If Ya Don’t Know Nuthin’, How Smart Ya Gonna Be? — The American Public’s Ignorance-Based Approach to almost Everything, Including the Libyan War

© 2011 Peter Free

 

22 March 2011

 

 

Americans eventually turned against the Iraq War, currently oppose the one in Afghanistan, but contradictorily support the new one in Libya — what does this tell us?

 

We are apparently ignorant, thoughtless, or incapable of learning from experience.

 

Given the magnitude of what we are losing in Afghanistan and are likely to lose in Libya, our failure to connect History’s dots is disturbing.

 

It is like having kids, who cannot be trained to find their way out of the house and across the street.

 

 

Is simple ignorance the cause of our ills?

 

Newsweek writer Andrew Romano’s recent Daily Beast column attributed American’s various policy stupidities to ignorance, rather than lack of brainpower.  Is he right?

 

When Newsweek recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

 

A 2010 World Public Opinion survey found that Americans want to tackle deficits by cutting foreign aid from what they believe is the current level (27 percent of the budget) to a more prudent 13 percent. The real number is under 1 percent.

 

A Jan. 25 CNN poll, meanwhile, discovered that even though 71 percent of voters want smaller government, vast majorities oppose cuts to Medicare (81 percent), Social Security (78 percent), and Medicaid (70 percent). Instead, they prefer to slash waste—a category that, in their fantasy world, seems to include 50 percent of spending, according to a 2009 Gallup poll.

 

What [Stanford professor] Fishkin has found is that while people start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs of the budget.

 

“The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” Hacker says. “We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”

 

Whether that’s a treatable affliction or a terminal illness remains to be seen.

 

© 2011 Andrew Romano, How Dumb Are We?, The Daily Beast (20 March 2011)

 

 

Ignorance as a terminable disease?

 

There is a connection between fact-gathering, fact analysis, and individual and national survival.

 

Creatures that want to exist in the real world had better take its various saber-toothed cats into account.  Pretend knowledge and ignorance don’t do that.

 

In the case of America’s ill-begotten wars, fantasy results in the creation of self-deceiving policies that kill our most courageous youth and drain the Treasury.

 

 

The Libyan War example drives the pretend-world point home

 

Think about this:

 

Vietnam should have taught us about the futility of trying to forcefully make other people do what we think we want.

 

We repeated that doomed experiment, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Now, we’re in Libya doing the same thing.

 

Today, we are fighting three wars, in three Muslim countries, for no articulable strategic reasons.

 

That’s nearly half a century of pretending the saber-toothed cats don’t see us.

 

 

Conclusion

 

In an intertwined world, I suspect that incorrigible ignorance is a terminal disease.