before modernity there was illiteracy…but this phenomenon of ignorance seems relatively new…these aren’t illiterate people…these people choose to not know….maybe one aspect of extremism that infects our world is this insidious willful ignorance….perhaps the demise of the liberal arts in our education system is complicit….In response to the demands of a hyper consuming culture, colleges and universities offer specialized vocational training, at the expense of a well rounded liberal arts regimen…I am told at some universities one can major in insurance, even hotel management…that’s information, vocational training, not knowledge….knowledge comes on the wings of the imagination, in the arts, in the humanities, in math and science taught with inspiration and integrity.
Ironically we have at our fingertips more information than ever in history…yet information is not the same as knowledge. We must never cease from the quest for knowledge…from “mental fight” as Blake puts it. We must persist in the ways of the imagination, and that requires willful openness… We must keep to the path of maturity for our own edification and for the world’s sake, and so must our children and their children’s children….Lest ignorance, willful ignorance rule.
According to a May, 2011 Lumina/Gallop poll, which was cited in a recent edition of Education Week magazine, when asked what is the purpose of schooling beyond high school, 53% of respondents said “to earn more money” and another 33% said “to get a good job.” Three per cent said, “to learn about the world,” and only 1% said, “to think critically.”
Education is no longer seen as something that develops us intellectually, civically, or morally. Like most everything else in our culture, including religion, it is a product to be consumed. All that’s missing now is the soma pill, but eventually that too will enter the culture and then we’ll be a brave new world, indeed.
Willful ignorance is a sin that needs redeeming because closed-mindedness leads to hard-heartedness, as the example of the Southern Miss pep band shows.
Our comedians do a good job subjecting willfully ignorant attitudes to scorn and ridicule. It’s time for mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox to do our part by reclaiming Christianity from the fire-and-brimstone preachers and religious hucksters who keep people ginned up on premillenialism, dispensationalism, dogmatic literalism, and fear. After all, only 3% of those polled said that higher education’s purpose is to learn about the world. Why would one want to learn about a world that one thinks will end soon with the imminent return of Jesus?
Surely a tolerant, pluralistic, Enlightenment-based society such as ours can do better than this?!