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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Thursday 5 July 2012
“Without being able to identify the politicians wielding power on your behalf, it's almost impossible to judge whether they are representing your interests.”
The Logic of Willful Ignorance
A recent study from Xavier university tells us what many already know: that many Americans have wholly tuned out of politics to the point where they can't even correctly answer the most basic questions about our government. Indeed, as researchers discovered, one in three native-born citizens can't pass the civics portion of the naturalization test we force legal immigrants to pass when they want to become full citizens.
No doubt, it's tempting to look at the data and simply agree with retiring U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), who last month made headlines declaring that "people have gotten dumber." However, there's a flaw in such a conclusion — namely, it wrongly assumes that knowing the test's information is proof of brains or even good citizenship.
Peruse the test-prep flashcards at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service's website, and you'll see what I mean. After reading them, ask yourself whether you believe that, at the day-to-day level, someone really must know all the history referenced in order to be a smart person or functioning citizen.
Even as a history enthusiast, I don't buy it. Yes, it probably should be required that everyone know something about slavery and the Civil War so that we all understand the cultural topography of modern America. But should the prerequisite for the label of "good citizen" or "smart" be knowing who was president during World War I, what the original 13 colonies were or who wrote the federalist papers? Hardly. There are certainly plenty of good American citizens and geniuses who don't know those facts simply because they aren't relevant to daily life.
Of course, when it comes to the questions about how our constitution and government work, you could argue that it's a bit different. Theoretically, these are facts you need to know to be an informed participant in a democracy. As the logic goes, without knowing what the constitution (supposedly) does, it's hard to know your rights.
Similarly, without being able to identify the politicians wielding power on your behalf, it's almost impossible to judge whether they are representing your interests. Thus, you might conclude that the Americans who don't know major amendments or can't name their senators are abhorrently stupid.
But again, that conclusion supposes that there's not a counter logic at work — when there almost certainly is. It's one in which many Americans have consciously decided that it's not worth knowing that information, because they've logically concluded that the information no longer matters in this country.
Remember — 21st century America is a place where elections are bought and paid for by huge money, where presidents of both parties ignore the basic tenets of the constitution, where the lifetime-appointed judiciary spends much of its time helping Big Business tilt the law against the population, and where the major parties resemble each other on most policies. Knowing that, why should we expect smart citizens to commit the naturalization test's facts to memory, when such facts are often irrelevant to day-to-day reality?
This isn't to defend stupidity. It is merely an explanation of the rise of an unfortunate-but-understandable form of willful ignorance — the kind whereby many Americans so accurately perceive the fraud being perpetrated on them that they have decided to simply tune out.
Sure, such a decision inevitably makes a person less informed about the political world's kabuki theater. But while you may disagree with that choice, it alone doesn't prove a person is a bad citizen or dumb. That latter label should be left to those political junkies, pundits and professional politicians who ignore inconvenient truths about our broken political system and doggedly pretend that America is still a functioning democracy.
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ABOUT David Sirota
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado.
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By Tara Culp- Ressler
14 comments on "The Logic of Willful Ignorance"
July 07, 2012 12:54pm
One might stop short of calling so many American citizens 'dumb'. How about 'incurious' ? No, I myself don't let anyone off for not knowing who the president was during World War One. You might omit a number of the original 13 colonies. Not more than four or five, certainly. I suppose civic complacency and want of curiosity may be why Plato, with his 'Philosopher King', excluded so much more of the population of Athens(and by extension, humans everywhere) so far as participation in essential governance is concerned....Something in the genes, perhaps, more than in the water.
July 06, 2012 2:02pm
I have to say I am one of the willfully ignorant during all but election time...I vote, I have a master's of science--I am not "dumb" but rather, as this article describes, am liable to become overrun by frustration, depression, and real anger should I tune in anymore than irregular snippets, again besides my thorough research before elections. I do not have a television, I do not read the paper, and I only lightly peruse blogs for current events information. Admittedly history and civics were much worse than calculus for me to sit through in college, but I know it is my duty to understand at least how our government is set up to function, and so I retained the big-ticket items in history and government, although I expect I may fail the citizenship test....
I left the country for 3 years starting in 2007 when I became painfully aware that the goings-on in my country were leaving me physically ill with all of the frustration I was carrying around with me. I wish I could say that after being back in the States for 2 years, that I was ready to re-enter the real-time world, but I am not. I am, unfortunately, one of the willfully ignorant, because I lack, frankly, the balls or stomach to deal with the current status of this country.
If I am part of the problem, well, so be it. I do vote, and I get all my research done in the month before elections--it's all the information I can take during the year--I choose to compress daily messages of frustration into 1 month of evening research--my votes aren't totally uninformed, but most of the year, yes, I am willfully ignorant, and I do not know when I will have the stomach to not be as such. Certainly not in the near future....
July 08, 2012 2:39am
You are not well. Seek professional counseling.
July 05, 2012 9:41pm
Much of this essay is sound and reasonable. Yet I take exception to the point that one who eschews politics is not a "bad citizen." Forgive the cliche, but if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
I had a friend, a trained attorney, who never voted, but he also never stopped complaining about social injustices. Though evidently gifted at birth, he was inherently one of the laziest and most irresponsible persons I had ever met. Today most American have an engrained sense of entitlement and feel that they need not exhaust themselves railing at windmills. Give me a Teddy Roosevelt, an ass-kicking man dedicated to excellence, who doesn't hide behind the lame excuse that because the dice are loaded he won't expend any energy trying to rectify the world's sorrows or injustices.
My dad was a union organizer in the 30's and was beaten to a pulp several times, once by four men, and he never gave up the cause. When you have parents like that, you form a spine and know that at times you must fight to the death for truth and justice. There is nothing admirable about bowing out when the going gets tough. Most Americans today are the products of bad parenting and shoddy public education. Neither breeds good citizens.
Each of us has an obligation to ourselves and our posterity to participate in our democracy fully, which means we often have to endure the heartache of feeling powerless when the forces we are battling clearly have the advantage.
July 05, 2012 9:19pm
I call this phenomenon the Palin Syndrome.
She has become the poster child and shining beacon for someone who can earn a good living and attract the media spotlight by delivering superficial, snarky, and factually inaccurate commentaries on events and issues about which she is totally and willfully ignorant.
July 05, 2012 8:36pm
Vestal Allen is correct as is Sirota. The Constitution provides for an oligarchic republic, in which the vast majority of citizens, who don't hold office, have no power to use whatever 'political' information they might have, and thus little incentive except infotainment to acquire that information. And moreover, there are no canons of scientific-age reason which the oligarchy's decisions have to follow. But just because our system is 'constitutional' (and by its apologists is called 'democracy') does NOT make it OK. On the contrary: in our era the 1787 Constitution and its system are NOT OK. Our public decisions DO need democracy and they do need scientific-age reason. Public decisions should be made by teams of ordinary citizens, following canons of reason, not by oligarchies of long-term officers acting to whim.
July 05, 2012 8:50pm
I'm sorry, but really have no idea what you are talking about.
July 05, 2012 6:15pm
Bravo! Great piece! It's the same in Canada, too.
July 05, 2012 4:57pm
One culprit in the failure of citizens to understand government is the media.
Take one example. Article 1 of the constitution places all legislative power in Congress. The President gets none. That was a deliberate choice of the framers, frustrated by lawmaking that was not responsive to the public and fearful of lawmaking by a strong executive. But today, when Congress passes a law (such as the tax cuts passed by Congress during the Bush years, or the Affordable Health Care Act passed by the Congress during the Obama years) the action is instantly labeled by the media as presidential action—thus we have the “Bush tax cuts” and we have “Obamacare.” And the pundits spin from there: when the Supreme Court permits the Health Care Act to stand, it is called a signal victory for the president, and comments go on to discuss how the Court’s action will impact the presidential election. No one seems to notice that these acts were passed by Congress. They could not have been passed by a president and, despite candidate Romney’s claim, they cannot be repealed by a president.
A relatively simple Civics lesson could instruct that In terms of constitutional power, the president is merely the “Lobbyist in Chief”—he can only urge Congress to pass legislation. If he is happy with what Congress is willing to give him, he can sign it. If he is sufficiently unhappy with what Congress has given him he can veto it, with the understanding that even the presidential veto is subject to congressional override. And if Congress does nothing with his proposals, the president is powerless.
Chapter Two of the lesson could tabulate the ways Congress can treat the president’s proposals, beyond rejecting them outright, including passing them in diluted form, passing them but underfunding enforcement, passing them but crippling them with votes on the president’s choice of enforcement officials, and the list goes on and on.
With information of this kind, voters would soon see how important it is to attend to congressional elections—elections that at least for domestic issues may be more important than presidential elections. That is, if Congress is in favor of higher taxes, you’ll get higher taxes no matter who is in the White House. And if Congress is in favor of lower taxes, you’ll get lower taxes no matter who is in the White House. Until the media stops “presidentializing” every government action, voters will never give congressional elections the attention they deserve. We’ll continue to elect handsome, well-spoken people who can kiss babies and remember the state flower, but who will be easy prey for the party bosses and special interests who currently run the store in Congress.
July 05, 2012 2:27pm
I must disagree with David's comments. First is the old saying: "Those who ignor the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." Then we must deal with the propaganda machines which depend upon uninformed voters accepting their false statements and filacious arguments simply because they don't know any better. Finally we come up against the hard reality that too many of our citizens are, in fact, dumb. A simple demonstration is from time to time provided by comedian Jay Leno when he goes out onto the street for a bit he calls "Jay Talking". Now, I don't expect every citizen to be able to name all nine Supreme Court Justices or the capitals of all 50 states. It really doesn't matter what the name of the boat was that brought the Pilgrims to our shores. But I think what does matter a great deal is the following: the names of the current Senators from your state. The member of the House of Representative from your district. The governor of your state and the elected state legislators from your area. You should know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. All citizens should have a basic grasp of the structure of our government and the basics of how it functions. You don't need to know who Robert E. Lee was but you should understand what the civil war was all about. There are several past presidents of great importance in the shaping who we are today (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Eisenhower). Finally, our form of representative democracy was the first of it's kind to ever be attempted and it has survived 236 years. Other forms have developed during that time and some of them have proven to have staying power but many have failed. If ours is to survive and prosper in the future it will require that the voters are informed both as to how we arrived at our present state but the principles upon which our success has been built. Lacking that understanding, it is all too easy to be persuaded into believing false doctrine and fake facts. The volume of untruths being spread around in the course of the current campaign is overwhelming. Those who lack the fundamental knowledge are having great difficulty telling truth from fiction. Ignorance is not bliss, it is disaster.
July 05, 2012 12:24pm
Those who do not know or remember history tend to repeat it, is in evidence all around us. The repeal of regulations, starting under Reagan, that contained robber barons and the greed of banks and Wall Street after the Great Depression, brought on the second greatest depression that we are still struggling to get out of. The deplorable lack of knowing and understanding our own history is being used against us by the propaganda machines on people who are not even aware of it. By following that propaganda, they vote on issues in such a way that they are cutting their own throats! And when they begin to bleed, they don't even know enough to know who rightly to blame for their condition.
For the same reason, I doubt many citizens that can trace their family here for two or more generations could pass the test that immigrants are forced to take! We can blame many sources for this-badly written text books that gloss over truth, a news media that neither researches for the facts or stirs others to do so, and so filled with 'intertainment' in the news rediculous theater, that facts fall through the cracks.
The only ones that benefit are those who have used the deregulation to their own ends: corporations who have managed to keep the public ignorant of their actions, the top 1% who have made money from it all, and the politicians tucked in their pockets. My father, who had a 7th grade education in the 1920's , had been better taught to think and reason than most high school and college grads today. What better way to keep the status quo that now exist that to keep the public dumbed down with the typical fare on television and the news media?
I disagree with David on one point: true there are many who have tuned out, but a large number are also not naturally dumb, but too hidebound or lazy to search for the facts when they know they should. With so many personal computers in use today and available in libraries, that is, if not lazy, unpatriotic.
July 05, 2012 12:13pm
The idiocracy allows malicious morons to vote uninformed and to serve on juries rendering verdicts based on their prejudices.
Is it any wonder that idiots and trash get elected to public office and innocent people get wrongfully convicted and wrongfully imprisoned.
July 05, 2012 11:08am
It is a shame that so many people would regard the requirement for passing a mandatory test as a precondition to voting in an election. For instance, if someone cannot provide the amount of the national debt within, say, five trillion dollars, they are not allowed to vote. That’s it—one simple question and one vote.
We can see what has happened to this country over the past several decades as a mathematically-challenged electorate is taken advantage of by snake-oil politicians. As Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
Free Market Underdog
Harker Heights, Texas
July 05, 2012 10:23am
America is not and has never been a Democracy. The founding fathers hated democracy. That is why they gave us a Republic instead.