America's Dunning-Kruger defect
by Tom Sullivan
The two middle-aged aged women spoke with an English accent familiar from Monty Python sketches.
"Look at that one there," said the first. "It's got a swastika on it."
I was traveling in Europe after college and visiting the Louvre in Paris. I was standing in the Roman antiquities section beside two British tourists. Before us, a glass case filled with ornate silver bowls and trays – ancient relics covered with intricate designs.
"Look at that one there," said the first. "It's got a swastika on it. Must be German."
Her companion read the little white card lying in front of the tray, and in a non sequitur I remember to this day, said, "'Donated by friends of the Louvre.' Well, there you are."
A polite-sounding name for this is the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." Here, let John Cleese himself explain it:
I bring this up because Digby twice commented this week on a CNN interview with Reza Aslan. The producers had invited the religion scholar onto the show to comment on ISIS and Islam-inspired violence. Aslan insisted that mistreatment of women, say, in Saudi Arabia and Iran was a product of local cultural, not the religion. Turkey and Indonesia are quite different cases, he offered as counter-examples. But the anchors were so unshakable in what they didn't know they didn't know about "Muslim countries" that Aslan grew visibly exasperated. And by his "tone" confirming – to CNN, at least – the innate "hostility" of a faith held peaceably by nearly a quarter of the world's people.
It would be like pointing to Klan lynchings in the South as typical of all Christendom. But as tourists in a world not even our leaders bother to understand, many Americans simply don't know what they don't know. Mark Twain made great satire of clueless tourists a century and a half ago. It might still be funny today if it didn't keep leading people in this country to support bombing Others in countries we can't even find on a map.
As David Atkins recalled this week, during a briefing on the potential fallout just weeks before invading Iraq and unleashing a civil war, President George W. Bush appeared unaware of the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites. Bush allegedly told briefers, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
Tourists.
A student teacher I had once recounted a story from his visit to Stonehenge. Another American visitor had remarked that it was good that they'd put Stonehenge close to the road so the stones weren't a long walk from the parking. That tourist might have been a future president or CNN host.