Does anyone care that a mountain climbing enthusiast and self-professed "entrepreneur in the cannabis space" doesn't know the name of one of the world's great cities? For about 15 minutes this morning I pretended that I did care. I was lying to myself.
In my experience, nobody knows anything. It is possible to become a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly without having heard of St. Augustine, to become a congresswoman and Founding Fathers-quoting presidential candidate without knowing where the Battles of Lexington and Concord were fought. A famous cosmologist can suggest, with total impunity, on the website of one of America's most eminent periodicals, that Oscar Wilde's reception into the Catholic Church was a hoax, like the spurious stories about Darwin's deathbed conversion that used to make the rounds in evangelical pamphlets.
Even the things people know are generally the wrong things. The cofounder of a journalism website worth nearly a billion dollars can quote statistics about urban sprawl but doesn't know what the Everglades are; reporters with 170,000 Twitter followers practically drowning in dank memes are steeped in the lore of CSPAN circa 1993 but cannot write grammatical English sentences; professors of English who sneer at eminent novelists and accuse them of narcissism make blogs about their favorite trees.
What is to be done?
I think we have two options. One is to exult in our ignorance. Take science, which some people claim to "f—ing love." I hate it. I don't know a thing about it. When I say there is no reason to believe black holes exist, I do so from a position of such ignorance that an argument seeking to disprove my contention would go over my head entirely. I am proud of this.
Here is a (not at all exhaustive) list of things I know absolutely nothing about:
• The NFL after Super Bowl XXXIII
• Top 40 radio
• Superheroes and the films made about their adventures
• Fungi
• Firearms other than hunting rifles and shotguns
• Oceanography
• Coding
• The current politics of Central Asia*
• The water cycle
• Dark energy
• Dark matter
• Anti-matter**
• Baryonic matter
• The Arabic alphabet
• Mollusks
• Contemporary fiction
• The lives of non-20th-century presidents other than the Founders and Lincoln
• Australian wine
• Styx's discography
• The European economy
This is what transparency in journalism looks like. Next time you catch me heaping scorn on the Arctic-exploring former governor of a Southwestern state engaged in a third-party bid for the presidency for not knowing who Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow is, screencap this. I will deserve it. I encourage everyone else with a blue-check mark next to his Twitter account to follow suit and declare his interests, or rather total lack thereof, as soon as possible.
The second option, which I prefer, is rather more extreme. I think a month and a half-long nationwide moratorium on news, sports, and TV, with the internet and LGE and Wi-Max all shut down for civilian purposes, would do us all a world of good. Read a book. Read six, or one with six volumes. Take a course in remedial grammar or algebra. Study maps of Africa. Learn the rules of lacrosse. Don't do it because you want to sound clever or because you think it will be good for your soul; you won't, trust me, and many of the saints were riotously ignorant of all polite learning. Just do it for yourself out of boredom, for the same reasons you tweet. Trust me: the election will go on regardless.
*If I had to pick one of these to read a few books about, this would be it. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
**Is this real or just a science-fiction trope?