“The thing is, ignorance is rarely the problem.
The challenge is that people don’t always care about what you care about. And the reason they don’t care isn’t that they don’t know what you know.
The reason is that they don’t believe what you believe.
The challenge, then, isn’t to inform them. It’s to engage and teach and communicate in a way that shares emotion and values and beliefs.”
This is terribly silly – of course lack of education and general ignorance is a massive concern in contemporary society that won’t be wished away by people ‘believing’ or ‘feeling’ better. The sentiment is laudable, but this statement actually exacerbates the problem, by privileging ‘belief’ over knowledge (eg the ‘right’ kind of belief vs someone else’s ‘wrong’ belief, as if this is disconnected from concrete reality), and by suggesting that feelings and values are more important than facts. Read this extract again as if spoken by a religious fundamentalist, and its flaws are apparent.
Mar 26th, 2017 / 5:43 pm