I would like to nominate Gary Johnson’s infamous “What is Aleppo?” gaffe as the moment which, for me, most typifies 2016, at least as far as our intellectual culture goes.

Predictably, and deservedly, Johnson was raked over the coals for this. A major presidential candidate — one who had far more electoral impact than Jill Stein, for instance — not knowing about this important foreign policy issue was disturbing. But it’s essential to recognize what he actually got in trouble for. Johnson’s great failure, what actually fed his public humiliation, was not a lack of knowledge. It was a lack of knowingness. 

As Robert Mackey demonstrated, many of those mocking Johnson’s response showed that they themselves were uninformed about the very topic that they felt it was absurd for Johnson to be ignorant of. That led, to pick an example, to these amazing corrections in the New York Times: