Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Unacceptable ignorance

Is this even defined beyond personal idiosyncrasies?

If not, does this mean that all forms of ignorance is fine as long as there is a willingness and openness to learn from the part of the ignorant person?

Three of us had a debate on this that lasted for about two hours. I opined that every person has a context and there are some fundamental facts about that context. Ignorance of those would be unacceptable. Unacceptable here obviously does not mean that the person has to burnt at the stakes for their ignorance but simply to indicate that the person under question is being quite dumb. The other two in the debate opined that we cannot come to any common ground on what is unacceptable given a person and his/her context. It is always a personal line.


e.g:
1.) If a well educated canadian says that a vegetarian diet has holes in it (implying that it does not provide all the required nutrients), is it unacceptable ignorance?
2.) If an educated person born and brought up in Delhi all his life does not know that there are 4 major south indian languages, is it unacceptable ignorance?

These are just examples. The main question is that, given a context, is it possible to arrive at some sort of common ground on what is unacceptable ignorance?



அறிவின்மை இன்மையுள் இன்மை பிறிதின்மை
இன்மையா வையா துலகு

3 comments:

skay said...

The thing under ambiguity here is the 'context' you are referring to..

Unknown said...

what i think is that, if ur action is going to affect negatively, someone in the world, in some way, then that is unacceptable. how much unacceptable depends on the magnitude (severity) of the affect and also dimension of that affect. also if u continue to do the same thing even after u know that ur actions are negatively affecting others (human beings, living creatures and nature), then ...

Unknown said...

wat do u think?