Arthur Silber: Why the Ignorance of Our Hundred Million Matters

August 8th, 2005

Following up on the Fat Clemenza news of last week, here’s part of a notable Richard Dawkins article I hadn’t seen before:

“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” I first wrote that in a book review in the New York Times in 1989, and it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.

By far the largest of the four categories is “ignorant,” and ignorance is no crime (nor is it bliss—I forget who it was said, “If ignorance is bliss, how come there’s so much misery about?”). Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn’t think me arrogant for saying so. It is not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or (probably) insane. It’s just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn’t worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. People like this have the vote, and we have George W. Bush (with a little help from his friends in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some states. Their views flatly contradict the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy, and many others. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields that you have bothered to mug up first. That is what Einstein did, and Galileo, and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They are contradicting—influentially and powerfully—vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero. My “arrogant and intolerant” statement turns out to be nothing but simple truth.