Ignorance as a Virtue--A New Reality?

Today’s conservative movement has a zeal for ideology that is fueled by unlearning basic facts and knowledge of math, science, geography and reality.  All too well these political fundamentalists reject reason, facts, logic, wisdom and knowledge to keep their sentient-based mindset/constituency. This summarizes their zealous attitude and its result: despite their commitment, they feel established in their own righteousness.

Spurting out verbal rubbish you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise at best. But ignorance has started to become less a handicap, and even a sense of pride!  One being belligerently ignorant is now offended if anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge in the face of expertise. 

With a great deal of zeal, they go about thinking and saying they are serving God and country, but all they do is produce their own set of standards or realities. Their zeal is probably their greatest barrier to the truth and to justice.  

More importantly, it prevents them from objectively serving the ‘common good,’ i.e., the very American system and tradition they zealously try to revise in their own image and likeness by embracing ignorance as a virtue. Their minds are blinded by zeal, not served by it.

Frederic Bastiat said, "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."  I finally realize why we need 35 million laws to keep the 10 commandments.

We obsess about homeland security, ‘enemies’ all around us and threats to our way of life.  But America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves by not seeing truth within instead of taking a contemptuous view of reality and growing proudly ignorant day by day. 

Ignorance is not the equivalent of expertise nor is wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice the same as evidence and reason.

Why International Aid Is Not About Aid

One learns many lessons living and working in Haiti where daily life is filled with a poverty as defined by the West.  One foundational truth is brought into focus if we begin to approach international aid in terms of relationship, not aid.

Much can be said about foreign aid workers and recipients.  In the best intentioned scenarios it is as if a script is written.  Participants are cast/thrust into predetermined roles of victim and rescuer, giver and taker.

The taker and victim sacrifice their dignity to a spirit of entitlement.  The giver and rescuer react, become resentful, and give themselves over to indignation and discouragement.

Unsuspectingly, everyone loses.

Such is the way of all relationships built on the inadequate foundation of good intentions.  How can any relationship built on good intentions survive, much less thrive?  Many failed marriages begin with good intentions…

Pope Francis addressed this when he said, “Without evangelization, you become just another NGO.”

How does all this possibly relate?  What is evangelization?

I understand evangelization to be the invitation to enter into a relationship beyond the physical (with God, a Higher Power, whatever your spiritual inkling).  This creates new relationships for us, relationships with those who have entered that same relationship.  We then have a new family in the metaphysical as well as physical.  It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone.

Or we might say, there is neither giver nor taker, neither victim nor rescuer.  In the case here in Haiti, neither Westerner nor Haitien.  These new relationships are not built on a foundation of good intentions, but a new foundation of love. Families do not survive operating on good intentions, either.

How, then, are we who are here to “help the poor” proceed?  

We change our view of the people we work with as a victim.  We reject old roles and embrace relationships before us with true charity, love, new heart and through new eyes.  If not, we are left to continue victim/giver relationships where there are always easy solutions to every human problem--neat, plausible and wrong.

“Though I should give away to the poor all that I possess, and even give up my body to be burned--if I am without love, it will do me no good whatever” (1 Corinthians, 13:3) comes to mind.

The idea is that our peace, i.e., success, comes to those who have destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, abolished outdated norms and customs--to create one new person out of the two--thus making peace (or a successful project if one is accountable to the System).  Success, then, is to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition.

“…to create one new person from the two, thus making peace."  It is easy to be drawn into thinking that, the poor, unconverted or person to whom we are giving our ‘aid,’ (in contrast to us), is that person whom will be brought up to speed, brought up to the same level as us.  This is not what is being said here.

It is saying this: we are BOTH brought together, BOTH melted down, BOTH remixed together because neither is any good.

We must approach our international assignments from that standpoint to succeed and/or have peace in what we do.  One might think Westerners should have an advantage because of education, wealth, power, etc.  Those advantages are squandered when we focus on our cultural experiences for solutions.  We are just as impoverished and no better able to serve the constituency we came to “save” than if we were not here.

When both melt and create one new person, it is a blend into the image of all we have in common.  We change, not into Westerner or Haitien, but into a world in us not born until they arrive.  It is only by this melting that a new world is born.  As a result, we don’t drop our ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.   We keep them in spite of everything.