Picture this true story, which happened many years ago in small town Ontario and likely plays out in similar ways many times in many places:
A young woman was visiting her sister-in-law for a few days and speaking with her mother on the phone. Our young lady was Canadian born to recently arrived Latvian parents so she grew up speaking Latvian and English, in that order. Out of respect or habit, she often spoke Latvian with her parents. It’s understandable if you are unfamiliar with Latvia, a very small country on the Baltic Sea that was, when this scenario played out in the late 1970s, an involuntary part of the Soviet Union with less people than Toronto. This sister-in-law’s family had been in Canada for generations and may not have known, or cared to know, the language her visitor spoke on the phone. Fair enough. When our young lady hung up the phone, though, her sister-in-law asked, “Did you understand anything you just said?”
Think about that question for a moment. Perhaps it was a joke. Still, it could easily have been a serious question revealing a subconscious mind set all too common in society. The sister-in-law’s question suggested that since she could not understand the foreign words spoken they were not understandable to anyone, including the woman speaking them or her mother listening to them. What, you may wonder, is the big deal about such a simple assumption?
In part, this was the topic of a chapter in The Full Scoop on BS. In the chapter entitled Ignorance, I defined it as a lack of knowledge combined with a lack of interest in gaining knowledge. As I later argued in the chapter, ignorance can be quite dangerous, as history has demonstrated time and again.
Many people are familiar with the saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, attributed to English novelist Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902). So true.
It takes a special kind of thinking to presume that if you don’t understand something it is not understandable to anyone. Hopefully, this sister-in-law’s ignorance wasn’t so complete that she skipped the assistance of skilled tradespeople, physicians, and teachers for her kids. Still, incomplete ignorance has left some big body counts, and it still does.
More on Samuel Butler and ignorance later, including some of my own failings.