Here is what I thought about posting on a now-dead thread: intelligent people should be curious people, and curious people are always fascinated, not frightened, by new ideas. Why should Alex Jones–or for that matter, Bernie Sanders–scare anyone? They are outside the realm defined by MSNBC on the Left and Fox in the middle (we have no genuinely conservative major news sources, and although I think Tucker Carlson is reasonably reliable, many of the rest are not, and not infrequently speak more or less as Democrats), but so what?
To me, the task of the intellectual is to always be gathering data points, always hearing new stories, always sifting through new accounts of the world and our place in it. It is to be always willing to listen, to learn, and to evaluate.
The evaluation of information, after all, is a skill in itself. If you rarely do it, you don’t practice that skill. And this is precisely the problem with most college students: they are exposed to information, but in many areas they don’t EVALUATE it. Most, for example, could not give you a detailed account of the hypothesis of global warming. Most would be unwilling to know ANYTHING about the research literature indicating transsexuality is best described as mental illness. Within far too many domains, their world views are shaped by nothing more complex or interesting than rote conformity to demands framed in the form of social extortion: comply or get out. Comply or you will be a noted and recognized pariah. This leads to a profound incuriosity about any issues declared Verboten by the Thought Police. This, in turn, leads to habits of intellectual sloppiness, and more or less conscious ignorance.
As I have stated, I am a big fan of Allan Bloom. He was not the conservative he was made out to be. He was gay long before the Stonewall Riots, and long, long before many large corporations were actively courting gay disposable incomes. He knew, in other words, what it was like to be an outsider, at least in that particular regard. He was not defending a specific status quo, or specific set of beliefs.
What he was defending was the axiom that, in the realm of knowledge, the presumption of ignorance is profoundly generative. One could argue–and I will, here–that the whole of Western knowledge rests, ultimately, on Socrates declaration that he knew nothing. The departments of molecular biology, and Information Technology, and Physics, and Mechanical Engineering alike rest on this premise.
And he was particularly defending that premise in the Humanities, in the moral realm. He was defending, put another way, humility in relation to hubris, caution relative to quick and easy certainty.
All of the things he saw in the 1980’s as nascent have continued developing, as he predicted. Political Correctness, which is really a version of Lenin/Stalinist social conditioning, has really taken over all our college campuses, despite the fact that it demands political faith not entirely differentiable from religious faith. Students are incurious, superficial, emotionally undeveloped, and dogmatic.
In such a world, a return to ignorance, to the certainty that the only certainty is that we know nothing, would be medicinal, healthy.
I vaguely recall posting on the negatives of knowing nothing some time ago, that the moral nihilism permeating our “best” minds at the “best” schools might perhaps be traced to this, with deconstruction being something started by Socrates, but the more I think about it, his version of ignorance was quite benign. I might even compare it to my notion of spirituality being the progressive elimination of cliches.
I continue to marvel at the madness everywhere around me. I am not infrequently called the crazy one, but my considered opinion is that I am often the only one seeing clearly. To be sure, I am an idiot sometimes, and the nature of being an idiot is you don’t realize it, but I think over time I self correct. That is my hope, at any rate.