Tom Hanks has said that he fears widespread public and political ignorance is the biggest threat to civilisation.
Speaking in Florence to promote the latest Dan Brown adaptation, Inferno, in which his character must use clues from Dante’s Divine Comedy to prevent the spread of a malicious disease designed to halve the world’s population, Hanks said: “Ignorance is one of our greatest threats – the idea of being able to solve complex issues with simplistic solutions.
“Just think about what happened in the Middle East,” he continued. “Or about the decision that we Americans find ourselves having to take every four years.”
Hanks called on voters to educate themselves and to try to prevent the sort of desperate scenarios depicted in the film.
“There are any number of places you could go on the planet Earth and the environment is hellacious and the people are held in slavery and there’s any number of degrees of misery that are in fact created by ourselves one way or another,” he said. “So the concept of Inferno, to me, is one that can be avoided, but only if everybody understands what the problem is and works to avoid it.”
