JOURNALISM

Read It In The Local Rag

The epidemic of ignorance threatening to destroy us.

The Irish children’s author Eoin Colfer once said, “Confidence is ignorance. If you’re feeling cocky, it’s because there’s something you don’t know.” And it was the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin who said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

We are presently in the midst of an epidemic of anti-intellectual pride in this country that is threatening to destroy us. It was the great Issac Asimov, who all the way back in January of 1980 who wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

The fact that this isn’t news, that we’ve been here before, does not mean that this time we will survive our own folly.

Let’s say you pick up your local newspaper, maybe one with an obvious conservative bent that regularly blurs the line between hard news and partisan editorial opinion. I don’t want to name names, so let’s just call it, The Gerald.