Ignorant. There is no word like it. Calling someone ‘uninformed’ or ‘misinformed’ doesn’t have the same force nor even the exact same meaning. No word can take the place of ‘ignorant’.
Yet it is politically incorrect to call someone ignorant. I’ve had comments deleted on Amazon reviews because I called someone ignorant when I meant it as a literal statement in that person was, as defined by the dictionary, “lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about something in particular.” It is considered mean-spirited to point out that someone is ignorant, even when or especially when it is true.
This just makes it all the more frustrating. Our society has a taboo about facing ignorance. We wouldn’t know how to function as a society without such ignorance. It can feel like it goes beyond even just ignorance. Along with an unwillingness to talk about ignorance, there is an ignorance of ignorance. It is the default position for nearly all social interactions and public discourses.
It can seem pointless even trying to blame anyone for being ignorant. The seeming unconscious obliviousness is immense. People are just ignorant. They don’t know any better, so the story goes.
My focus has been mostly on racism as of late. The ignorance in this area is more frustrating still. It is a systemic and institutional ignorance that makes possible the systemic and institutional racism.
Why are so many people ignorant about the continuing reality of racism?
“It can be tempting to think that today most white people are racist primarily because of an inadvertent lack of knowledge about the cultures and lives of people of color. Many white people in the United States and other white privileged countries do not often personally interact with people of color, and when they do, such interactions often are of the trivial sort found in consumer exchanges. Given the de facto but persistent racial segregation of many cities, neighborhoods, and schools and the paucity of non-stereotypical portrayals of people of color on television and in Hollywood movies, white solipsism is a real problem.”
~ Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, Kindle Locations 219-223
But is ignorance reality a default state? How can an unintentional passivity toward racism cause it to be to remain so stubbornly in place?
There is a study that was about attentional focus. It measured this by eye gaze. As I recall, it had to do with differences between liberals and conservatives. There was something that either conservatives don’t appreciate or doesn’t fit into their worldview. They put an image of this thing or something like that in their visual field. What the researchers found was that the people who had a vested interest in not seeing something intentionally didn’t look in the direction of what they didn’t want to see. At some level, they had seen it, even though in questions they acknowledged no awareness of it being there.
These people went to great effort to maintain their experiential blindness. This is how willful ignorance operates. There is an intention behind the behavior, even if it isn’t fully conscious.
“A similar temptation is to think that white people are racist because they lack accurate knowledge about the (alleged) scientific, biological basis for racial categories. This view of racism holds that many people fail to understand that there are no necessary and sufficient biological or genetic conditions for dividing the human population into distinct races. Because of this failure, they mistakenly think that race and racial hierarchies are real. Demonstrate the lack of scientific basis for race, so says this eliminativist view, and racism will disappear because the categories on which it is based-white, black, and so on-will have disappeared. Racial categories and the racism they support are like the emperor who wears no clothes. All one need do is honestly point out the emperor’s nakedness, and the illusion of his clothing will disappear. Dismantling the biological theories of race upon which racism rests likewise requires merely the same straightforward good will to acknowledge the obvious: the lack of the scientific data to support racial categorization.’
~ Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, Kindle Locations 227-232
I’m a lover of knowledge. I want to believe that knowledge matters. The issue isn’t really about knowledge, but about ignorance and the two aren’t necessarily oppositional. People know and don’t know things all the time. People are fully capable of dividing their minds and their lives, never making the connections that would cause them to see the full picture.
Knowledge isn’t just about facts, but more importantly about comprehension, about a visceral and emotional sense of really getting what something means and why it matters. Knowledge isn’t an abstract intellectual exercise. Truth is a moral force or it is nothing at all.
Pointing out data without a way of conveying meaning won’t undo ignorance. List the numbers of dead in the recent genocide against Palestinians won’t have an impact. But if you forced someone to spend a week having Israeli bombs falling all around them with dead bodies and destruction that couldn’t be ignored, all of a sudden that list of numbers would be viscerally real and would have an emotional impact. Mere knowledge that could be easily dismissed would become a truth with moral force.
Westerners can be told the data that objectively proves genocide. But data is just data. There is great power of the mind to not really see or comprehend the data, to dismiss it, ignore it and rationalize it away. It isn’t unintentional.
The oppression of dark-skinned people in Palestine follows the same basic pattern of the oppression of dark-skinned people in America. The mechanisms are the same. The details really don’t matter in defense of the social order and in upholding the status quo. Much has changed in the US over the centuries. Racism morphs to fit the times and yet basically continues on.
I sometimes try to make sense of this as mere inertia. But that doesn’t really explain anything at all. That is just an avoidance of responsibility and an avoidance of the despair that would accompany taking responsibility.
“Rather than an innocuous oversight, it was an active, deliberate achievement that was carefully (though not necessarily consciously) constructed, maintained, and protected. Du Bois eventually saw that to understand the white ignorance of non-white people, one has to hear the active verb “to ignore” at the root of the noun.”
We are ignorant because we ignore. This is willful ignorance. It isn’t just racial bias in institutions, residue of past racism. No, racism is alive and well, in the minds of all of us. We are afraid to call a spade a spade. It is politically incorrect to point out that our society is still racist.
Marmalade 
I’d have to agree that willful ignorance is one of the biggest challenges within our society.
Another problem is when people have very strong beliefs and are shown empirical evidence against their beliefs, they harden their beliefs rather than change their views. There’s a study about this on the War in Iraq and WMDs.
All cultures seem to be willfully ignorant to a degree. But I think it’s especially severe in the US. I’ve lived in 10 different cities now and been in probably 20, meeting people all over the world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another culture where people are proud of ignorance. It’s scary to be honest.
In theory ignorance should not exist as much with the Internet where information can be accessed reasonably cheaply. But in some ways, it has worsened the problem.
You’re talking about the backfire effect. I learned about that from Chris Mooney. I’ve written about the backfire effect in a few posts.
Compared to other Western countries, the US does seem unique in its population’s embrace of willful ignorance. No other wealthy developed country has even close to the same level of, for example, scientific illiteracy.
It goes hand in hand with our inferior education system, and why the ruling elite don’t want to fix it. An ignorant population is easier to manipulate, but the downside is that the ignorance seeps up into the elite as well and creates a mainstream culture of ignorance.
I’m still undecided about the impact of the internet. The younger generation that get most of their info from the internet are in many ways less ignorant than their elders. They have more knowledge about the broader world and they have less willful ignorance about science. But the internet is a mixed bag and its impact is mixed.
The motivational factor in all of this is FEAR and inability to suffer the consequences of our actions
Fear clearly plays a part.
It’s true that the unknown can and often does lead to a fearful reaction. But that is just general human nature. The question is whether there is anything unique about the kind of ignorance that dominates our present society, specifically the US.
The second part of your comment made me curious. Why do you think we are unable to suffer the consequences of our actions? What are the specific consequences of our actions and what would it mean to suffer them?
The liberal bourgeoisie are desperate to use race to deflect broader public attention from the consequences of the Democrats’ war on the poor.
I’d say the comfortable classes in general will use race to deflect broader public attention from the consequences of the war on the poor. The difference is how different sectors of comfortable classes use race for this purpose. Historically, race and class have always been intertwined. Not that long ago poor ethnic Europeans (Germans, Irish, Italians, etc) were not considered white by the English. And before that the aristocracy considered even the serfs in their own country to be a separate race.