Leesfragment: Ignorance

Nu bij ons in de boekhandels: Peter Burkes Ignorance. Lees zijn antwoorden op onze vragen, en lees dit fragment.

Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Are we really any less ignorant than our ancestors?

In this highly original account, Peter Burke examines the long history of humanity’s ignorance across religion and science, war and politics, business and catastrophes. Burke reveals remarkable stories of the many forms of ignorance—genuine or feigned, conscious and unconscious—from the willful politicians who redrew Europe’s borders in 1919 to the politics of whistleblowing and climate change denial. The result is a lively exploration of human knowledge across the ages, and the importance of recognizing its limits.

1
What is ignorance?

Ignorance is a social creation, like knowledge
Michael Smithson

The project of writing a history of ignorance sounds almost as odd as Flaubert’s wish to write a book about nothing, un livre sur rien, ‘a book dependent on nothing external . . . a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible’, in other words an attempt at pure form. Appropriately enough, Flaubert wrote nothing about nothing. In contrast, much has been written about ignorance, mainly negative. There is a long tradition of denouncing ignorance for different motives and reasons.

Denouncing ignorance

Arabic speakers talk of the pre-Islamic period as the ‘Age of Ignorance’ (al-Jahiliyya). During the Renaissance, the humanists viewed what they were the first to call the ‘Middle Ages’ as an age of darkness. In the seventeenth century, Lord Clarendon, the historian of the English Civil War, described the Fathers of the Church as ‘great Lights which appeared in very dark Times’, ‘Times of so much Barbarity and Ignorance’. During the Enlightenment, ignorance was presented as a support for ‘despotism’, ‘fanaticism’ and ‘superstition’, all of which would be swept away in an age of knowledge and reason. George Washington, for instance, declared that ‘the foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition’.
Views of this kind continued to be current much later. For example, the term al-Jahiliyya was applied to more recent periods by radical Muslims such as the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, targeting the United States in particular. Ignorance was one of the ‘five giants’ that the liberal politician William Beveridge promised to slay (along with Poverty, Disease, Squalor and Idleness). Beveridge’s report served as the foundation of the British Welfare State by the Labour government of 1945.
More recently, in the USA, Charles Simic has written that ‘Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal’, while Robert Proctor, a historian of science, has declared our own time to be a ‘golden age of ignorance’. Although we are well aware that we know much that earlier generations did not, we are much less conscious of what they knew that we do not. Examples of this loss of knowledge – to be discussed later – range from familiarity with the Greek and Roman classics to the everyday knowledge of natural history. In the past, a major reason for the ignorance of individuals was the fact that too little information was circulating in their society. Some knowledge was what the historian Martin Mulsow calls ‘precarious’, recorded only in manuscript and hidden away because the authorities in both church and state rejected it. Today, paradoxically enough, abundance has become a problem, known as ‘information overload’. Individuals experience a ‘deluge’ of information and are often unable to select what they want or need, a condition that is also known as ‘filter failure’. In consequence, our so-called ‘information age’ ‘enables the spread of ignorance just as much as the spread of knowledge’.

Praising ignorance

Responding to the tradition of denouncing ignorance we find a countertradition: a relatively small number of thinkers and writers who have dared to suggest that enthusiasm for knowledge (‘epistemophilia’) has its dangers while ignorance is bliss, or at least possesses a few advantages. Some of these writers, in Renaissance Italy in particular, were playful, praising ignorance along with baldness, figs, flies, sausages and thistles in order to show off their ingenuity and their rhetorical skills by reviving the classical tradition of the mock-encomium.
More seriously, a long tradition, from Augustine onwards, has criticized ‘vain’ curiosity, implying that a certain kind of ignorance is a wiser option. Early modern clergy, whether Catholic or Protestant, were generally hostile to curiosity, ‘treating it as a sin, usually venial but sometimes mortal’. It has been presented as mortal in the legend of Faust, which has inspired plays, operas and novels. When Kant used the phrase ‘Dare to Know’ (Sapere Aude) as the motto of the Enlightenment, he was reacting against the biblical recommendation, ‘Do not wish to know higher things, but fear them’ (Noli altum sapere sed time), paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pope as ‘presume not God to scan’.
Some secular arguments complemented the religious ones. Michel de Montaigne suggested that ignorance was a better recipe for happiness than curiosity. The philosopher-naturalist Henry Thoreau wished to found a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance as a complementary opposite to the already-existing Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In his Studies of Nature (1784), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, novelist and botanist, praised ignorance because it stimulated the imagination. Swimming against the stream of histories published during the Enlightenment, the French feminist Olympe de Gouges argued in Le Bonheur primitif (1789) that ‘the first men’ were happy because they were ignorant, while in her time ‘man has extended his knowledge too far’.
In the case of the law, Justice has often been represented from the Renaissance onwards as blindfolded, symbolizing ignorance in the sense of open-mindedness and lack of prejudice. In accordance with this view, juries may be isolated in order to keep them away from information that might bias their verdict. Discussions of what is called ‘virtuous ignorance’ are becoming increasingly frequent. The philosopher John Rawls argued in favour of what he called ‘the veil of ignorance’, a blindness to race, class, nation or gender that helps us to see individuals as morally equal beings.
‘Virtuous’ ignorance is a term that has been used to describe the renunciation of research on nuclear weapons, for instance, or at least the making public of the results. Other positive features of different kinds of ignorance have been emphasized by sociologists and anthropologists, writing about their various ‘social functions’ or ‘regimes’. Priests, for instance, are bound to keep the secrets of the confessional, while doctors swear to respect the privacy of their patients. Democracy is protected by the secrecy of ballots. Anonymity allows examiners to mark papers without prejudice and participants in peer review to say exactly what they think about the work of their colleagues. Secret negotiations allow governments to make concessions to the other side that would be impossible in the glare of publicity. Information produces not only benefits but also hazards.
By the end of the nineteenth century, ignorance was recommended as an answer to the increasingly acute problem of ‘too much to know’. For example, the American neurologist George Beard claimed that ‘ignorance is power as well as joy’, a remedy for ‘nervousness’. Ignorance has been treated as a ‘resource’ or a ‘factor in success’ by writers on business and management.
Anthony Tjan, for instance, recommends ‘embracing one’s ignorance’, since entrepreneurs who are ‘unaware of their constraints and external realities’ are likely to ‘generate ideas freely’. Later and more cautiously, he explained that ‘The key is recognizing the critical moments in a company’s trajectory when a clean-sheet approach is a net positive’. The phrase ‘creative ignorance’ implies a recognition that too much knowledge may inhibit innovation, not only in business but in other domains as well. The phrase ‘creative ignorance’ was coined by a writer in the New Yorker to refer to what prevented Beardsley Ruml, director of a major research foundation, ‘from seeing the No Thoroughfare, Keep Off the Grass, Don’t Trespass, and Dead End Street signs in the world of ideas’, warnings that acted as obstacles to the interdisciplinarity that he favoured. At a more practical level, Henry Ford is said to have remarked that ‘I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done’.
The claim that ignorance has its uses leads to insights, at least if we are careful to ask, Useful for whom? Nevertheless, the examples discussed in this book suggest that the negative consequences of ignorance generally outweigh the positive ones – hence the dedication of this book to the teachers who have tried to remedy the ignorance of their pupils. The desire not to know (or for other people not to know) whatever threatens or embarrasses us, whether at an individual level or the level of an organization, is an understandable one, but its consequences are often negative, at least for other people. Ignoring or denying awkward facts will be a recurrent theme of this book.

What is ignorance?

In the long debate for and against ignorance, different positions obviously depend on what their holders have meant by the term. The traditional definition is a simple one, the absence or ‘deprivation’ of knowledge. Such an absence or deprivation is often invisible to the ignorant individual or group, a form of blindness that has massive consequences, including the disasters that will be discussed in part two.
The traditional definition is sometimes criticized as too broad, requiring distinctions. In English, for instance, ‘ignorance’ is sometimes distinguished from ‘nescience’ and both from ‘non-knowledge’. There is also ‘unknowing’, a term that looks as if it was coined yesterday, but goes back to the anonymous fourteenth-century author of a treatise on mysticism. Similar distinctions exist in other languages. Germans, for instance, speak and write of Unwissen and Nicht-Wissen. For example, the sociologist Georg Simmel discussed what he called ‘the everyday normality of non-knowledge’ (Nicht-Wissen). Unfortunately, different authors use these terms in different ways.
What is generally agreed, on the other hand, is the need to distinguish between ‘known unknowns’, such as the structure of DNA before its discovery in 1953, and ‘unknown unknowns’ as in the case of Columbus discovering America while looking for the ‘Indies’. Although this distinction was made earlier by engineers and psychologists, it is often attributed to the former US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

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© Peter Burke