problems – sethlewis.ie

The Growing Power of Wilful Ignorance

She didn’t want to go to the dentist.

My friend already knew she had cavities, and she knew the dentist would want to do something about them. If she avoided seeing him, she could ignore the problem a little longer. It’s easy to ignore a cavity if the tooth is still functioning. Drills and fillings feel drastic when it’s entirely possible to carry on as normal with no intervention at all. The easiest way to deal with a little bit of decay is to apply a little bit of wilful ignorance to it. The trouble, of course, is that wilful ignorance is not an effective treatment for cavities. It only gives them time to grow. And as the decay grows, the wilful ignorance will have to grow with it. To keep a growing problem out of our minds, we must continually increase the capacity of our tolerance for it, slowly expanding the diameter of our blind spots to fit over its ugly edges.

The Past Is More Than A List Of Problems

It’s often said that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The unstated assumption in this saying is that the past is full of problems—which is obviously true. Learning from the mistakes of the past is a big job because there are just so many to choose from. Our learning is also complicated by the danger of over-correction—of fixating so intently on avoiding one problem that we fall easily into another. After all, we’re just as susceptible to cultural blind spots, overlooked abuses, and self-serving justifications as anyone who went before us. Have you seen the internet lately? So we must learn from the mistakes of the past, and we must apply our lessons carefully. But I think we sell history, our ancestors, and our own selves short when we only see the past as a litany of problems to avoid. Our forebearers certainly had their issues—plenty of them—but they also had their successes. They were often wrong, but sometimes they were right. And what if we were humble enough to admit this? What if we learned from history not only by critiquing it, but also by letting it critique us?

The Importance Of Not Being Original

Some things are worth saying over and over again. I’m sure that’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating. At our house, we said “sit down” and “eat your food” so often that my wife started saying those phrases in Irish, just to break the monotony. Still, we knew that saying it over and over again was the only way to get to the point of not having to say it over and over again.

But there are some things we’ll never get to that point with. There are some things that will need to be said as long as there are people on Earth. The reason for this is that us humans tend to forget basic truths almost as soon as we remember them. We work and fight and kill each other to right some horrible wrong like genocide, oppression, or slavery, then turn around and create new ways of doing the exact same things, like abortion, police brutality, or human trafficking. Each victory bleeds into a new battle, where we have to say the same old truths all over again, like “all people are valuable” and “all men are created equal”.