willful-ignorance

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Willfully polluting the ground with AC electricity is just another aspect of how the electrical utility companies will be remembered by the next generation.

A poet is a musician that can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw.___o it isn__,_ I said. __hat book wasn__ even written until a century after slavery was abolished.___hen why the hell are they still complaining about it?

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don__ have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren__ lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Justice can be achieved only if one has the pertinent facts, and excusing evil requires that those facts be obscured; justice is thus precluded.

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.

The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.

I think that the root of Willful Ignorance, is Fear. We'll return to that in a minute. But the root of Fear, is Simple Ignorance, at least I think that our original Fear is rooted in simply not understanding the World around us: not knowing.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.