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Put knowledge in context
to overcome ignorance

The columns of both Paul Krugman and Thomas Sowell (Star-Bulletin, April 5) require some comment.

There was much righteous indignation around election time, when angry Republicans shook trembling fists at those who had referred to them as being ignorant of the facts when they supported the president in his bid for a second term.

That was their first mistake; they were wrong to be angry because some called them ignorant. There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. Those of us who make a career of teaching recognize ignorance as simply a lack of knowledge -- something that we work at remedying every day of our lives.

Ignorant ranting, however, gives the mistaken impression of stupidity. And there is an important difference between ignorance and stupidity.

I often hear a friend or family member make a firm statement about something and think, hummm, if he knew this and this about the subject he would not take such a position. But I'm wrong, because the mere accumulation of additional information would not necessarily amount to knowledge. Real knowledge can only come when the new information is placed in a wide enough context to examine wider meanings of the new information. New information placed into a narrow context of business experience, for example, will elicit a far different result from that placed in a larger social, historical, environmental or cultural context. For example, in a debate about minimum wage laws, is it justifiable to regard wages in the same way that all other items of business overhead are regarded? That is, can one ignore the human, sociological, medical and moral factors in such deliberations?

The unfortunate thing is that most folks do not have that larger context into which new information can be placed to take full advantage of it. One example is the U.S. relationship with Iran. If we take the last 25 years of Iranian relations into the narrow context of their bad behavior in 1979 and evidence of terrorist behavior since, the knowledge derived is one kind.

If we were to remember that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iranian Premier Mossadegh in 1951 and that we put the dictatorial shah on the throne, then the context is wider and our knowledge of their behavior is different.

Several of my friends have been reading up on Islam since 9/11, in an attempt to understand the animosity of Muslim peoples toward us. I heartily commend their efforts, but having lived in both the most conservative and the most liberal Muslim countries, I find that the narrow contexts into which they fit this new information is not going to produce the knowledge they seek. Until one lives among Muslim populations and perceives the way their religion is realized into their society, the context into which the "book learning" is placed will produce only puzzling or mistaken results.

We cannot expect the public at large to have this context or time to gather the experience and information to understand what our foreign policy must be in regard to these nations. But we have professors who are specialists in these matters and career diplomats in the State Department who also hold this expertise.

However, when those scholar/specialists in universities are improperly labeled liberal by those who already misuse that term as it applies to politics and society, then we undermine that source of expertise that is our only defense against ignorant and arrogant behavior that only creates more problems than it solves.

To allow only "successful" businessmen, or lawyers, or pastors, to determine the context out of which our society is allowed to interpret the complex behaviors in a 21st-century world, deprives us of the true knowledge necessary to make the critical decisions that will be required of us.

A retired university colleague has the following admonition at the bottom of all his e-mails: "Education is the progress from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty." The reality of humanity is that we must learn to live amid thoughtful uncertainty.

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