Ignorance is practical.

Click to enlarge: A three-legged stool. A stool can provide stability with 3 legs, 4, 5, 6, or more. Three works just fine, weighs less, and takes fewer resources and labor to manufacture, but in the absence of any criteria besides "what keeps you from tipping over," there is no right number.

I’ve come to a point in my spiritual (and secular) journey where I am amazed how cavalierly many educated and intelligent people say "X ought not to be that way" when a group of folks may have happily been practicing X that way for a dozen or a hundred or a thousand years.

If you know me, you know I am what you might call a moderate progressive (>), which means, in part, I don’t have to agree with the way groups of people do things, but I do grant them the right to continue doing it without my interference, so long as they don’t interfere with my right to live my life the way I think I ought[1].

And that’s not always easy, because there are a lot of things I disagree with that are legal. I don’t like my taxes funding abortion and war, but I can’t earmark my tax dollars for the causes I personally like.

Click to enlarge: A formal place setting. There’s no reason why I can’t eat my entire meal with an oyster fork and slurp my soup from the bowl. It would make any place setting much more practical, if a little boring. But in the absence of any other etiquette besides “whatever gets it to my mouth,” there is no right way to set a table. (The image is from WhatWouldJackieDo.wordpress.com)

Some group practices cross over into hurt, I know that, but for the most part, if a group says, for example, “only men should be preachers,” well, by golly, it's their club and their rules. Lots of folks have started their own clubs on this very issue.

 

However, I encourage anyone to consider that just maybe something that looks out of step but has lasted a long time may have some merit, and there is merit in a practice that provides stability and comfort apart from the practice itself; ignorance is not only blissful, it can be practical.

Are there exceptions? Sure. Consider slavery, universal suffrage, child labor, fair housing laws, etc. Institutionalized marginalization is a bad thing; defining it and doing a risk/benefit analysis can be presumptuous, but it can also be essential.

I’m only thinking of benign practices here.

And yes, we’ll disagree on those, but there are some things we can shrug at and move along, right?

[2013-02-22]

 

c0

[1]
Note that when I say “I,” I am not saying “Clarence’s rules,” but that Clarence (and you) has the right to choose which value system to abide by - Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc - or none at all, which is impossible, but if you want to try, I can’t stop you.

c0