by Joshua Mehigan

Then there is the combination of all these and other kinds of ignorance, as for example in the U.S., where, whomever you ask, you are likely to be told with some measure of outrage that more than seventy million people have recently voted for a malignant liar embroiled in scandal who secretly wants to revoke our rights, change our social norms, and appropriate our money, and who will cause large-scale social and economic catastrophe. Agreement is tough these days, but if you believe that this description matches one or the other candidate in the 2020 U.S. election, then you likely consider the other 70-odd million perilously deluded, ignorant, or irresponsible. This suggests a huge problem prior to the problem of ignorance, that nevertheless compounds it; namely, that multitudes of people are stridently, immovably ignorant of their own ignorance. Many people seem to deduce from this that truth is relative, ignorance subjective. This signals an epistemological crisis. Epistemological crises are bad, if we hope to address existential threats. If ignorance is subjective, then there is nothing to prevent every discussion and argument from devolving into team sports, nothing to keep people from hostile, unwarranted certainty, if they are judge, lawyer, and jury in one.

“In the Last Circle,” by Edgar Bowers, vividly captures this particular worst-case scenario, which also happens to resemble the present scenario. The poem withholds details of the conversation or monologue, which could be a speech by Stalin or Hitler or someone raging about a crappy pillow bought from a one-star Amazon store. By omitting specific context, Bowers dramatizes various cognitive biases and fallacious modes of argument, especially emotional reasoning, argument by assertion, and absolute thinking. What is clear is that the “you” of this poem has been railing at length on a subject he is only able to consider from a position of arrogant, ineluctable loathing. Hatred and contempt are never particularly attractive or productive, whatever the subject. You can see the spittle gathering in the corners of the rapid, unselfconscious mouth. The addressee conflates self-righteousness and rightness and mistakes his unchecked fury for ethical principle, enabled by “self-deception” and “conceit” (in the sense of both “arrogance” and of “big idea”). Truth is what he knows. This is the autocrat or aspirant autocrat, himself immune to guilt, and, despite projecting power in wrath, a victim (“. . . all would be and must be false to you”). The listener listens conscientiously, presumably testing the addressee’s claims and arguments. But, like autocratic temperaments everywhere, the addressee doesn’t bother about proof. Science and reason were important to Bowers, though he clearly also recognized and even sympathized with the reliable intrusion of strong feelings into every human problem that might best respond to calm impartiality. (Bowers’s poem “For Louis Pasteur,” one of the greatest underappreciated poems of the twentieth century, takes up this problem at length.)

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POETRY // Irresponsible and Damned: On poems by Lord Byron and Edgar Bowers