The cult of ignorance welcomes the World Wide Web and its mother

Thirty years ago, while struggling with the second leg of my first-year BSc degree, I attended a public lecture. A man with Nordic features (blue-eyed and blond) in the mould of popular depictions of Yeshua of Nazareth was on the podium. He spent the next 45 minutes extolling the virtues of this grand new invention called the internet and associated applications such as the World Wide Web and electronic mail.

To say my mind was blown is a bit like saying the South African economy has hit a bit of a wobble. I remember trembling with excitement, imagining the equivalent of all the libraries, all the Encyclopaedia Britannicas, all the newspapers since the beginning of time, all the movies ever made and all the combined knowledge on the entire planet, available to you at the click of a button. I predicted that by the year 2020, we would have witnessed a dramatic spike in the average IQ of the human species.

I totally underestimated the insatiable hunger we harbour for the peace of ignorance. Our species is generally hectically averse to acquiring knowledge. In the words of biochemist and writer Isaac Asimov in 1980: “Antiintellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”

People are passionate about their democratic right to express their opinions without having said opinions subjected to any form of verification or scrutiny. Folks do not even want to be told simple, basic facts.

During a recent discussion about Bafana Bafana’s history of World Cup qualifiers, an acquaintance referred to a 1997 qualifier against “the DRC in Pointe-Noire”. My crime was to innocently point out that Pointe-Noire is not a city in the DRC and that we were playing the national team of the Republic of the Congo instead. Two minutes later the discussion had degenerated into an ill-tempered yelling match despite my attempts to make the irascible fellow simply read the opening paragraph of a match report I’d fished out of Google on my phone. “I don’t care about Google. It’s not accurate anyway,” he said.

I was a victim of a similar fate about two weeks ago, ahead of the ANC’s January 8 statement in Kimberley. My crime? I had noticed that way too many people on social media were spelling the North West capital “Kimberly”, so I went to Facebook and posted, “A moment of silence for the murdered second ‘e’ in ‘Kimberley’ over the past week.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself on the receiving end of obstinate resistance from folks belligerently defending their right to spell the word whichever way they deem fit.

The coup de grâce to the second “e” was delivered by a furious friend who had converted to radical Pan Africanism on the spot and called me “the chief defender of the queen’s language”. All because looking up the correct spelling of “Kimberley” was a mountain too high.

The aversion to assimilating new information among my own people, the Zulu speakers, has spawned creative colloquialisms. As you read them, I challenge you to identify your own language’s. When accosted with previously unknown facts, these are popular phrases bandied about by my people:

● Hamb’ uyotshela unyoko loko. This means that I don’t care about your facts; go tell them to your mother;

● Pho kunani? I hear you, but so what?;

● Wena ungenaphi? This is what you typically get when, say, someone posts a video clip of dancing to their favourite gospel song in the car, with their kid standing on the passenger seat, and you point out that the child will become a projectile flying out of the window during an abrupt stop. It means, What business is it of yours?;

● Ngeke sizwe ngawe. We won’t be told by you; and

● Ok’salayo. This is my favourite. It means that I acknowledge that your facts might be superior and correct, but I don’t really care and I will continue along my chosen, preferred trajectory.

Long live the power of knowledge! However, ok’salayo, that knowledge resides inside the belly of the beast that is wilful ignorance.

If you disagree, Hamb’ uyotshela unyoko loko.

I acknowledge that your facts might be superior but I don’t really care and I will continue along my preferred trajectory