What they know is not worth knowing

A thoroughly uninformed nation, Poles have TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, and are avid consumers of them all, but, like Indians – and Italians – they know nothing of the outside world, and surprisingly little of their own. What they do know, the result of painstakingly collected state education, isn’t knowledge, it’s doctrine. It chiefly consists of a set of biases: the heroism of the nation, the perfidy of our neighbors, the importance of loyalty to the motherland, kontusz and saber, the great emigration (always heartsick to return), the greatness of Chopin. The reverence for Chopin is as fake – instructed and memorized – as everything else: at this Sunday concert in Lazienki (it was unusually awful) the audience’s reactions to the music show total ignorance of the quality, techniques, and tradition of performance, but the ignorance is bathed in a saccharine worshipfulness, a certain way of being worshipful, itself learned, no doubt, at Sunday church. These are the sources of knowledge here: school, church, and advertising. Little wonder then that what they do know, isn’t worth knowing.