What's more, several years ago, a number of prominent Russian scientists accused the church in an open letter of imposing ignorance and clerical rule on Russian society.
Rawls charged his readers to design a society from the ground up, from an original position, and he imposed the ignorance constraint so that readers would abandon any foreknowledge of their particular social status — their wealth, their health, their natural talents, their opportunities or any other goodies that the cosmos may have thrown their way.
It may be that the prospect of an active, informed, educated citizenry is so frightening because it would begin to question how the United States ended up with so many elected officials who are not only ignorant about science and history, but are willfully ignorant and want to impose their ignorance on the rest of us.
I just expect them to have the humility, the simple decency, not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us with the force of law.
I have a responsibility to do this myself, without imposing my ignorance and privilege on marginalized persons by asking them to educate me.
"Now the difficulty is the silence and ignorance imposed by our detention," he said.
The ultimate effect of such practices was a form of self-imposed ignorance: few things were ever "officially" learned or reported.
The son of a landless farmer, he was born in a mud hut near Kandahar in 1959, and rarely ventured far from there, in a life of self-imposed ignorance of all but religion and war.
We're too far along to deal clumsily in the broad shapes and main roads of the Middle East, the trade-off being a self-imposed ignorance that falsely separates the human experience into "us" and "them".
This imaginative scheme imposed a tax on ignorance, penalizing an employer for lacking even a cursory grasp of a world religion's holidays.
