In Defense of Simple Ignorance

Nobody understands everything in which they participate. No matter how learned, how powerful, how rich, all have to interact, in most daily activities, with User Interfaces (UIs)—simplified models created by specialists, with a set of rules, requirements, and capabilities, which define and structure the user’s experience (UX).

I am currently sitting on a train, typing on a computer: my body on the seat and my fingers on the keyboard are each in contact with an interface, in order to perform activities that deeply matter to me, yet of which I could not describe the inner workings beyond very superficial notions. I think that I understand “a little” how a train or a computer works, but in practice my “little” would amount to nothing if I had to interact with them beyond the UI that was created for me, and for the equally dumb individuals that you are (that is: “anyone”). The public, consumers, default users, are assumed to possess only a limited set of faculties: basic proficiency with letters and numbers, ability to perform regular motions within a structured space.

There are no specialists (not even theoretical physicists, lol) who can claim to encompass, with their knowledge, all the domains on which even their own activity depends, not to mention all the others. I am not pointing this out as a failure: rather, I am suggesting that nobody is entitled to such a claim. No matter how much authority you have, all it means is that people do not contradict you; not that you know what you are talking about. In the quite different respect of truth, or accuracy, the more you claim to know, the more you are ignorant; but the worst kind: ignorant of being ignorant, imbued with what we might call “double ignorance”.

In contrast, if I may share my experience of, by fortune and by accident, having pursued a life of learning, in and out of schools, for a few decades; being preserved by mental illness from the burden of having to communicate my knowledge to anyone, and thus acquire authority; I will offer the following impression: the more I learn, the more I discover that I’m ignorant. Some ancient Greek is supposed to have said: “I know only one thing, which is that I know nothing.”, but even that is insufficient: I don’t even know how much I don’t know, how large is that nothing of which I would claim to know that I don’t know it. All I can do, through a constant effort which consists of 1: reading, 2: not beginning to believe that I know anything; is to extend the domain of my ignorance, and thrive to make it a “simple ignorance”, one that knows that it doesn’t know much and, as it progresses, is always only beginning to learn a bit more the extent of how much it doesn’t know.

Another type of knowledge consists in becoming competent with many UIs: it does confer power, but not understanding. This is a bargain that we all make in our daily lives, for good reason: we all need a minimal amount of power to live (to feed, shelter, mate, keep clean, and play games), and most of us are willing, without needing to be pressed much, to trade actual understanding for the acquisition of additional powers, upon which are based our social hierarchies. I am not pointing this out as a moral failure: rather, I am suggesting that we don’t confuse this power with knowledge. I am happy to be sitting on this train, typing on this computer these thoughts that you may read one day, but I still don’t know shit about how any of it works. I go forward, confident in my competence to use such tools as intended, so that later today I can sit in a hotel room and review these paragraphs, wondering if they are good enough to keep, most likely editing them thoroughly.

I would enjoy listing all the ways in which I am ignorant: but the list would keep growing indefinitely, as I would attempt to map out the various directions in which I have glimpsed something unknown to me, and in doing so learn a bit more about them, which means seeing a bit further into the unknown (to me), and so on. I would have enjoyed surprising you with things that you could not even have imagined that you didn’t know, be they unsuspected novelties (an animal that lives in an environment that you would never conceive could sustain animal life), or seemingly incongruous combinations of commonly known facts (a tribe which speaks the ancient imperial language of a now distant land, but writes it with the characters of an entirely unrelated linguistic group—neither of which, the empire and the characters, being the one where I sit or the ones that I am currently using), and if you happened to be a specialist both of abyssal biology and Central Asian ethnolinguistics, I would have enjoyed my own surprise of discovering this unknown specimen of human that you are. Alas, let us both be disappointed: it is in the nature of growing ignorance to defy systematic description, and of my arbitrary examples to remain mostly irrelevant, from their derisory size and sheer arbitrariness.

What of it, then? What is the point—besides temporarily, and within the very limited purview of this short essay, shutting up those ignorant dunces who keep asserting authority when they are just the loudest dunce, or those whom, for reasons related to the distribution of competence and control over the various UIs that compose our lives, the rest of us decide not to contradict—of hereby claiming the superiority of simple ignorance?

Maybe I would like to make friends. Maybe, among the people who care about knowledge, and particularly those who make a public profession of it, we could decide to harbor, not humbly but proudly, as a precondition of saying anything of any worth within the larger scope of our combined ignorance, an individual acknowledgement that, yes, for all that we would like to claim, really we are, mostly, when it comes to most things, ignorant to such a point as to stand, in proportion, practically equal to every other ignorant being. Maybe that is why I struggle to make friends: learned professionals tend to enjoy their authority more than intellectual honesty, and less learned people tend to find my profession of ignorance arrogant, full of apparent knowledge as it is.

Maybe this defines the position of what used to be called a “critic”, or even further ago a “philosopher”: someone whose job is to take down a peg all claims to knowledge. Why? There is, or was, a practical function to this particular character: the worst mistakes, and in history the worst crimes, are usually committed by people who take a small, seductive compound of knowledge for a universal, all-encompassing truth, and endeavor to apply their belief with the passion of new converts, that which commonly arises when one has a feeling of totality, of access to the “whole” of life or the universe. In defying all authority, in subverting all claims to knowledge, the philosopher didn’t make many friends, and could find himself occasionally executed by tyrants. Considering that today, people who hold the title of “philosophers” claim to speak with the authority of science, and science claims to speak with the authority of God, and God as we all know is the Creator of Western Capitalism, it may befit me to remind you, my imaginary reader, and all of your kin, that you still know fuck all.