Ig.no.rance: lack of knowledge, education or awareness (Merriam-Webster)
Two headline stories from today's newspapers appear unrelated but are in fact the same story told from different perspectives. The USA Today dated June 15, 2011, provides a good example. The headline photo shows Michele Bachmann on stage at the Republican debate with bold lettering stating that "Bachmann emerges as a player in the GOP race." Just off to the side is the Newsline summary of articles inside leading off with the headline, "Preventable measles makes comeback; doctors on alert."
How could these two stories about Bachmann and measles possibly be linked? Underlying both is our newfound embrace of ignorance. Let's be clear that ignorance in no way implies stupidity; far from it. The smartest people can be uninformed in any particular area; that is normal and expected because we cannot all know everything about all subjects. What is new is our celebration of willful ignorance, our pride in ignorance as a sign of authenticity.
Michele Bachmann perfectly embodies this phenomenon. (We will get to measles a bit later.) That she can be taken as a serious candidate for president of the United States is evidence of our newfound admiration for lack of knowledge as a qualifying characteristic of national leadership. This is a candidate that has accused her opponents of wanting to create concentration camps for American youth, kill senior citizens, and replace the dollar with foreign currency. In addition to the obvious and extraordinary extremes of this dangerous rhetoric, her more benign proclamations are often demonstrably untrue, easily proven false by even the most cursory fact check. Here is a sampling of just a few:
An invitation to a Tea Party headlined by Bachmann urged "Real Americans to unite" to "help stop the socialist agenda" and stand up against "A president who isn't even a U.S. Citizen; Death panels that plan to exterminate our seniors; Propaganda aimed at brainwashing our children; Plans to remove "In God We Trust" from our currency; Making gun ownership illegal." Be absolutely clear what this means: a viable candidate for our presidency claims her opponent plans to exterminate seniors and change our currency.
In criticizing Obama's health care plan, Bachmann explained that in Japan the citizens "had the government takeover of health care" and as a consequence the government puts people who criticize the health system on "a list" and denies them treatment. "And so people are afraid. They're afraid to speak back to government. They're afraid to say anything. Is that what we want for our future? That takes us to gangster government at that point and absolute abject corruption. We're not that kind of country. That's not who we are."
Yet nothing about Bachmann's statement is factually true; the government of Japan does not put anybody on "a list" to deny coverage because of political views, or for any other reason. This is pure fabrication. She just made this up; and her followers simply believe the lie. The lie then becomes truth to them. But also note a deep contradiction in Bachmann's concerns about our ability to challenge our government. She is the one who called for anybody who challenged her views of government to be investigated as un-American. So she is advocating the creation of a gangster government while warning falsely that Democrats are trying to create a gangster government. The inherent hypocrisy of this goes unmentioned.
Bachmann introduced legislation that even her colleagues thought was too scary to contemplate: "to ensure that the U.S. dollar remain the currency of the United States." She feared that Obama was going to replace the dollar with a foreign currency. (No, really, she did.)
This Bachmann claim is so far out that no reality check is warranted, but let's dive in. She was reacting to news that the Chinese government proposed replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency. Obama immediately came out and said that no such change could be considered. Of course this has nothing to do with changing the U.S. currency, and ignores Obama's position against any change in how global reserves are managed. Bachmann's concern and legislation are borne from complete fantasy, detached fully from reality.
Bachmann claims that President Obama is to blame for the swine flu; more broadly, swine flu epidemics happen only under Democrats. Bachmann cited as evidence the last outbreak under President Carter. "I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter."
The last swine flu outbreak happened during President Ford's term, not Jimmy Carter's. So of the two swine flu outbreaks, one happened under a Democrat, one under a Republican. But notice something important here: Bachmann got the facts wrong, completely undermining her premise, but got away with the bizarre idea that somehow a Democratic president can be responsible for an influenza outbreak without ever offering a plausible mechanism for such causality. If by chance the last outbreak had happened during Carter's presidency, Bachmann would assume her ridiculous conclusions were valid for no reason other than she believed it to be so.
There is plenty more. Bachmann claims that Barack Obama and his wife, and liberal Democrats in Congress, are un-American. She called upon the nation's newspapers to do "a penetrating expose" on members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-American or anti-American."
We see here a perfect example of how those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. Bachmann is channeling Republican Joseph McCarthy, and seems to be calling for reactivating the House Un-American Activities Committee. She is proudly calling for us to return to our darkest days of American fascism.
These are but a tiny fraction of Bachmann's lunatic utterings. Any one of them should be immediately disqualifying as evidence of extremism inappropriate to national office. Yet there she is in full glory on the front page being taken seriously. This is only possible because facts have become optional in our national discourse; reality is only what we proclaim rather than an objective truth. Bachmann is possible because we have become a society incapable of rational debate based on evidence. How can one have a conversation when being accused of killing seniors? Ignorance is the fuel feeding the fire of such irrationality.
In our embrace of ignorance we have lost our ability to think critically, to evaluate evidence and weigh it accordingly. Disdain for science and the scientific method is seen clearly enough in the field of candidates on stage with Bachmann. With faith-based reasoning politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality. Denying the reality of climate change is now mandatory for any Republican; expressing doubts about evolution is now essential. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be fantasy. It is a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance wins.
This disdain for objective truth has real and tragic consequences. And now we come to measles and the issue of childhood immunization. Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, saving hundreds of millions of lives and improving the quality of life for countless others, but because of medical illiteracy and misplaced religious zeal, some parents are, in a display of dangerous ignorance, forcing school boards across the country to accept students with no vaccination history. Consequently we are now witnessing the biggest outbreak of measles in 15 years, double the number of cases seen typically. With the success of vaccines we forget, ironically, that measles is deadly; prior to vaccinations about 5000 people dies annually in the United States from the disease. In 2008 measles killed about 170,000 worldwide. With the best intentions to protect their children, parents are in fact playing a deadly game of chicken based purely on ignorance -- lack of knowledge of the benefits of vaccination compared to the inaccurate, overstated and simply wrong conclusions about the dangers.
We have been here before. The classic example where this false claim of causation leads to great harm is what happened with autism and vaccines. Because of one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study, tens of thousands of parents risk their children's health by withholding critical vaccinations against terrible diseases. Rates of childhood immunization for measles (rubeolla), mumps, and rubella (German measles) have yet to fully recover from the impact of this one discredited paper. And many parents still insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. Myth has usurped fact.
In many school districts, including wealthy ones like in San Diego County, the number of unvaccinated children has nearly tripled since 1990. This affects everybody, not just those who choose to avoid vaccinations. For most diseases, if 85% or more of a population is vaccinated, you get "herd immunity" meaning that not enough vulnerable people remain in the group to support further disease transmission; and the bug finally dies out.
Here is the real-life result of choosing not to vaccinate: San Diego County is now experiencing the worst outbreak of deadly Whooping Cough in local history; we saw what should be a rare outbreak of measles in 2008. Last summer, on July 27, 2010, little five-week old Elias Carrillo died of Whooping Cough, one of nine such tragic deaths that year. And let's be brutally honest; we can lay the death of Elias directly at the feet of all the parents who chose not to vaccinate their children. How can we blame those parents for Elias's death? Because unlike most diseases that require only 85% vaccination to create herd immunity, Whooping Cough, and measles, requires 94% immunization to protect the public.
Irrationality, disdain for the truth, contempt for science, and the warm embrace of willful ignorance are all direct and disturbing connections between Bachmann and the outbreak of preventable diseases. Both are symptoms of the same malady, a society sick with extremism borne from faith-based reasoning. Faith in the absence of evidence or continued faith when presented with conclusive contrary proof an idea has failed. When beliefs are divorced from reality (concentration camps for American youth), anything goes; we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. If we do not share a common version of reality we have no basis for any dialogue at all. We see this in our growing butts and waistlines because we believe nonsense about diet and nutrition. We see it in our deteriorating public health system. We see it in the candidacy of Michele Bachmann.