This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Spouting
off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered
unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has
started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In
the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and
offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than
knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative
politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making
it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and
reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.
The
strategy of holding out ignorance to be the equivalent of expertise and
simply daring your opponents to try to do anything about it was
epitomized recently in the Ohio legislature.
Republican state legislator John Becker introduced
a bill that would ban all insurance plans in the state from covering
abortion. It was a horribly misogynist and intrusive bill, but Becker
didn’t stop at just trying to outlaw abortion coverage. He also insisted
that IUDs, the most effective contraception available, be outlawed from
insurance coverage. His reasoning was that he believes IUDs cause
abortion, because he believes they work by killing fertilized eggs.
He is, of course, factually wrong in multiple ways.
An “abortion” is a procedure that stops a pregnancy, and if a fertilized egg fails to implant—and
about half fail to implant,
regardless of a woman’s choices—then you were never pregnant in the
first place and therefore cannot get an abortion. But it’s also
factually wrong that IUDs work by killing fertilized eggs. Like nearly
all other forms of contraception, IUDs work by preventing sperm from
meeting egg.
When confronted with the facts, Rep. Becker
just blew them off. “This is just a personal view,” he said. “I’m not a
medical doctor.”
Well then, sir, by all means. Let your
random “view” pulled directly out of your hiney supersede the actual
opinions of people who are considering the evidence before drawing
conclusions.
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But
for modern Republicans, being downright proud of their ignorance has
become a badge of honor, a way to demonstrate loyalty to the right-wing
cause while also sticking it to those liberal pinheads who think there’s
some kind of value in knowing what they’re talking about before
offering an opinion.
This mentality, in its modern form, can be traced back to the Bush White House. In 2004,
Ron Suskind of the New York Times interviewed an
unnamed Bush official who famously pooh-poohed what he believed to be
the shortcomings of journalists who insist that the truth matters more
than fantasy:
The aide said that guys like
me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined
as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study
of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the
way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality.”
The
sense that you could stick it to the liberals by being utterly
indifferent to reality actually grew worse on the right after Bush left
office, starting with the adoption of Sarah Palin as a right-wing hero.
Palin represents this new era of treating the truth like it’s a horrible
force of oppression trying to squelch conservative America.
Subsequently, any utterance from her mouth is far more likely to be a blatant and aggressive falsehood than anything resembling fact.
The
thing is, shameless lying and ignorance works surprisingly well as a
debate tactic. It’s hard to argue with someone who not only has signaled
that he doesn’t care what the truth is but is downright proud of how
little he actually knows. Such a person is not amenable to being
educated. Once the pretense of really caring one way or another about
what is right and what is wrong has been abandoned, all avenue of
discourse is shut down.
Take
Rep. Jeff Miller’s recent appearance on MSNBC.
It was a performance that has become standard on the right when talking
about climate change: Dismissively wave away the scientific consensus
and spout ignorance in the most condescending tone possible, as if
nothing could be sillier than those scientists with their interests in
facts and research. Miller repeatedly dismissed decades of scientific
research showing the reality of global warming as “foolish.” Then he
went above and beyond the call of duty, really showing off how proud he
was to know so very little. “Then why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Were
there men that were causing — were there cars running around at that
point, that were causing global warming? No,” he said, full of contempt
for people who aren’t nearly as stupid as he is.
If
Miller wasn’t such a major idiot, he would know that, in fact, the death
of the dinosaurs was caused by an outside force that disrupted the
Earth’s atmosphere; not cars, but a
meteor that hit the planet with
such impact it caused a massive cooling and then—wait for it—major
global warming effect that wiped out 70% of the species on the planet.
It’s one of the major reasons we know that outside forces, whether
meteors or cars, that have major impact on the planet’s atmosphere can
create temperature changes that permanently affect life on this planet.
The
problem here is that someone who is not only so catastrophically wrong
but downright proud of being an ignoramus is not going to actually
bother to listen to an explanation like that. That’s why the wall of
ignorance is such a powerful rhetorical tool. When you have nothing but
contempt for the facts, attempts to educate you will only make your
pride in your own ignorance grow stronger. The more you try to educate
the proudly ignorant, the dumber they get.
At the end of the day,
the problem is one of identity. The conservative identity is one of
being opposed to everything liberal, to the point of despising anything
even associated with liberalism. As liberalism has increasingly been
aligned with the values of empiricism and reason, the incentives for
conservatives to reject empiricism and reason multiply. To be a
“conservative” increasingly means taking a contemptuous view of reality.
And so the proudly ignorant grow more belligerent, day after day.
Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and
journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon,
RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.
George W. Bush 
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