Recently, I read a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper. The author had worked himself into a tizzy over President Barack Obama and the entire democratic leadership in Washington and their push for universal health care. He declared that any attempt at a universal health care system was an attempt at socialism and should be protested with equal zeal as one would protest Stalin's Red Army coming down the road.
Never mind that the United States is the only industrialized nation not to have universal health care, or that the U.S. spends more than double per capita on health care than the average European country and still has a lower average life expectancy, or that the Obama administration has not pushed a single-payer system. Rather, such a system would work with existing insurers and give Americans the ability to opt out of the system if they so chose - none of this mattered. The author rationally decided to ignore these facts.
There's a lot of rationalized ignorance going around these days. I'm pretty sure the zenith was hit when candidate Obama was labeled a socialist. No one seems capable anymore to engage in meaningful debate; instead we take to the airwaves and to the newspapers and throw out senseless labels. He's a socialist; the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor is a reverse racist. None of this child's play actually accomplishes anything, but let us resort back to our original intuitions and narrow thinking.
It would be incorrect to assume that liberals are any less rationally ignorant than your average Rush Limbaugh listener and Ann Coulter reader. Nor should I try to hold myself up as a person who believes himself as any less ignorant than others. Ask me to explain how the differences between the Punjabis and the Pashtun ethnic groups in Pakistan contribute to the conflict between India and Pakistan, and all you'll get is a shrug.
There are at least 10 people who will read this column and arrogantly decide that they're quite fine rationalizing their ignorance. Perhaps they don't have the time to read every notable economist's opinion about the stimulus bill and don't care whether former President Ronald Reagan is truly to blame for our financial crisis when he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman observed in The New York Times yesterday. That's fine. Who does have the time?
Others, though, will continue to rationalize their ignorance because they share a certain pride in their lack of logic. Politicians haven't helped this bizarre reasoning, deriding their constituents as "folks" and "average Joes." Education, one would think, would be the key in turning back the tidal wave of misinformation perpetuated by rationalized ignorance, but according to the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of 17-year-olds who read one book per year outside of the classroom was cut in half from 1984 to 2004.
If there is one goal that any university or college should strive for, I hope it's a goal that gives its students no excuse to rationalize their ignorance. I hope that it's an education that teaches the next generation of America that we can no longer afford to partake in factless and fallacious debates. And if all else fails, Newt Gingrich is a jerk.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears weekly.
