A reader has sent me yet another lengthy screed about the State of the World and it leaves me as ignorant as I was before reading most of it. I know little about politics and nothing about economics, and I can’t muster the grit to change that situation. The writer seems like a bright, certainly well-educated guy but overly dependent on jury-rigging a grand unified theory of everything, rather like Coleridge is his gaseous phase. I defer to Dr. Johnson in The Rambler for July 9, 1751: “Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no…
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