Who hasn't heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” thousands of times?
Like all clichés, it sticks because it is rooted in truth, but it is worth asking why ignorance is so satisfying. When you read the history of philosophy, you are not so concerned with the joy of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth. This is assumed to be a universal human impulse.
Of course, that's not completely wrong. But negation and avoidance are also human impulses, and in many cases are more powerful than we need to know. Therefore, these drives are strong desires that we need to know and never find – often fight within us, shaping our worldview, relationships, and our self-image.
Mark Lila is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and author of a new book Ignorance and Bliss: About Things You Don't Want to Know. It is written short and elegantly, and perhaps the best compliment I can give is that it reads like a book written at almost every point in modern history. It involves one of the oldest questions in philosophy – knowing or not? – And at the same time, it can provide fresh insights that feel relevance and timeless.
So I invited Lila Grey area To explore why we accept and resist the truth, and the meaning of living ongoing in the tensions. As always, there's a lot more to the full podcast, so listen and follow Grey area Where to find Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or podcasts. A new episode drops every Monday.
This interview has been compiled for length and clarity.
The book opens with a sort of parody of Plato's all-talk of the famous cave. The original story features a prisoner who spends his lifetimes, bound by cave chains, seeing a shadow thrown into a wall. What is your spin?
In the Plato version, a stranger comes in and turns one of the prisoners, finds that he lives in a shadow world, and is invited to climb into the sun, and is told to come back Get others out there.
In my version of the story, he has a small friend with him. When it's time to come back, the man tells him that he can stare at his form and see what's under pure sunlight and see what's there, and he longs to come back. It turns out that this is. It's a cold life. All his fantasy and imagination were drained. He missed his virtual friend and eventually he retreated. And I've started a book and said that it's an unresolved question whether it's a good thing to come out in the sunlight.
We want to know the truth, we want to see the world as it is, but we need to be ignorant of certain things and we really hate to admit our ignorance. So we're always playing this game of hide and seek on our own. This is a strangely unacceptable dance for humans, right?
that's right. People don't want to feel weird. Part of that, I think our opinion is that we can feel like a prosthetic, not just in the bag we pull out when we need expression. I feel like I was touched by something very intimate.
And it is an incentive to not acknowledge your ignorance, and to build up all sorts of defenses and appeal to false authorities to ensure your own reasonable capabilities and your independence. It becomes a kind of evil thing that you are always trying to patch things up to yourself and others you understand, and in the meantime you're part of your worldview You can start pulling some stupid things.
Is there a good model for someone who is wisely ignorant, climbing the mountain of knowledge and saying that when they reach their peak? you know what? I like it more in the cave!
I think you're excluding options. That option is something Socrates explores in other platonic dialogues that he learns from your own ignorance. In other words, it is tentative to recognize that you are truly and generally ignorant of things and continue to ask and understand what you have come up with.
Especially for now, we live in a world where things have changed so rapidly that we are increasingly aware of the uncertainty of knowledge. It was very impressive to me amid Covid, based on the fact that public health officials continue to change their advice. First they said it was about washing your hands, and they said it was all about masks and stuff, and they're mad about it, but that's how science works.
But people don't want to live that way. They want to hear from authority this is what you are doing. They want doctors who don't keep hems or hawks, and don't constantly change the Med and say, “Let's try this, let's try it.” It is very unstable. So, I think we are eager to live on solid ground, but we are not standing on solid ground.
Do you think ignorance has the power we can overlook?
Yeah. I started the book with a quote from a novel by George Elliott, Daniel Derondawe say we had a lot to think about the power of knowledge, but we weren't thinking about the power of ignorance. And what she means is the power of people who are ignorant to ruin things in life, and it is a kind of social force, and certainly so.
But ignorance allows you to continue your life and not paralyze, even if you don't know anything specific and leave something specific. I use an example at the beginning of the book. What happens if there is an embedded LED screen on the forehead and you can read the thoughts of everyone around you?
You can't control your own thoughts, so your social life will halt, right? We always want to see how people think about us. And we were unable to develop a sense of stability for ourselves.
There are many people who are intentionally ignorant. And there are a lot of people who are ignorant about their ignorance, but then there is this other kind of irony that you are talking about books that deliberately exploit ignorance. What is the political significance of this?
People need certainty and demand it. And demagogues in particular, especially political leaders, can provide simple answers to those that seem very complicated and stir people up in ways that can be directed. It's classically how a demagogue works and how a demagogue becomes a tyrant.
I am not surprised that we are faced with aggressive ignorance, especially now, among populists and those who have been moved by populists. Our experiences are so new that we don't know many things, so it's very difficult to understand what's going on right now. For example, what do you do about the fact that a country's economic state depends on the international economy and does not have a complete say in how that international economy operates?
It is difficult to accept the fact that our political leaders do not control the economy. And you go to someone who says he is the answer, or someone who says she is the answer. For all of us, it is extremely difficult for us to stand up to the present with a tentative mind and deep sense of our understanding.
At some point we must ask: what is the point of knowledge? Do you need knowledge for knowledge? And if something is useless or knowing something actually hurts, why do we want to know it?
At least in the book, the question you are asking is really a question of a different kind of human character. There are people who find something faster whenever a new opportunity for knowledge presents itself. It is a mystery why it happens, why the soul reacts in that way, and Socrates tells a variety of myths about why it is, but it is just a fact, and everyone has It's not like there is.
Do you think it's worth knowing regardless of cost?
Self-knowledge can be harmful if it is partial. It is the story of Augustine in his confession at the moment when he says, “God has been torn from my depths.” Me, and I look at myself, and at that moment I am so frightening that something clicks and gives away myself.
So, although there may be limitations to this kind of thing, Socrates makes people good to know themselves now and know themselves, so all self-knowledge is the final It is assumed that it will be useful. You know, the power of your ignorance is no longer holding you hostage.
Do you think that's true? i don't think so.
no i don't. And it's hard to believe that Socrates really was thinking about it. You can see it in the way he deals with others in a platonic dialogue, you will see that he has a lot of knowledge about how people fall into it.
Yes, I definitely could see cases that are made for always wanting to know the abstract truth and truth about the outside world. But when it comes to self-knowledge, when you sometimes peer inward, what you find is that you are simply a bundle of contradictions. And to stick to that.
There is one way it exists, and that's the Montaigne option. The picture that Montaigne gives us in his essay is exactly the same thing we just said, and his advice is to live with it. Just go with me. You are a contradiction.
I think it's probably wise, but I think it's easier than that. But do you think there is probably even a necessary link between self-knowledge and external knowledge? In other words, to some extent, do we need to know ourselves in order to know the truth about our own outside world?
I can think of some answers to that. I don't know which one will be mine. One is that these are removable. I remember spending a year at an advanced research lab. I would sometimes sit here where there were scientists and mathematicians. And you could tell that these people don't have a self-awareness in terms of how people reacted to them. Perhaps they were just surrounded by problems and were discovering things.
On the other hand, one of the barriers for us to know what constitutes knowledge is to know what constitutes it, which requires our own analysis. And the third feeling, although not strictly necessary, exercises to know yourself are a kind of training exercise to ask about the outside world.
I would like to talk a bit about the nostalgia you've written many times in this new book. In our journey of knowledge, as individuals and society, are we overtaken by nostalgia? At what point do you want us to go back to what we didn't know what we just knew?
When society as a whole is nostalgic, I think we have to do two things. Once the world is unreadable, it is now unreadable. This means you don't know how to act, and if you don't know how to act, you're deeply intrusive because you want to control your environment and be able to control things so you can reach your goals.
And there was a time when life was ordered, as it seemed less complicated and easier to be 8 years old than 68 years old, to be frustrated with the present and not knowing how to improve things. Imagine to imagine what Imagine to imagine what Imagine to imagine what Imagine to imagine what Imagine to imagine. No better ways have happened than not knowing much about various things or specific changes. Perhaps you can reverse the machine or reverse the train.
I wonder what this thought and what was the outcome of writing personally for you? Did this project change your relationship with your own ignorance?
I hope so. I think I have a better understanding of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do –
What can philosophy do and what can't?
A philosophy that recognizes our ignorance is a step forward. It is probably the greatest cognitive outcome for humans.
