May 7, 2017
TO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW:
Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know ; He lacks a sense of American history and its presence with us today. (GEORGE WILL, May 3, 2017, National Review)
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump's inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. [...]What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation's history. As this column has said before, the problem isn't that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know--or cannot acknowledge, even to himself--that he does not know anything.
An ignorant man can be a fine president. Indeed, they may make better presidents.Some level of ignorance allows you to approach problems afresh, without the clutter of preconceived notions and accreted positions that make up the conventional wisdom. There are very rarely crises that are so urgent that they require immediate decisions and you have ample time to read and be briefed about issues. And if you are comfortable in your ignorance you will approach such areas with some eagerness to alleviate your lack of knowledge and understanding.
On the other hand, if you are ignorant but refuse to believe/accept that you are, you will make ill-informed judgments proceeding from that ignorance or may fall prey to expertise, deferring the judgment to another. We see the former most often with Donald, who can hardly answer most questions without revealing complete ignorance or, at best, cursory knowledge. We see the latter when he just mouths the idiocies that his guru, Steve Bannon, has revealed to him, like the Civil War nonsense. Both expose him as a man unfit for the office he holds.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2017 6:35 AM