The Age of Collective Ignorance
The above image is from a social media post I published this past week, prompted by numerous protests in Canada and across the globe. The responses were interesting, with the majority feeling that we should be striving for common ground as opposed to throwing mud. Then today, a new Canadian poll emerged, affirming that 82% of Canadians are worried that Canada is about ready to head down the same path as America and that our historic hegemony is in danger of being broken irreparably.
Whatever the causes are of our irascibility as a people, the result has been a loss of trust in institutions, including governments, and an evolving cantankerous collective nature that leaves us increasingly unable to work with others in protecting our common ground. Far too many of us appear to be lying in wait for something to be critical about, even if the subject has little to do with our daily lives. Without institutions to build our understanding, we recede back into history in a form of tribalism that is motivated by bias.
It’s not a new problem. Back in 1957, two researchers, Joe Balloon and Timothy Brock, undertook an extensive psychological study on what happens when people are presented with information that contradicts their beliefs. They began with talking about cigarettes - still the rage back then. Working with undergraduate students, in a wide-ranging series of tests they discovered both smokers and nonsmokers tuned out information that opposed their current beliefs about smoking. Even as a growing amount of research was revealing the direct link between smoking and cancer, the pro-smokers subtly tuned out the warning messages. Those against smoking attempted to tune in far more directly.
Similar studies had been going on for decades prior, one of the most significant being about religion in 1920, in a book titled Now and After by author Alexander Berkman. But Ballon and Brock’s became one of the first studies in what became known as selective exposure. When people are confronted with dissonant thoughts, they will almost always default to their pre-existing beliefs while ignoring what they disagreed with. People become more unaware and less adaptable over time because they only select what they wish to hear.
None of this is new to us, since thousands of studies have emerged with similar outcomes in recent years, mostly driven by the effects of social media and the Information Age on our collective and individual capability of navigating through an increasingly complex world. In other words, our growing inability to access a broad array of information helpful to our progress as humanity is slowly turning us against those we disagree with. All that extra information is actually making us more selective, not less.
Tolerant societies, like Canada’s, have historically attempted to make room for various persuasions as a necessity for survival in such a large land with a relatively small population. The less we encounter one another in those institutions that taught us to work or act together, the less we understand other views and feel disinclined to make the effort. Faith organizations, governments, corporations, civic associations, post-secondary institutions - these and more brought us together in a broad effort to better our society and forge the advancement of civilization. Our independent age, where most of our information is now acquired in front of our own digital screens, devoid of other points of view, is teaching us to cunningly select the messages we consume. In the process, we are becoming more limited in our broader understanding and more divisive in the process. We fashion our own media environment, where we no longer gather together to hear trusted voices but instead subscribe to countless podcasts, digital channels and YouTube venues that entrench us even further in our myopia.
An age without enlightenment is an age without renaissance - new understandings, new frontiers of collective advancement. As Thomas Carlyle put it plainly: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” We shouldn’t either, including our own.
