Against ignorance

That’s why ignorance is so fond of expanding into any empty space available.

Vacation. I like camping with my family. We’ve gone to the same place three years in a row, near a lake, “zero technology”, well, almost zero technology (I need matches to light the campfire ;)

Twice a copy of LUN (a Chilean tabloid) falls into my hands. What a stupid newspaper!

I read a story about a girl who dies because she refuses to open her mouth, “traumatized” by a bad experience with the dentist. I doubt the story. It seems too stupid, hard to believe. Was it verified? And if it were true, I’m overwhelmed by the ignorance of those parents who let their daughter die of this.

I also learn of a young woman who proclaims the superior amatory virtues of vegetarians. Apparently everyone who eats meat is too violent, and the best thing is to get ready with “little aphrodisiac salads” for Valentine’s Day. Of course, since vegans are morally superior…

I’d like that young woman to explain to me the cases of Hitler, Pol Pot, and other vegetarian serial killers. Human stupidity and violence are distributed evenly between vegetarians and omnivores. Saying that vegetarians are better, or worse, has no rational basis whatsoever.

Nobody becomes morally superior by eating lettuce!

An ignorant person is anyone who believes they don’t need to know anything more, or who believes they already know everything necessary, and the worst part is that they feel superior because they hold the truth. Like religious fanatics, some hardcore vegetarians, and those who believe that you can’t create viruses on linux, ignorant, all of them.

When we got to the campsite we ran into the last day of a Christian missionary camp. What an annoying, arrogant group, with no respect for anyone else! They had rented half the campsite’s capacity for themselves, but they acted as if they owned the whole place. My wife went to ask them a favor and they were already trying to evangelize her.
“Why don’t we go and give them the bad news, and see if that shuts them up and lets us rest?”, I said to my wife. Thank goodness they left the next day. Bad on the campsite; we left a complaint on record.

But the annoyance they caused me is the least of it. What’s sad is hearing them tell young university students to forget what science says, to ignore biology or philosophy, because everything you need is in the Bible. No need to ask any more questions, because the truth was revealed to them.

Right in the week when we celebrate the bicentennial of Charles Darwin, I run into these two kinds of fanatics who go on perpetuating ignorance.

Die Stimme der Vernunft ist leise, Reason speaks in a low voice, Christopher Hitchens reminds us. At the end of his book God Is Not Great, he tells us the time has come to know our enemy and prepare to fight it.

I don’t think the enemy is religion, as Hitchens says. I think there is a greater enemy, that the real enemy is ignorance, which, to be sure, certain religions take it upon themselves to perpetuate, even to praise.

I feel we must fight ignorance, starting with ourselves: humbly acknowledge that we know nothing, and try to improve from there, just as Socrates recommended so long ago.

I’ll leave you with this beautiful reflection:

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud.

If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand."
– Gotthold Lessing, Anti-Goeze, quoted by Hitchens in God Is Not Great.