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Title

A little bit of knowledge

Description

To egregiously paraphrase the Pascal quote cited later: <bq>A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.</bq> There is all too much substantiating evidence for this adage these days, especially if one spends too much time wallowing in what is often designated the MSM or [M]ain[S]tream [M]edia. Learning a little about something and beating everyone over the head with it is nothing new. Nor is the phenomenon wherein those who know the least make the most noise. It is very likely that things have always been this way. As evidence, there is the following quote from the article <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/hbc-90006257" source="Harper's" author="">Pascal’s Principle of Convergence</a> (cited in the original French as well as the English translation from Harper's because the English is a bit stodgy): <bq>Le monde juge bien des choses, car il est dans l’ignorance naturelle qui est le vrai siège de l’homme. Les sciences ont deux extrémités qui se touchent, la première est la pure ignorance naturelle où se trouvent tous les hommes en naissant, l’autre extrémité est celle où arrivent les grandes âmes qui ayant parcouru tout ce que les hommes peuvent savoir trouvent qu’ils ne savent rien et se rencontrent en cette même ignorance d’où ils étaient partis, mais c’est une ignorance savante qui se connaît. Ceux d’entre deux qui sont sortis de l’ignorance naturelle et n’ont pu arriver à l’autre, ont quelque teinture de cette science suffisante, et font les entendus. Ceux-là troublent le monde et jugent mal de tout. The world judges things well, because it is in that state of natural ignorance which is the true place of the human. The sciences have two extremities, which converge: the first is that state of pure ignorance, in which we are left by nature; the other extremity is that at which great minds arrive, which, having traversed everything which man can know, discover that they know nothing, and recognize once more the point from which they set out. But this is a learned ignorance, which knows itself. Those who have set out from the stage of natural ignorance, and have not yet been able to arrive at the other, have but a hint of that real and adequate knowledge; and these are the assumers and pretenders to reason. These disquiet the world: and judge everything worse than the others.</bq> It's especially with the description of our modern-day pundits---<iq>Ceux d’entre deux qui sont sortis de l’ignorance naturelle et n’ont pu arriver à l’autre, ont quelque teinture de cette science suffisante, et font les entendus</iq>---that makes you realize just how non-unique we are in how we communicate, despite our satellites and twitter pages and iPhones. We use different media, but we spout the same, unfounded, unconsidered kind of crap as Pascal's contemporaries. Learning history often involves this feeling that history is a wheel in which all bad things return; at these times, life seems solely a struggle against the unavoidable sink of cynicism.