Mark Lilla’s elegant and stimulating book, Ignorance and Bliss, anatomizes appetites for ignorance, together with their effects. He identifies five modes of seeking ignorance: evading uncomfortable knowledge; placing some kinds of knowledge under taboo; emptying ourselves of knowledge so that we can be inspired; seeking childlike innocence; and nostalgically imagining and trying to recover a lost paradise. These overlap and intertwine, but are, as he presents them, distinct enough that each has its own characteristic flavor.
Lilla’s modes of seeking ignorance are all informed by the same stance toward the world. It is one in which looking at the world and trying to understand it are so uncomfortable and distressing that the best—perhaps the only—thing to do is turn one’s back and close one’s eyes, and then live in some kind of fantasy rather than in the world as given. This attitude has a counterpart: that of those who, when they look at the world, find themselves disposed to understand it better because it is “an object of puzzlement and wonder,” and who then live in that real world, even when tempted toward fantasy.
Lilla, who is a professor of humanities at Columbia University, prefers the second stance, and there are many instances in the book of a passion for ignorance being illuminated, criticized, and then contrasted with the desire for knowledge. Those contrasts are where Lilla’s normative concerns surface, sometimes in surprisingly strong language.
It isn’t that Lilla sees all knowledge as lying open to us. Neither does he criticize all refusals of knowledge. He’s clear enough that we all have, and must have, some knowledge-taboos; that not all knowledge is equally worth seeking; and that the world is not divided neatly into knowledge-seekers and advocates of ignorance—the saved and the damned, that is. He wants, rather, to identify and criticize extremes: practices and attitudes that seek ignorance where knowledge is both possible and preferable, and particularly the foundational epistemic commitments that make acquiring some kinds of knowledge impossible. He’s also interested in, and repelled by, the strength of the passion for ignorance present to some degree in each of us.
Lilla is subtle and self-aware enough to see the smugness that can be involved in criticizing the epistemic habits of others. He tries hard to avoid giving the impression that the professoriate’s habits of knowledge-seeking are the right ones, and that everyone else’s should be measured by the yardstick they provide. But here he doesn’t always succeed. A smug and censorious tone sometimes surfaces in the book, a tone that suggests that Lilla takes himself and his fellow travelers to have the correct disposition toward the world; they see its recalcitrance to our desires, its beauty, its otherness; they’re able to live with discomfort; they’re adults who rely on reason and experience to arrive at their ever-increasing understanding of how things are. They too are drawn to ignorance, but they resist. By contrast, there are the infected, those who’ve become subject to “some psychological bacillus…spreading by unknown means,” which “crowds out common sense and expertise” and nurtures the passion for ignorance. These, he writes, are especially numerous now, and they are children who need to grow up. Lilla would like such people to be cured—to adopt attitudes toward knowledge like his and those of his tribe, and therefore to respect the wisdom of the wise, the expertise of the experts.
Lilla’s view of what reason can deliver is optimistic, and perhaps naïvely so. He doesn’t, of course, have the extreme confidence an eighteenth-century philosophe would have had in the deliverances of reason, but he appears to be far from even a modest skepticism. This is important because the passion for ignorance would appear very differently than it does in this book were Lilla to embrace, or at least entertain, such a skepticism.
We might, for instance, say that we know very little of what could be known, that we’re wrong about a very large proportion of what we take ourselves to know, and that we’re virtuosos at being certain of what we’re in fact in error about. This, we might go on to say, is true of each of us individually and all of us collectively. And we might add that these claims about the frailty of reason are among the relatively few we can rely upon. This isn’t a root-and-branch skepticism that denies any possibility of knowing. Total skepticism is hard to state coherently because it must exempt itself from the scope of its own claim. But the more modest skepticism I am describing is a corrective to intellectual arrogance. Reason, according to modest skeptics, has among its few gifts the capacity to show, with clarity, its own limits. The Socrates of the early dialogues would have agreed. Lilla, so far as I can tell, mostly would not.
He is confident in what reason, together with experience, can teach us about the world, and therefore eager to embrace the kind of curiosity that seeks to know, as well as to damn the passion for ignorance that shuts knowledge-seeking down. It’s this confidence that leads him, when his own certainties surface, to present them in stark and immoderate tones.
An example. In the course of his discussion of nostalgia as a political principle, Lilla elegantly and (so far as I can tell) accurately portrays the structure of appeals to a lost golden age, whether these are made by Salafists, Slavophiles, or Scottish nationalists. He writes: “Give someone a set of political principles, and he will need to understand them before acting. Give someone a history, a story that elicits anger and pride, and you have instantly made a soldier.” This is excessively dichotomous. On one side there are nostalgic histories that make soldiers, and on the other there are statements of principle that require understanding before they can be acted upon. Lilla prefers the principles to the nostalgia, the effort at understanding to the taking up of arms, the professoriate to the benighted Salafists and Slavophiles. And his preferences are grounded in the confidence that reason can achieve something in the sphere of political principle.
But consider: a foundational statement of American political principle in the Declaration of Independence contains an axiomatic appeal to self-evident truths. That appeal is representative, not at all an outlier. Statements of political principle frequently and characteristically contain axiomatic commitments that are inaccessible to reason. Appeals to self-evidence place the principles they enunciate beyond the reach of reason. If it doesn’t seem self-evident to you (as it doesn’t to me) that we’re all created equal, and so on (note that not seeming self-evident isn’t the same as not seeming true), then those for whom these principles do seem self-evident won’t engage you with argument, for what argument could do more than an appeal to self-evidence does? They’ll either try to get you into therapy or, more likely, kill you—just as some Salafists and Slavophiles do, except probably with more enthusiasm and less restraint. Our American record of slaughtering those whose preferred political order is nondemocratic, and therefore not responsive to these putative self-evidences, makes the Salafists and the Slavophiles seem amateurish. (Not to speak of the Scottish nationalists, who have scarcely gotten beyond advocacy of kilts.)
Another example. Lilla appears largely confident that reason and experience are the principal devices we have for proper belief formation. But they are not. Most of the beliefs any of us have about anything are derived more or less directly from testimony. That testimony might come to our ears, as when people tell us things, or to our eyes, as when we read things people have written or look at things they have made; and it might come to us from the dead or from the living. But come it does and come it must. Were we to regard understandings of the world derived from testimony as illegitimate, or as more dubious than those derived from reason and our own personal experience, we would live impoverished, even impossible lives. I have many beliefs about the People’s Republic of China without having been there, and many beliefs about the validity of this or that mathematical proof without being able to assess for myself the mathematics involved. All these are beliefs arrived at via testimony. Lilla also appears to have many such beliefs, as he must.
The fact of the matter is (and this is another example of what reason can do in the way of ouroboros-like assessments of itself) that the most fundamental epistemic decisions each of us make are about which testimonials to trust and order our lives around. And these decisions are always made without decisive—and often without any—reasons independent of their making. That isn’t a bug in our epistemic situation, but a feature of it. Denial of this feature is inextricable from Lilla’s critique of the enthusiasts of ignorance.
What, then, do we have here in this little volume, from which I derived a good deal of pleasure and some instruction? A tract for the times. An intervention in a troubled political situation. A naïve plea for remaking the epistemically sick, who are the infected walking abroad, by the epistemically healthy, who are happily at home writing their books. Lilla could have written a more modest book that limited itself to depicting a particular way of being in the world, a book that suggested limits to rather than abjurations of nostalgia, innocence, evasion, and taboo. That would have been a book that offered an invitation to something: Here, take a look at this, it might have said. This is how my tribe sees things, here’s our local wisdom. And there is indeed some of that in the book.
But, unfortunately, there’s also an attempt to dispose of the wisdom of other tribes by depicting their members as children who need to grow up or as sick people who need to be healed. These tropes are patronizing, unjust, and unreasonable. Modest skepticism of the type briefly sketched here at once moderates both enthusiasm for one’s own mode of occupying the world and contempt for those who occupy it differently. Its advocates can more easily make a subjunctive offering of the world they inhabit than can those whose epistemology is more optimistic, and who are therefore drawn to the indicative mood or to the bludgeon of the imperative.
Ignorance and Bliss opens and ends with versions of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Lilla uses these, in part, to indicate the difficulty of occupying the stance toward knowledge that he prefers. In the version with which the book concludes, there are two people who have left the cave of illusion, where they’ve been comfortable. They find themselves on the stony shore of an ocean where some boats are drawn up, and from which they can dimly see islands in the distance. What should they do? One is eager to launch a boat and set sail for the islands, not knowing whether they’ll be able to get there or what will happen if they do. The other is hesitant, wondering whether to retreat to the familiar and comfortable cave. “What would you do?” Lilla asks, and adds, “Think very hard before answering that question.”
Yes, we should think hard about the question, and not just in the sense that Lilla means, which is that neither answer is easy, and that no one should think they would easily take to the sea. The comforts of ignorance are, he thinks, too attractive for that to be likely. But we can also think about the question’s frame and assumptions in ways that Lilla appears not to. The two who have left the cave and find themselves on the shore have nothing but themselves: no assumptions, no authorities, no testimonies on which to rely, no view of the world. They’re blank slates, aware only that the place they’ve come from has taught them badly, and that they know nothing of where they might travel to. They are, perhaps, the Columbia students Lilla would like to have, those who might become virtuosos of curiosity, open to whatever might come. Such a thought experiment should, however, be resisted. It places all local wisdoms, all local authorities, and all traditions in the cave of illusion, and makes those who follow them acolytes of ignorance. Such a picture is drawn by those who know the truth (Plato and Lilla), and they remain outside the picture’s frame, where they can be neither addressed nor seen. The picture depicts everyone within its frame as either a slave of ignorance or a tabula rasa—which, while I suppose it to be a view of the current American body politic that Lilla would disavow, sits comfortably with what he writes. There’s a short and fairly direct line from the allegory of the cave to the political philosophy of Plato’s Laws, and that is not, to me, an encouraging thought.
We Americans do not, at the moment, find it easy to have a life together. Lilla’s book suggests that continuing to allow the clerisy to rule is the answer. They, after all, are the ones who know, and we, the benighted, have only two good choices: let them tell us what’s what, or try to become like them. So far as I can see (not far, I’m sure), that prescription is disastrous. That is partly because the clerisy’s knowledge habits are sometimes as productive of error as those of the ignorance-seekers, and partly because a democratic polity—which for better or worse is what we’ve got—can’t survive if its learned classes take many (most?) of their fellow citizens to stand in need of radical re-education. A better question for members of the clerisy is: What do I have to learn from those who, as it seems to me, take ignorance to be blissful?
Ignorance and Bliss
On Wanting Not to Know
Mark Lilla
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$27 | 243 pp.
