Bookshelf For Lack Of Knowledge

"Ignorance: A Global History

By Peter Burke

(Yale, 310 pages, $30)

'I am conscious that I am not wise either much or little," Socrates says in Plato's "Apology." Between knowledge and ignorance lies an epistemological no man's land, a murk of half-knowing that we describe in the imagery of weather ("the fog of war") and the theology of darkness ("brought to light").

Socrates first seeks wisdom among the experts, the "public men." Peter Burke, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, is one of them. In "Ignorance: A Global History," he offers an essayistic "general study." This is wise, for a comprehensive treatment of ignorance would resemble Casaubon's ill-fated search for a "key to all mythologies" in George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

Petrarch wondered if there could be "a wider field" than a "treatise on ignorance." Mr. Burke proceeds from philosophical definitions to practical applications in history, religion, science and geography, and from there to the "Consequences of Ignorance" in war, business, politics and media.

Augustine criticized curiosity as vain. Early modern clergy, Catholic and Protestant, called curiosity a sin, usually venial but sometimes mortal. Montaigne, Mr. Burke writes, suggested that ignorance was "a better recipe for happiness." The representation of Justice as blind shows the merits of donning what John Rawls called the "veil of ignorance."

Immanuel Kant's motto, Sapere aude ("Dare to know"), rejected such belief in the virtue of ignorance. No philosopher has summarized the resulting confusions better than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when parsing the evidence for Iraqi WMDs in February 2002. There are "known knowns," Rumsfeld observed, the things "we know we know." There are "known unknowns," the things we know we do not know. And there are "unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." The Marxist know-all Slavoj Žižek added a fourth category, the "unknown knowns" of the unconscious mind. Not that this helped the Bush administration.

Greek philosophy attacked ignorance with skepticism, but Christian authority attacked it with faith. The management of society obliged the control of information, creating a kind of ignorance economy that withheld knowledge from the poor and women. The modern era recapitulated these strategies. For philosophers such as Berkeley and Hume, ignorance was a challenge. For Carlyle and Marx, it was a social problem. For Freud, it was both. Rumsfeld was thinking like an earlier detective, Sherlock Holmes, and looking for what Mr. Burke calls "eloquent absences," such as the dog that did not bark.

In medieval Christendom, Mr. Burke writes, "many believed but few knew very much." The period 1500-1900 was an age of evangelization and education, but religious knowledge now has "low priority." Not that scientific knowledge has high priority. Robert Proctor, a historian of science, calls our time a "golden age of ignorance."

Mr. Burke waxes Rumsfeldian: "Although we are well aware that we know much that earlier generations did not, we are much less conscious of what they knew that we do not." He is especially troubled by our impressive ignorance of geography, history, religion (our own and others') and the Greek and Roman classics. Among the experts, this takes the form that Karl Popper called "active ignorance," resistance to new information. The rest of us, Mr. Burke believes, subscribe to "lay ignorance," a kind of passive resistance to intellectual labor of any kind.

As Rumsfeld discovered, the no man's land metaphor of knowledge becomes a reality on the battlefield. At Jena, Napoleon misjudged the position of most of the Prussian forces. At Austerlitz, he benefited from the fog of war, as the Austro-Russian army, working on incomplete information, misjudged the strength and intention of the French forces. Stendhal and Tolstoy, both of whom saw action, describe battle, in Mr. Burke's words, as "sheer chaos in which everyone is equally ignorant of what is happening more than a few yards away."

Mr. Burke detects full-spectrum ignorance in the Vietnam War: civilian policymakers, military commanders, the public, the press, even the soldiers who could not speak the language of their allies and enemies. Much of this ignorance, though, owed more to selection bias, especially at the strategic level. The information was available, but it was ignored by choice. Similar patterns of "strategic ignorance" occur in business and politics by accident or design.

Popular ignorance is an asset to autocracies, but a threat to democracies. Thomas Jefferson warned that a civilized nation could not be "ignorant & free" at the same time, and James Madison believed in the need for "popular information," since "knowledge will forever govern ignorance." Mr. Burke sometimes shows a selective bias common among his type of public man, the academic. He describes Americans as dim religious fanatics. He equates "denial of climate change" with "denial of genocide," though the issue is not whether the climate changes, but why, and what, if anything, can or should be done about it. He especially dislikes Donald Trump, and seems to endorse the Russia-collusion narrative of the 2016 election.

In the "Apology," Socrates finds that the public men are not as wise as they think, so he approaches the poets. They are not much use, either. Their art depends on inspiration: on gnosis, intuitive knowing. Mr. Burke does not ask whether gnosis is a shortcut to knowledge or ignorance. He does, however, disapprove of the "popular information" of Socrates's final source, the "hand-workers" and "good artisans." Yet Socrates found that those of "less repute" seemed to be "superior men in the matter of being sensible." As Mark Twain said, "We are all ignorant, just about different things."" [1]

1. Bookshelf For Lack Of Knowledge
Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 28 Feb 2023: A.13.