It’s become accepted in many quarters to associate the wielding of facts or knowledge with arrogance. Typically the term is applied to political liberals – coastal elites, the blue-state bloviators, whatever one might call all the annoying know-it-alls who purportedly disdain the Rust Belt working-folk and get their information from sources not owned by Rupert Murdoch’s ilk.
But the politically ignorant – the sorts of people most likely to be deceived by demagogues and liars – have an arrogance of their own. Some might just dismiss it as wishful thinking: for example, the apparently widespread conviction that, say, the political system would be best off after a shakeup by an outsider – regardless of the source or dispositional/intellectual/experiential/moral/philosophical qualities of that outsider.
But it’s not just wishful thinking. It’s a blind faith in the righteousness of one’s own beliefs coupled with a total disinterest in the heft of the factual hull of those beliefs amid the high seas of reality. It’s a deep sense of the superiority of one’s own opinions, coupled with a blind dismissal of any facts that countervail those opinions. That’s much more sinister in this than mere ignorance.
In ten days, we embark into political terra incognita based not on ignorance, but on the arrogance with which it has locked arms.
