Key West The Newspaper

by Kim Pederson…….

“We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” This quote from Thomas Edison appears in the lead paragraph of The Book of General Ignorance. In that same paragraph, authors John Mitchinson and John Lloyd make this observation: “There’s an idea going about that the human race basically understands how the universe works…. Regrettably, that’s not the case.” They then go on to ask and answer 230 trivia-jewel questions like “What’s the name of the tallest mountain in the world?” and “How do moths feel about flames?”

It doesn’t take a keen observer to realize that humans are remarkably ignorant of their own ignorance, a perilous circumstance former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously described as “things we don’t know we don’t know.” Ignorance is the quality or state of being ignorant. That sounds fairly innocuous until you look at the definition of ignorant: “destitute of knowledge.” What could be a more damning pronouncement than that?

There are many kinds of ignorance, of course. An ignorant person can be someone who through events and conditions beyond his or her control is simply unaware of one thing or another. An ignorant person can also, more ominously, be someone who deliberately ignores or disregards important information or facts. There’s seems to be a lot of the latter going around lately. (I’m being optimistic here. It’s probably been going around forever.)

On the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton was taken to task, correctly, for dumping all of Donald Trump’s supporters into her “basket of deplorables.” She would have been closer to the truth if she had dumped them and the rest of us into a “basket of ignoramuses.” We should take a lesson from Thomas Edison and admit that we know hardly anything at all. Then we should take a further lesson from Thomas Pynchon, who advised writers to “get familiar with their own ignorance.” We need to question what we know and think every day. It’s the only way to make the world a better, safer place for everyone because what we don’t know we don’t know or what we know and choose not to know or what we know we should know but can’t be bothered to know can kill us and likely will. If we, the collective we, are not able or willing to take on the tremendous, seemingly impossible challenge of being consistently open-minded, deliberate, and discerning in our judgments and decisions, then maybe we belong in that basket of deplorables after all.

* Promo photo of John Banner as Sgt. Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Fair use.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.