Missionary Ignorance
What is the opposite of Curiosity?
The writer Martin Amis, in his memoir Experience, posited that the opposite of Death was Life, but also Love. Sure, at a basic level, you’re either dead at one end of the spectrum or alive at the other. But the true opposite of the cold, inert finality of death is not just it’s absence but the presence of something that blossoms, something responsive and comforting and indestructible.
The idea that something can have two opposites, a practical one and a deeper philosophical one, always pops into my head whenever I see someone being punished (I don’t like the word cancelled) for expressing or being connected to the wrong ideas. If thinking, talking and writing about ideas, good or bad, is Curiosity, what is it’s opposite?
“Ignorance” or “Incuriosty” don’t quite cut it, since they designate merely not knowing, or not wanting to know. The true opposite would be an undefined word or phrase, something like “Missionary Ignorance” – you don’t sit in the dark, but you go out looking for anything that resembles a flame so you can snuff it out and make sure everyone else is in the dark as well.
We see examples of Missionary Ignorance at work every day - a recent notable example was last week when a well-known American poster and publisher called Lomez was doxed in a mainstream British newspaper. I’m not going to give the article publicity by linking to it; you can find it via a quick Google search. The key point of interest of the story for me is that the doxxing was purely punitive in its purpose - it was about targeting someone because you don’t like the way they think and are hoping exposure and embarrassment can result in a job loss, marital breakdown, or something worse.
In the Lomez case, one of the books highlighted as evidence of a transgression was the publication of Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger’s book about the 1st World War. Jünger is one of the most famous and respected German writers of the 20th century, and an edition of Storm of Steel is published by Penguin and has been for many years. For someone to try and shut that down, or smear another using it as evidence represents a level of philistinism that should repulse a thinking, literate person, which the journalists who do this presumably are.
We’ve seen a lot of Missionary Ignorance closer to home as well (my home anyway). When Ireland’s proposed Hate Speech laws were being shopped around, I expected to see people from an artistic background stand up in defence of speaking your mind. Ireland prides itself on a long (though uneven, and complicated) tradition of rebelliousness and art and indeed a combination of the two. Resistance never came. People who had campaigned previously against Ireland’s outdated blasphemy laws, and who for my entire life have actively supported reform of Ireland’s libel laws on the grounds they stifle speech, were almost entirely silent. Worse, those who spoke up invariably went to bat for the new laws.
I can accept this attitude from civilians. The average person is not a big thinker and is worried about appearing pretentious or airy-fairy. So it has always been the case that most people view ideas instrumentally, as badges or enmity or friendship and indicators of social status, without regard to their content or the joys of intellectual playfulness. But I always assumed a facility with words - such as a journalist might have- was naturally connected to a similar facilicty for imagination and curiosity. I was wrong - the cultural lesson of the last decade is that those are unrelated things and the fact that you have the one doesn’t mean you have the other. Quite the opposite.
The easy answer to why a journalist would be one of the Missionary Ignorant is that they don't value expression because they’re activists on this or that issue, and that’s the priority. That’s true, but I don’t think it’s noted enough that when given the highest priority, activism is fundamentally philistine, anti-thought and anti-art. “Cancellations”, whether attempted or successful, often reflect this. Nothing is less useful and therefore more hateful to activists than thought and expression, unrestrained and for their own sake. In practice, activism must always narrow, prune, and close off paths - how else to force everyone to the right conclusion?
We have accepted the crusading journalist as a recognisable type in our culture and maybe that’s fair enough, provided the crusading is limited to passionate advocacy for a cause rather than trying to render your ideological opponents unemployable. But it never is, and the purely negative activism of Missionary Ignorance is more commonly how we experience it. I appreciate I’m an outlier but I can’t tell you how sad I feel that writers who behave this way have transgressed against the most basic promise of their profession and their natural talents. No matter. In words, as in all things, the future belongs to people who do not betray their hearts.
An elegant, eloquent and sharp rebuke to the wilfully ignorant and
the submission to the strait jacket
Another case in point is the recent kneecap "free speech" case which was backed by the artists, and the Mise Eire festival which was opposed by the same artists, kneecap included. They objected to some of the proposed attendees rather than anything being shown at the festival, as far as I could tell at the time.