Like so many things in life, ignorance is paradoxical.
Is it possible that
ignorance is an intelligent response to the universe, and conversely, the lack
of ignorance is a stupid and self-destructive response?
As usual with this blog, we start with politics.
No politician who admits ignorance of anything could ever be
elected even to any political office, even the office of Chief Dog Catcher. Therefore, accepting this reality, all
politicians know that they need to know everything or at least, pretend to know
everything. A politician must have all
the answers and no unanswered questions.
The most successful politicians will always have a clever and ready
answer to every question asked of them in any forum, a public meeting, a TV interview, whatever.
Have you ever heard a politician dare to answer a question
of any kind by saying, “I really am ignorant of that. I am happy to admit that
I cannot answer that question, and I probably never will be able to answer it.”?
That kind of political animal, if it ever existed, has been extinct
for a long time.
No politician could
ever admit, especially to himself, how little he knows know about anything. The
modern political animal may actually know very little about almost everything,
but he or she must have an opinion about everything. That opinion must be
strongly held and can never change, even in the face of completely
contradictory facts. In order for this
to work, the politicians themselves must strongly believe in their own
omniscience.
The need to believe strongly in one’s own omniscience
creates problems. For one thing, it
means that political beliefs must be totally disconnected from science and
changes in scientific knowledge.
Even more troubling, it means that politicians must be, in part,
have narcissistic personalities. If the politician has only a small dose of
narcissism his personality, he may be
content with being elected dog catcher, but if a politician is a huge
narcissist, he or she is per se eligible to run for the top office of President.
Think Gary Hart, John Edwards, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton. In fact, think of any major politician and
try to imagine that person discussing how comfortable he is with his own
ignorance of everything. That kind of
person does not exist.
The public is an integral part of this sham as the
politician. The public inflates the politician’s narcissism with political ads,
signs, cheers, big rallies, and political events of all kinds, not to mention
donating money, buying the candidates books, political buttons, etc. All of this feeds the monster of political
narcissism.
This is one reason why we have such a love-hate relationship
with our political leaders and why we are always so disappointed in them. We
expect them to be omniscient. When it turns out that they are clearly not
omniscient, but continue to think that they are, and then make mistakes as they
blunder along, we become disappointed. Case in point: Barak Obama. Another case, George W. Bush.
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| King Tut |
In some nations, the political leader is thought to be so
omniscient that he is actually deified. Of course, the political leader plays
along with this and encourages it to the max. But does any man really believe
that he is really a god? The answer is
that many actually do. Think of Fidel Castrol, Hugo Chavez, Papa Doc Duvalier,
Stalin, Hitler, and all the monarchs and sultans throughout history.
Science is on the other side of the paradox of ignorance.
Science values ignorance. Scientists value questions more than answers. Answers
are boring and uninteresting unless they lead to more questions. Scientists think
that there can be no discovery and no new knowledge without ignorance of that
which is sought to be known. The greatest scientists are those who have the
most questions. One of the ultimate
questions in science is how much of the unknown is unknowable?
How different from the political sphere is that?
Neuroscientist,
Stuart Firestein, has written a book entitled “Ignorance: How it Drives
Science.” Recently, on NPR’s “Science Friday” show, Firestein explained to
interviewer Ira Flatow how science is
really pursued among scientists:.
When
we go to meeting together and talk or go out to the bar and have a beer or
whatever, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know,
what we need to know, what we'd like to know, what we think we could know, what
we may not even know we don't know just yet and things of that nature. And
that's what propels the whole operation along.
Firestein argues that we put too much emphasis on answers
and not enough on questions. He says
that if we start with a hypothesis, it is likely to lead us to the wrong
answer. Scientists need to start, he says, only with collecting facts and let
the theory come later.
Firestein is fascinated not by the known unknown but by the
unknown unknowns. He is interested more in the limits of ignorance than the limits
of knowledge.
One of the
best quotes in the interview is from the comic Emo Philips, who says “I
always thought the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body, and then one
day I thought, wait a minute, who's telling me that?”
Einstein had a visual metaphor
about knowledge and ignorance. He saw us as inside a balloon containing all of
our knowledge. As we gain more
knowledge, the balloon grows, and the surface of the balloon grows, which means
it touches on more and more of that universe of what we don't know. So that the
more we learn, the more we don’t know.[1]
Firestein and Einstein are not alone in their
comfort with ignorance. The eccentric
Nobel Prize winning Richard Feynman who works on quantum
electrodynamics (the field of science concerning how light and matter interact)
said in his book, “The Pleasure of Finding Things
Out” that “I
don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious
universe without having any purpose - which is the way it really is so far as I
can tell - it does not frighten me.”
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| Los Alamos Id Photo of Feynman |
When awarded the Nobel Prize Feynman
said that he was uncomfortable with accepting it because when a person held a prize
or gained a position of authority, people are inclined to think that he must be
correct, and Feynman was uncomfortable with that.[2]
Don’t even try to imagine a politician trying to think this
way.
[1]
This metaphor came from one of the callers to the NPR show. For another look at
this paradox of ignorance and science, see
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11299244.
