Ian Warden: Cultists wallowing in the warm mud of ignorance

But what does it, that special bliss, have to do with the main theme of this week's column, the chilling rise in the West of the "cult of ignorance". All will be revealed below.

In the stimulating places where I read and listen to the conversation of mankind the commenting classes are all discussing US scholar Tom Nichols' new book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Earlier this week he was even lured, for an interview, into the web of the menacing Amanda Vanstone's ABC Radio National Counterpoint program.

Nichols says that there has always been a kind of "cult of ignorance" in his United States but that now, in the US and elsewhere (with for example the cult having a triumph in the UK's Brexit vote), that cult is going gang-busters. It is riding a wave of loathing of experts and expertise.

Reviewers everywhere are pointing to how timely Nichols' book is given that the new US president is an ignoramus who during his campaigning roared (to rapturous delight in his audiences) "You know, I've always wanted to say this – I've never said this before with all the talking we all do – all of these experts, 'Oh we need an expert.' The experts are terrible."

What's more the president is revelling in giving important cabinet positions to people totally ignorant of government and of the fields (including Energy, Education and Housing) they now rule over.

Reviewers, endorsing some or all of Nichols' findings marvel in horror at denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change, vaccination and the safety of GMO foods. It emerges that US "millennials" are the most adamant, against everything scientists say, that GMO foods are satanic and dangerous.

Nichols fumes that "Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything relevant to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything."

Of all the topsy turvinesses of our times the malignant spread of the cult of ignorance, can seem for some of us (including this columnist and Nichols' learned, ashen-faced reviewers) the most horrifying development of all.

Asking myself why it seems so horrifying I diagnose that for lots of us (perhaps especially of my mature-age uni-educated generation) life has always been a cult of knowledge. It may be if we examine it that our cult is delusional and no better than the cult of ignorance. What is the point of going on accumulating knowledge willy-nilly? We can't take it with us when we go.

But meanwhile, out of some untested faith in the importance of being as informed as we can be about as much as possible, we cultist fools go on learning and learning and reading and reading. Our knowledge-seeking antennae are always up and bristling. Your columnist is doing two esoteric U3A courses just because they are about subjects of which, until now, I have thought myself shamefully higgerant.

For our knowledge cult the idea of wallowing in ignorance, of thinking it a virtue, is bewildering. The triumphantly ignorant and fact-ignoring seem a different species, as alien and nasty as werewolves and zombies. The fact that they ever achieve power and influence, winning Brexits and the control of nations, is shocking for those of us who want our society, our world, to be run by knowledge cultists like ourselves.

And this where, at last, the subject of the bliss of marital sex gets its guernsey in this week's ramblings. In this very week in which I have been immersed in melancholy discussions of Nichols' book and of the march of the cult of ignorance I have added to my knowledge. And, as usual, how good it felt!

I have been listening to and loving Bach's joy-packed Wedding Cantata (BWV 202) for more than 50 years. I had always imagined (for it is sung in German and I don't speak German) that it is, like the majority of the great man's cantatas, a work in praise of God. But this week, using the magic of YouTube and Google I find after all that it is a secular cantata (refreshingly, God and Christians don't get a mention). It celebrates love and love making and argues, plausibly, that marital sex (when "two souls obtain one jewel") is the most joyous of all.*

What is this delight that snippets of new, ignorance-removing knowledge like this gives the learning-crazed members of our cult? Irrational or not, masturbatory or not, surely it is the sense of some personal progress being made, of the mind having been enlarged a teensy-weensy bit, of that mind being made even more appreciative of life's loveliness.

The cultivation of ignorance is obviously giving its cultists some similarly masturbatory delights. And yet, as I hurriedly finish this column so as to be able to beetle off to my ignorance-battling U3A class (today it is Russian literature in translation) I struggle to understand what those delights can be.

*I commend to you all the YouTube performance by sturdy Nordic goddess Kasja Dahlback and an ensemble of joyful Finns at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LywPtaSUTo