What Don’t We Know?
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My son, who is at pains to tell you that he is not five but five and three-quarters, is obsessed with the future. He draws pictures of crystalline cityscapes crisscrossed by “hyperloops” and flying cars; in the future, he says, scientists will “wreck down” our house to build a skyscraper, and robots will take the place of police officers. He’s certain about all this but uncertain when it will happen. Last year, he thought the future might arrive in 2024; he’s now considering 2025, or even later. “What if it takes them a really long time to build the future?” he asked me the other night, with a concerned look. “What if it takes until I’m an old man?” (I winced to hear him say those words.) “Or what if I die”—he mimed a kind of heart attack—“and I miss it?” I did my best and told him that he will definitely see at least some of “the future,” as he pictures it, when he grows up.
The truth, of course, is that we’re ignorant about the future. Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? What will skyscrapers, or smartphones, or schools look like in thirty years? We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions. But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize,” the philosopher Daniel DeNicola writes, in his book “Understanding Ignorance.” The more you know, the more precisely you can say what you don’t.
DeNicola’s book is an entry in a subfield of philosophy called “agnotology”—the study of ignorance. As philosophical subfields go, agnotology sounds abstract and even a little contradictory: what could it even mean to study what’s unknown? And yet, because ignorance is actually an everyday condition from which we all suffer, the study of it is quite down to earth. Have you ever been in a bookstore, leafed through a weighty tome, and then returned it to the shelf? You are practicing “rational ignorance,” DeNicola writes, by making “the more-or-less conscious decision that something is not worth knowing—at least for me, at least not now.” (In an information-rich society, he notes, knowing when to maintain this kind of ignorance is actually an important skill.) Have you ever tuned out a gossipy friend because you don’t want to know who said what about whom? Deciding that you’d rather be above the fray is “strategic ignorance”; you embrace it because it will make life better, deploying it when you decide not to read the reviews before seeing a movie, or conduct a hiring process in which the names of the candidates are obscured. There’s a big difference between strategic ignorance and what DeNicola calls “involuntary” ignorance: “In the iconic image, Justice is blindfolded, not blind,” he writes.
My wife’s parents have a box of letters that were sent between her grandfather and her grandmother while he was serving in the Navy during the Second World War. The box is in the basement; no one has read the letters, and no one plans to. This reflects a valid concern for privacy, but it also involves what DeNicola calls “willful ignorance”—the persistent, long-term maintenance of a gap in one’s knowledge that could easily be filled in. Willful ignorance isn’t necessarily bad; it might be wise to avoid learning the disturbing details of a half-forgotten traumatic event, for instance, lest they keep the trauma fresh. But we should be wary of willful ignorance, DeNicola argues, because it often flows from fear. “Consider a mother who is so upset about her son’s military service that she refuses to discuss it while he remains on active duty,” DeNicola writes. Or a voter who refuses to read about a favored candidate’s ongoing scandal. “The benefits of willful ignorance tend to be overestimated by those who exhibit it”; knowledge can be a path to overcoming fear.
DeNicola argues that, even when we don’t choose ignorance, there are ways in which we must “dwell in ignorance,” no matter what we do. We’re ignorant of most of what happened in the past because, despite our efforts at historical reconstruction, “worlds disappear” in the flow of time. We’re ignorant about the future not just because we don’t know what will happen but because we lack the ideas needed to comprehend future knowledge: “Galileo could not have known that solar flares produce bursts of radiation,” for example, because the very idea of radiation depends on a “framework of theoretical concepts” that wasn’t developed until hundreds of years after he lived. It turns out that there’s a special word, “ignoration,” which describes the condition of people who “do not even know that they do not know.” In a broad, almost existential sense, we all live in ignoration all the time. Recognizing this makes knowing what you don’t know feel like a step forward—even an opportunity to be seized.
One of the benefits of studying your ignorance, DeNicola shows, is that you can calibrate it. Maybe you’d like to be less ignorant about your mother’s job, or more ignorant about your roommate’s relationships. DeNicola asks us to imagine a man who goes to a new restaurant and orders the soup. It’s delicious! But the restaurant serves a strange cuisine from a country that he’s never visited, and he’s a picky eater. He might decide that he doesn’t want to know what’s in the soup. The problem is that the acceptability of our ignorance depends on our identities and goals. What if he’s a vegetarian? In that case, he might be compromising his principles by not knowing the ingredients. What if he has a food allergy? He might be taking a deadly risk. In Henry James’s novel “The Portrait of a Lady,” an heiress named Isabel Archer moves from America to Europe, where she falls for and marries Gilbert Osmond, another expat who seems especially sensitive and refined. Unsure of herself and decorous to a fault, Isabel doesn’t ask too many questions about Osmond’s past; she doesn’t press him, for instance, for the name of the mother of his fifteen-year-old daughter. And of course Isabel discovers, eventually, that Osmond has married her for her money at the urging of his mistress, who is the girl’s mother. Isabel’s willful ignorance was miscalibrated. And yet you can’t always ask what’s in the soup.
After reading DeNicola’s book, I started a kind of ignorance audit of my life. I drew up a list of unanswered questions—a to-know list to go with my to-do list. What’s the name of the nurse who works Saturday and Sunday nights at my mom’s nursing home? What’s wrong with my back, such that I sometimes wake up to find my upper body canted a few degrees to the right? How much must the sea rise before it inundates the small town where I live, and when is that forecasted to occur? Whatever happened to my best friend in second grade? For obvious reasons, the list began to grow without bounds. Still, it felt a little liberating to articulate these questions. I was doing what DeNicola calls “locating the boundary of the known,” and giving myself a chance to venture beyond it.
In a recent book called “Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity,” a German philosopher named Markus Gabriel argues that our personhood is partly based on ignorance—that “to be someone, to be a subject, is to be wrong about something.” It’s intuitive to hold the opposite view—to say that we are the sum of what we know. But Gabriel points out that, even when you know something to be true, you probably also know that there are aspects of it about which you’re probably wrong. I encountered this phenomenon recently when my son asked me to explain the meaning of “E=mc2”—but, also, when I tried to tell him about how I’d met his mom. “We were riding up in an elevator, and we started talking, and then she got off,” I said. “And then, later, when I was riding down, she got back on.”
This story is true, but also wreathed in inevitable uncertainties. What exactly did we say to one another? What were we wearing, or thinking, or feeling, before and after? There are limits to recollection, and to noticing in the moment; life is short, and you can’t know it all, not even about yourself. But you can know, at least to some extent, what you chose not to know and what you wished you’d found out. You can understand what you looked away from, and toward. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com