In Walker Percy's 1991 essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land appears a previously unpublished, thought-provoking article, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" containing this sentence:
Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. (page 113)
Percy's sentence seems prophetic more than a quarter century before the truth became relative in American politics and beyond. Philosophers have sought to define and describe truth for more than two millennia, but all their work has vaporized in a time when polemicists and even academics refuse to ground their observations and summations in commonly accepted principles of morality and ethics.
We can surely find many more examples of prescient wisdom, such as comedy writer Robert Orben's oft recycled 1974 aphorism, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I suppose we have always known this "truth," but what are we doing about it?
