When you know enough to know you don’t know it all
Long before the age of social media there was an old Greek dude who thought he was the wisest man alive because he knew that he knew nothing. The point of him harping on about his ignorance was to encourage his students to be in a continual search for knowledge and not to act like know-it-all jerks.
His name was Socrates.
Fast-forward a few millennia and the prevailing attitude seems to be that we should all act like we know everything. Moreover, our discussions about the various everythings that we know more closely resemble duels with verbal war axes than any pursuit of knowledge.
We’ve armed ourselves with dog whistles and microwavable polemics, ready to perform for bloodthirsty audiences. It’s fun to witness but very seldom gets us anywhere.
Cue the Ezra Klein Show, a podcast by political commentator and editor-at-large at the online US news company Vox. The intention behind Klein’s show seems to be less about spilling intellectual blood than about understanding various viewpoints.
By interviewing articulate guests with deep knowledge about the sociopolitical topic at hand, the show reveals itself as less of a performative act of “wokeness” vs “anti snowflake-ism” and more of an exercise in stimulating debate.
It can be slightly US-centric at times, but generally the focus is on concepts rather than specific news events. For example, Klein’s conversations about how capitalism is failing, the inherent biases in technology and their effect on global society and misogyny are deeply fascinating and informative.
It may be a little too tame for people who enjoy listening to former world debating champion Eusebius McKaiser play the role of a woke Debora Patta, but it is interesting and continues to prove that actually knowing everything would be mind-numbingly boring.