The luxury of ignorance

Being a movie fan, and especially a fan of cinematic noir, I have grown up hearing a lot of "crime and punishment" terms. More often than not, these are cool-sounding legal jargon (e.g., habeas corpus, quid pro quo, in flagrante delicto [ahem], tort law, misdemeanor, felony, severalty, corpus delicti, mortgage, etc.). Being a pop kid, I took these terms in stride, never really worrying over their vagueness, just as I, being a Florida boy, took for granted knowing some basic Spanish.

But in the past year or so I've become increasingly irritated by my pop-kid nonchalance towards my ignorance, and not only in legal terms but in many arenas of adult western life (e.g., finance, economics, politics, etc.). Taking your ignorance for granted, with a shrug, doesn't stop your ignorance from taking you to the cleaner's, with a quickness. For example, though I've come across the term countless times, and have even used in print, I never fully understood the term "noblesse oblige" until a few days ago. Coined in 1837, noblesse oblige (no-BLESS OH-blee-zhay) literally means "nobility obliges," or in other words, those who have should help those who don't.

Why would I feel so free to use a term I didn't understand? The pressures of a deadline, the allure of sounding smart, the basic writer's instinct that it fit my point – all these go into my casual ignorance. For bookworms and scribblers, like myself, there is even a sort of adventurous luxury in indulging in ignorance. As long as most people realize you express most of your thoughts accurately and clearly, then you have the luxury of letting your ignorance, perhaps sensed only by yourself, slide now and then. But I'm tired of pretending always to know how to use "big words", and so I've decided, bit by bit, day by day, to expose the shallow roots of my ignorance so they may flourish and strike into a humbler but deeper and more secure knowledge. That's why I have a blog dedicated to my ignorance and this one, to learning about the Church's law, as well as more general legal terms. I think this impulse -- this rage against the soothing darkness of casual ignorance -- is part of larger quest on my part to be authentic in Christ. For the past several months, I virtually leap at books and resources dealing with fakery, hypocrisy, Christian freedom vs. pseudo-freedom, humbug, and, in a word, bullshit.

So, here I am, taking a break from revising a (supposedly) professional (but actually scandalously poor) translation of Chinese into English, flipping through my crisp new Barron's Law Dictionary (5th ed.). Let's have a look at some roots of ignorance, shall we?

Tort (Lat. "tortus", twisted) is a civil wrong, as opposed to a strict breach of contract. The three general groups of torts involve intent, negligence and strict liability. I presume to say noblesse oblige is a function of tort law. Nobility is not contracted to help those in need, but rather is expected by civil well-being and common law to help others.

MISfeasance means doing a good or proper act in a wrongful or tortious manner. MALfeasance means doing an improper or wrongful act. NONfeasance means failing to fulfill an expected duty. It is basically negligence.

A misdemeanor differs from a felony (a "true crime") in terms of the severity of the crime. Felonies are typically punishable by death, imprisonment, or, at bottom, forfeiture. Interestingly, misprision of felony is a misdemeanor consisting of either failing to prevent or unveil a felony, or, at worst, choosing to conceal information of the felony. As a Catholic, I take this disctinction to be akin to the distinction between venial (misdemeanant) and mortal (felonious) sins. (Is it time to cook up a new avatar – the infamous Felonious Mulct?)

Though I've never made a thoroughgoing (or, let's face it, even a passing study) of law, I'm very taken by its precision and care to distinguish terms. This is ironic. Typically, people take (contemporary) law to be sophistry and lawyers to be liars. Typically, people assume law means confusing and bending otherwise clear terms, the vocabulary of common sense, into a haze of crafty "legalese". But actually, law aims to keeps terms very well defined and thoughtfully ordered for the good of society. Of course, much the same paradox exists in professional philosophy. People trained to pursue wisdom and truth above all seem to waste their time (and their readers') splitting hairs on irrlevant obscurantism for the good of their CV's rather than the good of Athens, as it were.