Jed Rothwell wrote:
> > > Ed Storms, who has a streak of conservatism despite himself, sometimes > bemoans this ignorance. He thinks it shows the world is going to hell in a > handbasket, and people are growing more ignorant every day. Call me an > optimist, but I think people have always been this ignorant. History books > describe countless foolish mistakes. I do not mean acts that we, today, in > hindsight recognize as mistakes. I mean that presidents, prime ministers, > generals, corporate CEOs, leading scientists, and geniuses such as Thomas > Edison made bone-headed, inexplicable mistakes that everyone else at the > time recognized were mistakes. Of course people have always been ignorant. However, that deficiency has always been relative to what they needed to know. Throughout most of history, such people had very little power. This has now changed. Not only must more be known to make a rational decision, but the bad consequences of ignorance are greater. While Bush et al. are selling democracy, the people who are expected to exercise this power are increasingly out of touch with reality and manipulated by doctored information obtained from TV. As for being a conservative, at one time I would have been proud of such a description. Now it is an insult. Many people who now call themselves conservatives act in the most reckless and self-serving way, show ignorant of historical consequences, and are much more arrogant than an extreme liberal. Clearly, a new description is required to describe what used to be conservatism before the word becomes completely unrecognizable and treated as an insult by most real conservatives. Ed
