The Age of Malicious Ignorance
There was a time for a few years where I called it “belligerent ignorance”, a term I picked up somewhere. But there’s a newer, more sinister form of it now on the scene.
I post on Quora as well as Medium. A little over a week ago on Quora, somebody posted the question “Why did Canada do so little in WW2?”
Being a good Canadian, the question of course offended my deeply Canadian sensibilities. Because if there’s one thing Canadians of nearly every political stripe can agree on, it’s that our participation in World War Two had, for all our faults as a shitty abuser of First Nations people and as a people at the time who were content to elect a prime minister who didn’t like Jews none too much, a moral component to it. (And that’s okay, but I won’t editorialize beyond that. At least not here. And every member nation of the Allied forces had superior morality as a component of their involvement. Canada’s not special.) Here’s my response on Quora setting out the facts of Canada’s involvement in World War Two, in case you’re interested.
Anyway, I’ve realized that something else about it offends: the nature of the question itself. Because it’s a symptom of something much darker.
The question was asked by somebody intelligent enough to at least know how to use a smartphone or computer and the internet, who knew what “Quora” is, and knew how to post questions on it. Not a huge hurdle to cross, but not a trivial one either. And the question is perfectly grammatically correct. Whatever else one can say about them, the asker is obviously not a complete idiot.
That same person is smart enough to easily look up online what Canada’s involvement in World War Two was. And they know they can do that. And thus the inescapable conclusion is that they were simply asking a bullshit question, in order to be provocative. To throw another (albeit miniscule) rock at the other side’s window when tensions are already high. They are absolutely, fully conscious of what they’re doing and why. They aren’t under any honest belief that the statement in their question is based on actual information. It isn’t, and they simply do not care about that. (And this is not limited to spreading bullshit about Canada’s involvement in WWII; that’s a drop in the bucket. They do it about much bigger issues as well. Hopefully it’s clear by now that I’m using this trivial incident to draw a rather verbose analogy.)
In short, it’s bad faith, pure and simple. And it’s indicative, I think, of a greater theme: their goal in engagements is now to pick fights. And we see it on a daily basis now. It’s in Trump. It’s in DeSantis. It’s in NewsFuxMaxAmerica. It’s in Musk vs Zuckerberg vs Jesus livestreamed slap fights. It’s in the striking down of Roe v. Wade. It’s in the Pillow Man Thing — seriously, who the fuck is that asshole? It’s spilling into climate change. It’s in the slavery-as-work-experience thing. Everything they do now is aimed, in large part, at picking fights.
The elephant in the room is a question: are they trying to find a spark that lights the tinderbox on fire, like so much bone-dry Canadian forest?
And that’s something more than just belligerent ignorance. We’ve entered the age of weaponized, malicious ignorance: ignorance motivated almost exclusively by bad faith, and aimed squarely at provocation.
My overall gut read on the situation is that it’s mostly the right in America that’s adopting that approach. (I stand to be proven wrong.) And that it’s happening more and more these days. And it’s difficult to see, assuming more of the same and bigger, how the logical end result isn’t a lot of people dying. One way or another.
I’m not sure how that changes the response or the strategy or how any of us should deal with it, but I suspect it’s an accurate assessment of where America, at least, is at right now. (And as goes America, so goes the world.) Maybe it’s an insoluble problem, an inevitable step on the way down the global insanity rabbit hole. But I’m certainly open to suggestions for how to deal.
Stay wild, freaky people.
