Ignorance is not always bliss — and not always bad — a new book argues
Ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but in general it gets a bad rap - which is why the latest book from Peter Burke comes as a surprise.
Over the years, this distinguished scholar has concentrated on the social history of knowledge, most recently in 2020’s “The Polymath: A Cultural History From Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag.”
But in what appears to be a volte-face, Burke’s “Ignorance: A Global History” explores the myriad ways in which “not-knowing” affects our lives, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. In 15 chapters, he touches on “a network of related ideas,” including “obstacles, forgetting, secrecy, denial, uncertainty, prejudice, misunderstanding and credulity.”
He also considers disinformation, fake news, feigned ignorance, information overload, and the practice of sowing doubt and confusion online.
In short, Burke takes all ignorance — rather than all knowledge - for his province, while modestly calling his book simply an introduction to a burgeoning academic field. Burgeoning indeed.
The main text covers more than 40 different varieties of ignorance (conveniently listed in an appendix).
For instance, “strategic ignorance” is “deliberately keeping others ignorant,” the default practice of governments and spy agencies, despite our calls for “transparency.”
“Organizational ignorance” is defined as “the effect of the uneven distribution of knowledge within an organization.” That is, the workers on the shop floor and the bosses in their executive suites know different things about a company, and when they don’t share their respective “knowledges,” as is often the case, the company as a whole suffers.
“Rational ignorance,” in its turn, implies “refraining from learning when the cost outweighs the benefit.” A classic argument for this dubious practice occurs in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”: In that novel, Sherlock Holmes reveals that he doesn’t know, and doesn’t even want to know, that the Earth revolves around the sun. Why not? Because, he tells Dr. Watson, his brain-attic can hold only so much and he refuses to clutter it up with information not relevant to his work as a detective.
Throughout “Ignorance: A Global History,” Burke peppers readers with a flurry of striking factoids, quotations and anecdotes.
The ancient Greeks recognized “two kinds of sceptic, the ‘dogmatic’ sceptic, who is sure that nothing can be known, and the ‘reflexive’ sceptic, who is not even sure of that.”
The Enlightenment political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that “the whole earth is covered by nations of whom we only know the names, yet we presume to make judgments about the human race.” In this regard, not much has changed since the 18th century.