Ignorance is a disease with no vaccination
Is there a word for prideful, ostentatious ignorance? I can't think of one. If there is such a word, it could be applied to so many things in the human experience. Most of these things relate to personal beliefs, but something in particular has been troubling me for years: Ironically, the advent of the Internet has proliferated this Victorian-level distrust of science. Over a medium that is purely a monument to science, ignorance is proudly exclaimed and tries its best to refute anything discovered by the scientific method.
I don't dismiss such stubborn ignorance because I understand where it comes from. To those who always believed that science was the "last word" in everything, suddenly being thrust into the knowledge and rumor overload of the Internet can cause the less well-read people to retreat into a shell of "trusting their gut feelings" for everything from aerospace to religion. Mostly, this is harmless belief in nonsense that devolves into dead-end arguments on Internet forums.
But one bit of proliferated nonsense is life-threatening and needs to be aggressively stopped because, as Mark Twain said, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on." With the Internet, that lie can circle the globe for months before the truth rolls out of bed. And that bit of particularly destructive ignorance is trumpeted by the anti-vaccination crowd.
Recently, a measles outbreak is being tracked in New York City. So, here is the anti-vaccination crowd causing us to fall back one hundred years, mostly because Playboy Bunny, Jenny McCarthy, has used her extensive medical knowledge (by citing one horribly wrong medical report, later rescinded) to tell all the willfully ignorant masses that vaccinations were causing the explosion of Autism cases. It's so easy to blindly believe a beautiful woman who has nothing more than a gut feeling and lousy information. It's so easy to believe experts are idiots and we know better because we feel we're right; real research be damned. Let's not ignore that this explosion of Autism cases was immediately preceded by the medical community greatly expanding its definition of Autism -- but I'll not muddy the waters with facts.
Could you imagine how the world would function if we just went by what we feel, rather than what we know? Oh, wait. You don't have to imagine that. Just look back to the time before the Enlightenment. It's all right there. People were banished, imprisoned or killed for actually researching things and discovering truth; this wasn't a one-time thing. It went on for at least a thousand years of recorded history.
Why did rationalists tend to be killed? Because they had hard proof that feelings are frequently wrong. The anti-vaccination crowd is really, really wrong. Deadly wrong. It enrages me because they are subjecting their children to permanently debilitating or deadly diseases because of a rumor... because it's more comforting to believe their feelings are better than proof. And there's the added bonus of feeling superior to "experts," therefore making the true believers feel smart. Smarter than they really are.
It's all about ego, in the end. For all the hatred launched at egotistical academics, nothing is more egotistical or dangerous than ignorance. Especially prideful, ostentatious ignorance -- whatever that word is.
I don't dismiss such stubborn ignorance because I understand where it comes from. To those who always believed that science was the "last word" in everything, suddenly being thrust into the knowledge and rumor overload of the Internet can cause the less well-read people to retreat into a shell of "trusting their gut feelings" for everything from aerospace to religion. Mostly, this is harmless belief in nonsense that devolves into dead-end arguments on Internet forums.
But one bit of proliferated nonsense is life-threatening and needs to be aggressively stopped because, as Mark Twain said, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on." With the Internet, that lie can circle the globe for months before the truth rolls out of bed. And that bit of particularly destructive ignorance is trumpeted by the anti-vaccination crowd.
Recently, a measles outbreak is being tracked in New York City. So, here is the anti-vaccination crowd causing us to fall back one hundred years, mostly because Playboy Bunny, Jenny McCarthy, has used her extensive medical knowledge (by citing one horribly wrong medical report, later rescinded) to tell all the willfully ignorant masses that vaccinations were causing the explosion of Autism cases. It's so easy to blindly believe a beautiful woman who has nothing more than a gut feeling and lousy information. It's so easy to believe experts are idiots and we know better because we feel we're right; real research be damned. Let's not ignore that this explosion of Autism cases was immediately preceded by the medical community greatly expanding its definition of Autism -- but I'll not muddy the waters with facts.
Could you imagine how the world would function if we just went by what we feel, rather than what we know? Oh, wait. You don't have to imagine that. Just look back to the time before the Enlightenment. It's all right there. People were banished, imprisoned or killed for actually researching things and discovering truth; this wasn't a one-time thing. It went on for at least a thousand years of recorded history.
Why did rationalists tend to be killed? Because they had hard proof that feelings are frequently wrong. The anti-vaccination crowd is really, really wrong. Deadly wrong. It enrages me because they are subjecting their children to permanently debilitating or deadly diseases because of a rumor... because it's more comforting to believe their feelings are better than proof. And there's the added bonus of feeling superior to "experts," therefore making the true believers feel smart. Smarter than they really are.
It's all about ego, in the end. For all the hatred launched at egotistical academics, nothing is more egotistical or dangerous than ignorance. Especially prideful, ostentatious ignorance -- whatever that word is.
Comments
Post a Comment