‘Tis Folly to Be Wise

“Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.” Mark Lilla in the NYT (Gift Article): The Surprising Allure of Ignorance. “Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize ‘the people’ and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.” (Other than that, we’re pretty clear headed…)

+ The Oxford University Press word of the year is Brain Rot, defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” (The last time I might have had a cogent response to this would have been just before I logged onto Compuserve for the first time.)