“Ignorance is bliss” says Cypher in the
first movie of a surreal trilogy of Matrix.
Sometimes the reality is so cruel, ugly and frustrating that ignorance and
denial seems to be the better way out. Even though there are things that are
best not to be aware of, the spread of global ignorance is enormous nowadays.
The diverse information sources have made it easy to find the loads of facts
and news from all over the world, and democracy provided people with a power to
make a difference. The new problem of the mankind is not the dearth of the
information but the actual appreciation of it and further conformable actions.
Recently, the professional actress and
drama coach of an acting study group I had honor to attend shared her thoughts
on something she called “the syndrome of an unfinished action”, the theory was
based on the scheme of normal psychological behavior - “action, analysis of
this action and corresponding reaction”, - people see the event, analyze it and
act in compliance. However, she has noticed that most of the time lately,
people come to nothing more than just analysis. Very often they show a little
bit or none at all of the reaction. And at this point the sensible question
arises – is she right?
Unfortunately, there is some evidence
of the open and undisguised indifference and cowardice, that may prove “the
unfinished action syndrome” existence. I recall watching video on the YouTube
where Russian psychology students have made an experiment in the Moscow city
subway to measure people’s reaction on the fact of theft. There were three students;
one of them was acting as if he had fallen asleep in the underground, while the
other one pretended to steal from him. Meanwhile, the third student was
surreptitiously shooting everything on video, which later had been uploaded to
the famous resource known as YouTube. These students wanted to see if the
subway passengers who witnessed the theft will do anything about it.
Surprisingly, most of the time there eyewitnesses didn’t even make an attempt
to prevent the crime or call the police.
YouTube is a video host that is known
worldwide, and everyday lots of videos are being added to this website,
lamentably, a large amount of them contains pickups of the horrible things done
by humans with the apparent lack of humanity. You can find videos of suicide
attempts, videos of soldiers and prisoners being hanged and decapitated, women
being stoned by the crowd, cruel actions towards animals. Most of these videos
are the evidence of the people’s denial and fake, farfetched ignorance as quite
a lot of them are shot on the telephone cameras by witnesses or the direct
participants. One of the latest examples of the savage and wild behavior is
videos of Muammar Gaddafi’ being tortured before death by the people he served,
on this matter the Mediate.com web resource has published the article starting
with the words:
A gory video televised by Al Jazeera showed overthrown
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi being dragged through the streets, hemorrhaging
blood with a wound to his head. The video appears to show rebels cheering in a
crowded street amongst Gaddafi’s bedraggled corpse.
(Mediate.com)
The actual shooting drops the bombshell on the spectators. The suffering
of the Lybian Leader is obvious, and another unconscious question arises – what
is needed to be done to people so that they become beasts?
In
the latter article by Denyse O’Leary Is
it still wrong, if another culture says it is right, the author shares her
amazement on student response to the act of cruelty. She refers to Mr. Stephen
L. Anderson, the Canadian professor of Philosophy, who has showed his students
the photo of a young Afghani woman Bibi Aisha, whose relatives have cut her
nose and her ears for the attempt of escaping from an abusive husband. The student
reaction was least predictable for Mr. Anderson, on this matter he reflects:
The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare
hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of
my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that
many were experiencing deep emotions.
But I was not prepared for their reaction.
I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I
got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They
spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling
to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.
They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over
there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots
of this kind of stuff .”
Another said (with no consciousness of
self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”
(Denyse O’Leary, referring to Stephen L. Anderson)
Is it wrong to judge other cultures? Is it wrong to judge a man, who has
cut his sister’s nose and ears? Bibi Aisha does not think so, just as many
women who suffer from the oppression and home abuse.
There are
lots of so-called “honor crimes” happening all over the world. In the article
“The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes In Turkey” Dicle Kogacioglu gives
the definition of the honor crime: “An honor crime is commonly defined as the
murder of a woman by members of her family who do not approve of her sexual behavior.”
In his article he says that “honor crimes” are seen “as primarily caused by
tradition, alternately called “codes of honor”, or more broadly “culture” ”.
Can such a culture be judged? Yes, it needs to be judged, moreover it has to be
actively attacked and eradicated!
Nineteen years old Muslim
Katya Koren was stoned to death over the participating in beauty contest, two
male teens – Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni - were hanged in Iran for being
gay, Semse Allak was stoned to coma by her family, Fadime Sahindal murdered in
Sweden by her father… And these examples are just a drop in the bucket of all
the honor crimes committed daily in the world. Here is another example - in
2010 father and grandfather buried
alive a sixteen year old girl for talking
to boys:
Turkish police have recovered the body of a
16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an
"honour" killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys.
The girl, who has been identified only by the initials
MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre hole
dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern
province of Adiyaman.
(The Guardian)
Turkish social activist and television anchorman Cenk Uygur was
reporting this incident in the The Young
Turks show. In his words:
…When somebody says “honor”, somebody else is about to
be killed. Eight of ten times the word “honor” is used as an excuse for the
most despicable things. […]
[…] I feel
understandably angry about it. And… But we have to do something about it, it is
not just an anger. Countries like Turkey have to be courageous enough to go on
a campaign to say “This particular cultural phenomenon is wrong!” And it is not
honorable. And the people who do this are dishonorable!
That they insult Islam, they insult the idea of being a Turk![…]
[…] Ignorance is
throughout the world and in this case it is in Turkey. […]
[…]There are
bounds of reason and when you see stuff like this you have to go proactively to
change this culture, because this is a dishonorable culture. Sick culture!
The despicable parts must be attacked!
(Cenk Uygur, stenographed by the author)
“Culture” like this creates an awful portrayal for Islam in worldwide
media, provides supportive facts for anti-islamic propaganda, starts the stereotypical
image and biased misperception of Muslim world. It jeopardizes the ancient and
beautiful religion in the eyes of the international community. Cenk Uygur is
right in everything he said in this particular case – “despicable parts must be
attacked!”
Till what extend will
people’s ignorance let horrible things happen? And is it really ignorance or
the selfish wish to stay aside? A position of deliberate ignorance is very
practical as it seems to take off the responsibility for somebody else’s
actions and one’s own omission. Douglas Pratt in his article Islamophobia: ignorance, imagination,
identity and interaction provides the classification of different types of
ignorance. It includes innocent, blind and culpable ones.
On the one hand, there is innocent ignorance, or ignorance
simpliciter, namely the situation of a naïve ‘not-knowing’, yielding the
direct and unequivocal ‘don’t know’ response when a question of knowledge or
perception is posed. However, this form of ignorance may provide opportunity
for correction through the provision of information and the processes of
education. It implies no intentional prejudice on the part of the one who is
innocently ignorant. On the other hand, blind
ignorance is something else again. It
is ignorance born of an intellectual incapability, or cognitive barrier, that
effectively prevents any ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’ other than what has been
dictated by the worldview perspectives held. It yields a ‘can’t know – it’s
beyond our ken’ response. Knowledge, and an image, of the other are so utterly
prescribed by the worldview of the knower that no alternative perspective or
image is admissible. Here the notion of applying a corrective simply through
information is inadequate. Any educational process, if attempted, will require
sustained and careful execution to effect any real change. Yet even if change
is unwelcome or resisted, the premise of this mode is basically that of
cognitive inertia, which in principle can be overcome. Indeed it is this type
of ignorance that yields to the great changes in social ordering and cultural
life, such as happened, for instance, in the momentous changes brought about in
the USA by the civil rights movement in the twentieth century.
However, there is yet another kind of ignorance that
goes beyond even that occasioned by the blinding effect of a limited
perspective and an intransigently closed mind. This third kind is culpable ignorance, that is, an active
ignoring: the deliberate refusal to know, the avoidance of the challenge to
cognitive change, the reinforcement of a prejudicial perspective by
deliberately ignoring the issue at hand. This is ignorance born of an active
dismissal of alternative possibilities, the out-of-hand rejection of options
presented for alternative ways of thinking, understanding and interpreting.
This modality goes hand-in-glove with the attitude and mindset that harbours
most forms of fundamentalism or extremism. It produces an intentional ‘won’t
know’ or ‘not wanting to know’ response. It is resistant to any information
contrary to its own; it is inimical to educational process; it treats cognitive
change as effectively, if not actually, treasonable.
(Pratt)
If the first two kinds of the ignorance described by Pratt may in some
cases excuse the omission, the third case of culpable ignorance is the one that
more often leads to the destruction and tragic events in the world.
Another article by Elizabeth
Harman Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?
argues on the responsibility and exculpation over the ignorance. In this article
the term Akrasia is used, it means “the state of mind in which
someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will” (Abbyy
Lingvo Dictionary). Harman, herself, gives the following definition of akratic
action which is “the one done in the belief that one should act differently”. Akratic
action is quite comparable to the culpable ignorance and is blameworthy as well.
In the given article Harman expands the variety of ignorance by separating the
clear-eyed akrasia, false beliefs, mismanagement of the beliefs, involving
ignorance (forgetting) and motivated ignorance (morally permissible cultural
practices like “honor crime”). According to Harman in some cases these types of
ignorance may be exculpate, but it depends on lots of minor facts. For example,
in addition to the definition of motivated ignorance Harman writes that in case
when
similarly each individual within the whole group of
privileged people may fail to realize that their practices are wrong out of
motivated ignorance, If a cultural practice continues and is accepted in a
society not simply because people are ignorant of its moral wrongness, but
because people don’t want to see its moral wrongness, the ignorance looks less
ignorant and the practice is more plausibly blameworthy.
(Harman)
Harman also suggests to consider the existence both original
responsibility and derivative one. And for instance, we can recollect the
experiment in Moscow subway mentioned above. All the witnesses of the theft are
responsible for their omission and theft due to the derivative responsibility
just as every intelligent human all over the world responsible for the all the injustice.
If we have the power to be the force that can prevent suffering and tragedies,
but we do nothing, that means we are all to blame – for wars, honor crimes,
abuse of weak, killing of animals, deforestation, pollution. We might deny it,
we all might want to be Neo, who saved the mankind, but in reality, mostly, we
are all egoistic Cyphers, and just like him we betrayed ourselves and our
society for the state of ignorance, that might can give us the fib of a peace and
quiet but actually blindfolded existence.
Works Cited
Abbyy Lingvo X3 ME Dictionary Akrasia.
ABBYY. 12 Dec. 2011.
Harman, Elizabeth. "Does Moral
Ignorance Exculpate?." Ratio 24.4 (2011): 443-468.
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Kogacioglu, Dicle. "The
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Matrix,
The. Dir. Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Laurence
Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe
Pantoliano, Hugo Weaving. Universal. 1999
O'Leary, Denyse. "Is It Still
Wrong If Another Culture Syas It Is Right? A Teacher's
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Mark. "Inability, Culpability And Affected Ignorance: Reflections On
Michele
Moody-Adams." History Of The Human Sciences24.3 (2011): 65-81. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.
Pratt, Douglas. "Islamophobia:
Ignorance, Imagination, Identity And Interaction." Islam &
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