On the road…again!

Afghanistan to Zambia

Chronicles of a Footloose Forester

By Dick Pellek

On Ignorance

This is likely to be the most personal, contentious, insulting, and embarrassing chronicle that the Footloose Forester has ever penned. It is all about my ignorance, your ignorance and the general ignorance that pervades the very air we breathe. 

“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects” quipped the late humorist Will Rogers.  He passed away so long ago that the younger generations may not hear his name any more; and only lucky oldsters may recall his guileless smile and charm as he stood on stage working his lasso while dissing the establishment and assorted stuffed shirts.  He made his point, and thus emboldened the Footloose Forester to brave future criticism when he also included the subject of ignorance into his thoughts and writings.  That touchy subject is of course charged with real or implied insult on a personal level that cannot easily be attenuated or rationalized.   People get offended rather easily if you say that they are ignorant about this or that; and there seems to be no way for most people to accept the word ignorant without being personally invested in its use.

Dwight David Eisenhower was enough of a fatherly figure in the young eyes of the Footloose Forester to speak about ignorance in a non-damning way; and as then President of the United States, he responded to a reporter that he took daily lessons in economics because he was ignorant.  He unabashedly admitted that he was ignorant about economics, having spent his career as a military officer.  But Eisenhower went on to say that people should not be ashamed to admit that they are ignorant; because we are all ignorant about some things.  Ignorance simply means that you are unaware of something. The word in no way suggests that being ignorant means that you are stupid.  So said President Eisenhower.  It was a poignant remark and one that the Footloose Forester well remembers as he assesses his own attitudes about people, places and events. 

Before he gets into finger pointing about the ignorance of others, the Footloose Forester recalls an embarrassing moment when his boss in Haiti confronted him about a report in which the Footloose Forester discussed the process of technicians from the capital city making field visits to places where they were ignorant of local circumstances and day to day issues. His boss, who was coincidently standing on the very ground at that same field site during a subsequent trip, took the opportunity to blushingly scold the Footloose Forester that it was not necessary to report that he (the boss) was ignorant of the circumstances.  Annoyed, insulted and demeaned … was he.  The occasion did, however; give the Footloose Forester the opportunity to look him in the eye and state, unwaveringly, that the ignorance factor in the report was all about the ignorance of the Footloose Forester, as visiting technician.  It wasn’t a case of a phony rationalization; it was about his approach to observing and assessing circumstances and making that admission as part of his reporting process.

As written in another chronicle, entitled “Schooling for Life”, his seeking a Masters degree at the University of Florida was a natural extension of his belief that he was woefully unprepared to speak and practice as a forester in the Third World, his choice as a career path. Rather than to project a phony self effacement when he told people he was ignorant, he just reminded them and himself that he and they were entirely ignorant of places they had never been, and of the languages and cultures that were awaiting them there. Tropical Forestry was his personal career quest, and he sought to mitigate his ignorance of the tropics through a course of study. His ignorance of the tropics was almost total at the time, but that was also part of his challenge.

On another occasion when he was giving a presentation at a forestry conference in Bamako, Mali, he let it slip about his relative ignorance regarding a policy or technical matter in Cape Verde.  One of the participants then asked if the Footloose Forester had ever worked overseas before.  To which he replied, yes; there was Pakistan, and Viet Nam, and Indonesia, and Costa Rica, and Panama, and Honduras, and Trinidad, and Senegal and ….  But he was still ignorant.  The gentle laughter in the room at the mention of the third of fourth country broke into horse laughs before he got into naming all the African countries.  In retrospect, the Footloose Forester always took some delight in mentioning that in one way or another, we should not let our pride in our fancy degrees overshadow our utterly ignorant status as we attempt to cope with international development issues in places where we do not know the languages, the geography, the ecosystems, the politics, or the day-to-day struggles of the people.  

Reminding USAID colleagues and other development workers that we are all ignorant to a large degree was one of the personal techniques that the Footloose Forester used openly and often. Most colleagues resented that point of view, and resented the Footloose Forester for the implied insult toward them.  It didn’t matter whether or not finger pointing was part of the process. The suggestions of ignorance in the dialogues were always resented, even if they were not always acknowledged.  Unfortunately, the Footloose Forester had to risk a certain amount of ire to make his case—that some of his associates were even more ignorant than he himself was. And the teaching and sharing with others certainly had its place in the world of international development, especially among the cadre of USAID functionaries who spent most of their time in offices.

As poor a job as the Footloose Forester probably did dispelling the implied insults concerning the ignorance of others, he could not bring himself to give up the quest to do the best job that he knew how, even if it required potentially alienating his colleagues as he attempted to shed light on the issues. He always said what he believed and let the proverbial cookie crumble as it might.

The ultimate frustration, however; was always reserved for those who practiced willful ignorance. If a person took a stance based on simple, innocent and unadorned ignorance; that was one thing.  But when they refused to listen to your point of view, or to ask questions, or to choose options that are not in anyone’s best interests; that amounts to willful ignorance and the scorn of the Footloose Forester.  At this stage, it would be better to downplay the remembered episode wherein the Footloose Forester stood helplessly by while a two-person team fresh out of Washington, D.C. toured a research facility in Rwanda. Just a hint of the story, though … neither of the visiting “officials” from Washington spoke French; neither of them asked a single question of the official monitor of the project (the Footloose Forester) either before, during, or after the field inspection; nor asked any questions addressed to their Rwandan hosts; nor to the accompanying Kenyan monitor who did speak French and had been the official monitor of that project for several previous years….  A clear case of willful ignorance.

Ouch!  Just when the Footloose Forester was ready to move on to another topic, a Washington Post newspaper editorial (12 March 2014) reminded him that ignorance really is all around us.  Under the caption, Rand Paul's Ignorance, editorial writer Jennifer Rubin used another variational descriptor of ignorance.  The cut and paste excerpt reads like this:   I’ve resisted the suggestion that Rand Paul doesn’t know much, if anything, about national security. He is a U.S. senator and has access to the media, Senate staff, administration briefings, outside experts and colleagues. But sometimes ignorance is deliberate.  [Underlined for emphasis.] This might be such a case. If so, his problem is not merely one of ideology.