A little knowledge is dangerous - Keith Roulston editorial

Watching the news on TV these days, I can’t help thinking about the wisdom of the proverb, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
   

Of course I can be accused of wishing for a return to the days when people like me – trained journalists – were the source of most public knowledge, but this day of the internet, when anyone can always find someone somewhere to back up their point of view, is wearing me out.
   

I can’t imagine, for instance, there was the same sort of backlash against the polio vaccine as there has been against the COVID-19, although I was still very young at the time. I seem to remember a thrill among parents that at last there was an opportunity to protect their children from a feared disease and a rush to get us vaccinated.
   

Of course the danger, then, was for the future generation. The death toll now has been worst among seniors, and maybe 
practical people see these as a drain on society anyway.
   

But the change, too, today compared to when polio ravaged the land, is that people are less respecting of knowledge – even if they have more. My parents had Grade 9 and Grade 8 education in one-room school houses. All of my siblings have some sort of post-secondary education. Even the truckers who shut down Ottawa and various border crossings, probably thought they were well educated compared to the parents of many of the people who lined up to get polio vaccines.
   

And then, or course, there’s the internet. Where once trained journalists controlled the sharing of information, now we have a democracy of information in which anyone can express his or her opinion.
   

When I was young, my poorly educated parents put great faith in doctors who had far more education than the vast majority of 
their patients. They admired researchers like Dr. Jonas Salk, the virologist who was among the first to develop a vaccine for polio (and paved the way for the disease to disappear from the North American mindset). They listened to family doctors who were thrilled to finally wipe away the fear of this dreaded disease.
   

I suspect there were doctors and others back then who disagreed with people like Dr. Salk, but in a world where the exchange of information was controlled by gatekeepers like journalists, their influence was greatly constrained. One can argue that polio disappeared faster because of it.
   

Today, thanks to the internet, we lived in a world where the transfer of information is much easier. Trained journalists may still control who gets to speak on TV, radio and the newspapers, but these gatekeepers no longer have veto control. It’s easy to argue that the world is a better place when everyone has an equal voice. It makes life much harder, though. 

 

Look at the U.S. where former-President Donald Trump still dominates the news claiming he is denied his rightful office 
by election fraud. Though all the hard evidence shows this is untrue, millions of Republicans continue to believe Trump, to the point that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell fears his party cannot move on to issues that will help it win this fall’s congressional election.
   

Thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals believe the only escape from the limitations of the current pandemic is for as many people to get vaccinated as possible. Heart and other operations are still being postponed because of people who think they don’t need to be vaccinated, or that all the information about sick people in hospital is a fiction concocted to twist their arm to get vaccinated. Most of the beds in critical care wards are taken up by those unvaccinated – but that’s not what you believe if you think all the COVID-19 news is put out there in the name of giving more power to governments to interfere in our lives.
   

There’s another quotable statement that dates back to the King James Bible: “The truth will make you free”. Agreeing on what is the truth is the problem.
   

The vast majority of truckers are vaccinated and believe it is the key to ridding us of the pandemic limitations, yet a handful of people insists it has the right to cripple cities and countries unless the majority lets it have its way. Part of the demands of the organizers of the shutdown of Ottawa was that the federal government be replaced by an unelected group, even though the current government was re-elected last October, though in a minority.
   

But supporters of this shutdown of the country are sure they are right – even if thousands, even millions, of people are deprived of the use of their cities, even their sleep, and their jobs because their stores, factories and restaurants are shut down by protesters.
   

A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.