Letters to the Editor
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Ignorance and activism
"Prosecutors used scare-mongering to get the jury to convict an innocent person"?
GASP! Well, I never!
I'm sorry if an innocent person was convicted and inasmuch this article is about that topic, I am as outraged as anyone should be.
But there is another issue in the article and it is the issue of activism itself.
An activist is a person who wants to change something very specific in MY world whether I want it or not. That alone makes activists sort of unlikeable people, in whom arrogance and selfishness is combined with a single issue zealotry.
I am not against opening eyes, but eye-openers (iconoclasts, rebels, etc) want to change something in my world while persuading me to join in and want the change together with them.
For an activist, the narrowness in focus is in mutual feedback with a serious level of ignorance about some fundamental aspect of the topic at hand.
In case of the ELF people, it is summed up in the following sentence:
" genetically engineering trees for the benefit of the timber industry. They said his research would "unleash mutant genes into the environment" and "cause irreversible harm to forest ecosystems."
This shows a shocking (but not surprising) degree of ignorance of biological science and the fundamentals of logic. Mutant genes are unleashed into the environment - where else by the way? - every second by good old Mother Nature. In fact the activists themselves are the beneficiaries of mutant genes that had the fortune to assemble into the genome of a homo sapiens by a few billion years of evolution.
This type of ignorance is akin to the one underlying the activism against "genetically modified foods" which is widespread in Europe and for some miraculous reason has not gained foothold in the US. All of the cultivated food crops are genetically different from their wild antecedents, how else could they look bigger or juicier? They are all genetically modified after thousands of years of selective breeding and hybridization.
Such levels of pervasive structural ignorance of the topic at hand is crucial to the development of activism. Experts in their topic know all too well that nothing is as simple as it sounds. The typical activist has oversimplifications, misunderstandings and the total lack of awareness of alternative explanations in his/her head regarding the mechanics of the issue they are ready to sacrifice themselves and even others for.
It is sad to contemplate that institutes of higher education, such as apparently Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., turn out fanatic ignoramuses like the ones the article talks about, and what's more they prosper as well known magnets for people interested in such type of activism. It being a state college, in this case the fostering of stupidity and violence was done with governmental assistance, to boot! So it is not only educational malpractice but misuse of taxpayer dollars as well, just to add insult to injury.