Ignorance by Robert Graef

Author:Robert Graef
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883222
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

As one certitude after another has been shouted out of existence by “progressive thinkers” the national forum invites morally lethargic people to push the envelope of decadence ever further toward the edge and where it stops, nobody knows. One thing is certain: Violence is a natural offspring of an anything-goes society. After all, anything means anything—and anything includes violence…. Now all this may make a lot of anarchists cheer, but there's one problem they haven't considered. Once all certitudes have vanished and violence is totally out of control, a nation becomes a dictatorship waiting to happen.6

The full churches of the 1950s, along with literature and movies emptied of gratuitous sex, suggest that Ringer's GOP was on to something. On the other hand, liberals view certitude as a mind-set built from narrow frames that recognize only chosen parts of reality. A part of certitude's dictionary definition, freedom from doubt, pictures a mind that achieves the intellectual security of fixed beliefs by not doubting or questioning and, therefore, not sensing need for change. On the left side of the aisle, the strength and weakness of liberalism lies in its undisciplined mix of worldviews, united only by a fractious will to make things better. Liberals have no problem with change, while conservative critics can't stomach liberalism's openness to it. Nor can they trust liberals’ assessments of how change should be managed or their predictions for its outcomes.

The freedom-from-doubt aspect of certitude appeals to closed minds, or if not closed, then lazy. When people lack zeal for questioning issues, learning slows to a crawl, especially when their leaders promote and model certitude. When peasants rise to challenge seats of power, they flex and adapt and study the trail ahead so they might anticipate their opposition's actions and reactions. They rise by flexing with conditions and events, but once they take up residence in palaces and their words become law, all that changes. The first order of business is defense of position, then defense of image. New rulers establish certainty of expectation. If you oppose, you will be jailed. If you steal, your hand will be cut off. No pleas, no variation of sentence. The once open-minded achiever adopts closed-minded certitude to remain in power. They must do whatever they see as necessary to ensure that their precious patch of turf atop the pyramid cannot be accessed by ambitious vassals. The view from the top of the pyramid becomes as narrow as its geography. That it didn't happen after the American Revolution is remarkable.

POLITICAL TENSION BETWEEN KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING

Tension between knowing and not knowing is natural and eternal. Some people know things that others don't know, which grates on the unknowing. Rather than a simple difference between what knowers and non-knowers know, what separates them is a difference in attitude between eager learners who welcome newness and those who don't hold new information in such high esteem because it is a precursor of change. People have always lived most comfortably with the security of

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