Rational Ignorance

In one of the great moments of Star Trek, Captain Kirk explains how he became the only cadet ever to solve the Star Fleet Academy’s ultimate challenge: he cheated.  And millions of Star Trek fans simultaneously muttered, “Oh No!”, and “Yes!”  That’s the way we humans are, torn between our desire to follow the rules set by others and our instinct to win, by hook or by crook, our own personal victories.  Edward O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, attributes this to a divided nature engendered by the evolution of genes both for selfishness and for cooperation.   Philosophers and theologians have from ancient times attributed it to a divided, multi-level soul, or Original Sin, or the temptations of Satan; Freud described it as a struggle between a primitive Id and a rational Ego; and Carl Sagan theorized it as a vestige of brain evolution that simply piled social “mammalian” structures on top of tooth-and-claw “reptilian” brain foundations.

Whatever its root causes, we have developed many mechanisms for making our divided nature work for us.  One major one is our ability to compartmentalize our world into mutually exclusive views that we can handle neatly with one part of our nature or another:  sacred versus secular, Oktoberfest versus the rest of the year, business versus family, rational versus emotional.  Cheating is ok on government regulations but not ok on the golf course.  We shoo away “the better angels of our nature” in order to calculate our personal profit undisturbed.  We blame others as responsible for their own problems when in fact we have initiated them, the “not my problem” defense.

One form of this compartmentalization is what economists call “rational ignorance”, the tendency not to bother to learn about or to ignore what does not affect us personally.  It’s a kind of cheating.  We cut problems down to a workable size by ignoring large parts of them.  It makes reporters think that our only concern at election time is the impact of our choices on our wallet.  It makes us ignore the impact of our agricultural, environmental and energy policies on the poor of Africa or of Southeast Asia.  It makes us not care about the locations of Pacific island countries that may be drowned by global climate change.  But as our world has shrunk and our technology become gigantic, the need for cooperation has escalated, the groups which must cooperate for survival grown larger and the meaningful relationships become ever more complex.

This week the newspapers report that African famine has led to a sharp rise in the forced marriages of young girls as families “dump” them to lower family food costs, that neo-Nazi anti- immigrant clashes have risen in Greece because of the societal unrest produced by the European debt crisis, that it took two separate multi-national teams, each of 3000 scientists, to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, that Kansas faces rising deficits because of prior tax cuts meant to reduce the costs of state government, that China will by 2050 have a shrinking population with a median age of 50, higher by 10 years than the median age of the U.S. and no longer able to function as the factory hands of the world, that Russia faces “a wall of water” from torrential rains, and that Midwestern farmers, the breadbasket fillers of the world,  face declining crop yields as the U.S. endures the warmest twelve months on record.  Which of these is "not my problem"?

I doubt the mind exists that could fathom the growing complexity of global relationships, but one thing is clear.  We need ways to cut down on our rational ignorance and care more about what is happening elsewhere.  Our neighborhood is now everywhere, and our neighbors’ problems are ours. We can no longer cheat on the situation by just ignoring the pains and issues of others.  Ignorance is no longer rational.  A renewed emphasis and funding of higher education is needed, and we need to lean more about our world every day. .  Concern for "our neighbors" in the lost parts of the world is needed more all the time; it means a lot, not only to them but to us as well.  Think about that as you make your political and economic choices this year.