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Ignorance is bliss?

There is a famous quote made in 2002 by the then US Secretary of Defence Donal Rumsfeld,

‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. ..there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’

Basically, we are all ignorant but the trouble is we don’t really know what we are ignorant about.

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I was listening to the BBC Today show yesterday morning and they were interviewing the former Tory Government minister turned podcaster Rory Stewart.  He has a new series entitled ‘The Long History of Ignorance’. He wants to make the case that being ignorant can be a good thing, he wants to make the positive case for ignorance.

But surely in this technological world where people often say information is power what on earth could be good about being ignorant?

As Rory says himself it’s an odd claim for a ‘recovering politician’ to make. It’s only been a week since the General Election but already we are seeing some new facts coming into the open that we were kept ‘ignorant’ about prior to casting our votes.

Take for example our Justice system.  For years experts in the field have been saying the Justice System is on the verge of breaking down.  Cases going to court taking far too long and prisons reaching breaking point.  If we had listened we would have known this was the case, but the government of the day felt that the public would not like the truth to become official. Alex Chalk the former Justice Secretary was said to have made plans to release prisoners early but was told that sort of announcement wasn’t going to be a ‘vote winner’.

Jeremy Hunt the former Chancellor of the Exchequer has been quoted as saying one of the reasons the Election was called earlier than expected was that there was no room to make tax cuts later in the year.  This was the true state of the nation’s finances, but the election was partly fought on a tax cutting manifesto.

We were kept ignorant of the facts because they weren’t vote winners.  How can that be a good thing?

In politics this is nothing new.  There can be perfectly good reasons to argue that keeping the population ignorant of the facts is a good thing compared with knowing the truth.  If you’ve ever seen the Winston Churchill film ‘Darkest Hour’ starring Gary Oldman you will have seen the dilemma Churchill faced about being completely honest with the public about how bad things were in the fight against the Nazis.  He chose to keep people ignorant of the truth to help protect public morale.

Propaganda again is nothing new.  The Nazi’s were experts at using ignorance to commit all sorts of horrors.  Today it is hard to understand how say the Russian population can believe the lies put out by the Kremlin as justification for their war on Ukraine. By controlling the media and keeping people ignorant of the truth does help to explaining how this works.

So I have all of this going on in my head and I’m wondering what on earth could be positive about ignorance.

One of the first points Rory makes is that sometimes we don’t need to know everything about everyone. 

There is another famous quote’

‘Ignorance is bliss’

Maybe you don’t want to have all of the details about your partners life before you met.

Rory goes further saying the idea, that in a trial, jurors are not given all of the details of past convictions means they are only considering the facts of this case and not being swayed by a person’s past misdemeanours.

BUT wouldn’t it be better to know if your new partner has a history of domestic abuse? Is ignorance bliss or merely stupidity?

Another area where Rory says Ignorance can have an extraordinary and often positive role is for creatives and artists.  Think of a musician who picks up an instrument they have never played before and how they create something new.  Every game or story has in built ignorance otherwise if we knew everything there was to know we wouldn’t bother to try something new. If we knew how high a mountain was before we started climbing would we bother at all?

One area where ‘knowledge’ can be worse than ignorance is that it can give a false self confidence in ‘the facts’.  Some of the major conspiracy theories have lots of facts.  Some of the biggest proponents of these conspiracies would say they aren’t ignorant of the truth like the rest of the world is, but often they have lots of knowledge but not the wisdom to understand what they don’t know they don’t know…

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On the radio this week I had a long chat with a Cambridge Professor of Physics.  He is exploring the world of nanotechnology.  As many scientists look out into the universe he looks in ever smaller particles and atoms, and it’s a big world down there.

I think he told me that atoms in the salt cellar on my kitchen table numbered more than the stars in the sky.  What became more and more apparent was that he doesn’t know it all, in fact he knows very little, but it is his ‘ignorance’ that drives him on to thinking and researching, striving to push back the boundaries of his ‘ignorance’.

The other thing you might find surprising about the Professor was that he had a deep Christian faith.  I asked him how he could marry those 2 positions.  How could faith and science sit comfortably together.

I think what Professor Cowburn was saying was that religion and science have lots of areas of ignorance and that will be the human condition forever. He said sometimes we ask the wrong questions of both disciplines.  Sometimes in his ‘ignorance’ he is struck by feelings of awe as he sees the intricacies of the world he is exploring and that triggers his faith to become stronger.

Dr Rowan Williams.

Rory Stewart will be joined by all sorts of great thinkers as he journeys into ‘The Long History of Ignorance’ from Roman expert Mary Beard, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and the former Head of MI5.  All will say they are aware of their own ignorance and use that as a driving force. 

Maybe we could learn from American author and poet Charles Bukowski. He says:

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

Realising that we are ignorant, that there are still many unknown unknowns maybe the start of humility when it comes to dealing with people and our world.

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