4. Sheer, Unvarnished Ignorance

This last category is the least complex, but arguably the most depressing. It deals with simple ignorance and benightedness, an incompleteness of education, a widespread failure to absorb knowledge. Every country has a percentage of people who do not know the answer to basic questions, and in some countries—particularly those in the Third World, where education is not widely available—the percentage will be very high. In America, however, there is a stubborn strain of vacuous unawareness that reflects no credit on American society. How to digest the fact that 24 percent of Americans do not know who their country won its independence from? Or that only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution?

On reflection, I am less worried by the fact that a fifth of the inhabitants of this great country believe that Obama is Muslim than by the fact that 60 percent of them are unwilling, or unable, to accept the scientific basis of evolution. I suspect that Obama, too—for all his personal angst over the Muslim aspersion—will be with squarely with me on this one. Political bias can be a fleeting sickness; profound ignorance, on the other hand, can be incurable.