Believe it or not, there is a field of academic inquiry devoted to not knowing. Ignorance studies, which sometimes dignifies itself as “agnotology,” hopes to do for folly and cluelessness what epistemology does for knowledge. As academic work goes, it’s a multidisciplinary feast, packed with big questions and deep thoughts.
Where even to begin cataloguing the forms of ignorance? In the words of two leading agnotologists, there is “knowledge that could have been but wasn’t, or should be but isn’t.” Then there are Donald Rumsfeld’s known and unknown unknowns. Perhaps there are also Freudian unknown knowns: things we aren’t aware of knowing but that fester in our unconscious. Among all these unknowns there may be some we would benefit from knowing, and other stones that would best be left unturned.
However we might classify ignorance, it’s generally agreed that there is a lot of it around. In one respect that might be obvious. “Knowledge is like a sphere,” wrote Pascal, “the greater its volume the larger its contact with the unknown.” As we learn more, the extent of our ignorance will always expand at the frontier. But there may also be a political or cultural dimension to our supposed age of ignorance, a sense that we have entered a time of mendacity and misinformation.
The American political scientist and historian Mark Lilla would agree with this assessment: “there are certain historical periods — we are living in one — when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand,” he writes. But he adds that the situation isn’t quite so simple or gloomy. Ignorance is not always foisted upon us but can be something we desire. Even those who claim to see through the ignorance of their time can be benighted. Sometimes not knowing is more rational and prudent than knowing.
Lilla’s new book, Ignorance and Bliss, is a lucid meditation on the complexities of not knowing. Its guiding idea is the human will to ignorance, which Nietzsche described as “a kind of state of defence against much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance.” Finding little philosophical work on the subject, Lilla embarks on a circuitous “intellectual travelogue.”
A chapter on the challenges of self-knowledge finds that self-deception is not only functional but even necessary for wellbeing and navigating the demands of the social world. Complete self-knowledge is impossible, and just as well. Self-insight is overrated, weaker than our capacity to resist hard truths that might undermine our sense of self. “At some point we all decline the invitation Socrates makes to us to learn what really is the case.”
Taboos come in for similar treatment. The urge to tear away veils that hide forbidden knowledge is one we should often resist. Religious teachings against curiosity — the apple on the Tree of Knowledge, the Tower of Babel — have a point. “We veil ourselves all the time,” Lilla argues, and that can be self-protective.
Consider people given the option of undergoing genetic testing for a disease that may afflict them later in life. Studies find that deliberation tends to reduce uptake of the test, a finding hard to square with the idea that it is invariably rational to know more. Lilla doesn’t make the contrarian argument that evasion of knowledge is generally a good thing, but he can be relied on to examine the costs and benefits of ignorance and illusion.
One way the will to ignorance can have serious costs is by masquerading as a will to knowledge, Lilla suggests. Writing on mysticism and spiritualism, he observes how some religious traditions have gone in search of great truths by an anti-intellectual purging of knowledge, seeking an emptiness into which esoteric wisdom or revelation will flow.
The idea that an absence of knowledge implies moral innocence is a powerful one. Lilla explores how attitudes to childhood have been touched by it, leading us to protect children from forbidden knowledge in harmful ways and to romanticise them. “Innocence talk is adult talk.” It is also talk that is “central to the American political mythos” in which “the human race was granted its second innocence at Plymouth Rock.” “America,” Lilla writes, “has trouble imagining a role for itself that is not that of the Lamb of God, or that of the seven-headed beast of the Book of Revelation.”
The impossibility of a return to innocence is a theme that also runs through a chapter on nostalgia. Longing for a vanished past is driven by the desire for “a state of mind unburdened by what we have experienced and learned since childhood.” In nostalgia people imagine they want to recover something but in truth “they want to flee what to them tastes like toxic knowledge about the world and themselves.”
National or collective nostalgia is another matter, a dangerous reaction against progress — and a retreat from contemporary knowledge — that inspires fundamentalisms. Lilla writes of a “forward-looking nostalgia” that aims to create a cataclysm to bring about the rebirth of a lost and simpler past. He presents nostalgia as a manifestation of the will to ignorance, although it could equally be argued that a will to innocence is primary, and the shutting out of unpleasant truths just a means to that end.
Lilla’s style is professorial, rich with references to great books, but also readable. His book contains scores of memorable quotes and aphorisms, all served with lightness and humour. Few readers can hope to have Lilla’s grasp of the classics, but he brings Prometheus, Oedipus, Socrates and the rest to life without being didactic or tweedy.
Ignorance and Bliss is not the sort of book that formulates a thesis and prosecutes the case. More exploratory, it turns an idea over and over in search of new ways inside. The will to ignorance isn’t really the central idea Lilla claims it to be, more a point of departure for a series of excursions into not knowing. Lilla is a wise, erudite and unponderous guide through these dark woods, a model of the kind of passionate curiosity he advocates for but also advises us to question. •
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
By Mark Lilla | Hurst Publishers | $44.99 | 256 pages
