MARYSVILLE – “You’re ignorant.” “No, you’re ignorant.”
Turns out they are both right. No one knows everything. We are all ignorant to some degree. By becoming educated we may know more, but we will never know it all from every perspective.
Robert Graef used to write a monthly column for The Marysville Globe-The Arlington Times, but he quit three years ago to write a book.
It’s called, “IGNORANCE, everything you need to know about not knowing.”
He had been thinking of writing it for years and decided to finally do it because, “At my age the window of opportunity is getting narrow. If I put it off I may not do it.”
Graef said the mind of the nation was going astray. It paid too much attention to nitpicky things.
“People were acting without knowing, and I was consumed by that theme,” he said, adding people think too much of themselves. “It’s in the moment for personal satisfaction. What’s available to me right here and now.”
Graef researched dozens of scholarly writings on the topic. He said the hardest part was interpreting the academic writings so the average person can understand it. “You should read some of the things I had to dredge through,” he said. “They don’t write in English. They write in academia.”
Despite his best efforts, the 350-page book still reads more like a college or honors high school textbook. Graef said he actually got a call from another publication that was interested in printing it if he would only “dumb it down.”
“It wasn’t my intention. It’s just the way it came out. It was the nature of the sources,” he said.
“IGNORANCE” wasn’t as hard to write as one might think.
“The book almost wrote itself. I was the eyes and legs that had to bring it all together,” he said.
Graef said he started writing it during the Obama administration, but the book is even more pertinent now. He actually tried to get Promethus Books to move up the publication date.
“Is there any way we can get this out earlier? This stuff is timely,” he said of the book that had 3,000 copies printed.
Graef said he wished he had more time to write a second book, focusing only on government.
“The bigger the institution, the more profound problems arise from ignorance,” he said. “They have narrow views and don’t see the whole fabric.”
The author said as a lifelong learner he knows he doesn’t know everything.
“If you’ve studied at all you become aware of your own ignorance,” he said.
Graef said there is one thing he wants everyone who reads the book to learn.
“It’s the danger of close-mindedness,” he said. “Rigidity of thought patterns and small knowledge bases cause friction in a changing world.”
The book asks that people be open to thinking. Don’t control your knowledge, that leads to being divisive and stunts your development. The digital age has accelerated the pace of misinformation, making the truth even more elusive. Graef explains how something doesn’t have to be true to be believed – making reference to the stories of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch as examples. He says buzzwords are used to incite emotion, rather than looking at facts. As an example he mentions how the left and right call each other facists when neither are.
Government is a major place where ignorance is found, where it’s the party not the issue that matters. A person’s faith also can lead to that type of ignorance, he says.
Graef says people choose ignorance by not listening to other points of view. Losing ignorance can be uncomfortable. It’s “willfull blindness,” he says.
He writes that the lack of an independent media so focused on mudslinging is not the fact-seeking media the country used to rely on.
The author cites Socrates as the wisest of all people simply because he realized how much he didn’t know.
A key to knowledge is, “One must understand an opposition’s position before one can properly understand one’s own.”
The book
Chapter titles include: What is Ignorance? The Size of Personal Universes. The Scope of Ignorance. The Many Branches of Ignorance. And there are specific chapters on Ignorance related to education, media, politics, faith and science, and propaganda. Another chapter is on the Cost and Consequences of Ignorance. It is 350 pages and sells for $18.
Reviews
–“This is an entertaining map of human ignorance and the threats it poses. Given the rising tide of BS and ignorance, it couldn’t be timelier,” Stephen Law, University of London
–“It should be on the bookshelves of anyone who aspires to social consciousness.” Robert Gruden, author of American Vulgar
–“A national conversation about what we do and do not know, should and should not know, and can and cannot know, and the dangers and pitfalls of not knowing the difference,” Bill Vitek, co-editor of The Virtues of Ignorance.
