In Which I Confess My Ignorance

One of the main goals of learning - or at least one of its main side-effects - is to reveal progressively more and more how ignorant one is. If learning is done properly - and it takes some real-world experience to learn how to learn - one's preconceptions are always being tested and challenged, and the notion of what one really knows and what one does not really know is at the least being refined and sometimes actually revolutionized in some way. Real progress depends on this.

The more I know, the more I know about how ignorant I am, or, the more I know how much there is to know that I do not yet know.

I don't know if there is an afterlife. I don't know if there is an ultimate particle. I don't know if there are aliens who visit the earth. I don't know if Oswald was a lone assassin. I don't know if the free market is the best approach for the greatest good for the greatest number. I don't know if democracy is necessarily the best political system we can come up with. I don't know if there even is global warming, let alone if human activity is responsible for it, or if greater carbon dioxide emissions are the main human cause, etc. I don't know if the nuclear family is the best situation for bringing up children. I don't know if the present members of the human race have all descended from a single prehistoric mother. I don't know if explaining differences between the sexes by recourse to the notion of our prehistoric hunter-gatherer heritage has real merit. I don't know why the Roman Empire declined and fell. I don't know why so many Americans seem eager to expose themselves to any humiliation or degradation in order to get on television. I don't know why most if not all people do so many things which cause themselves more harm than good. . . . And I've hardly started. I do have my suspicions, opinions, prejudices and preferred beliefs, as well as bits of second-hand knowledge about these matters, but real knowledge - no.

Once you develop a certain level of expertise in your field, you should become more comfortable with the fact that you will never master it all and that there is much that you do not know - and that it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to have "encyclopedic" knowledge of a subject. We are most impressed by that rare individual who does seem to possess both a sound overview and a grasp of the controversies, minor issues, and minutiae of the field. Even such a master can be exposed by a crank or a lucky student who happens to find some area of weakness or a seemingly small flaw which might turn out to be the key to a basic error in his whole point of view. Science and knowledge often make leaps of progress through such anomilies.

I could almost become proud of my ignorance - but such pride could be justified only if I had earned the right to be proud, through much dedication and effort on trying to overcome my ignorance and through the commitment to continue the struggle and always strive for improvement.

Simple ignorance is the easist thing to attain - or, rather, one cannot even attain it because it is a lack, an emptiness: one does not achieve nothing. Pride in such everyday ignorance is something to be despised, as it is pride in deliberately refraining from using my intelligence to better myself or my world. Mind you, there are many things that are not worth knowing, and an essential part of the process of learning is developing a system to filter out the "noise"; this filter must always be refined and upgraded to avoid creating a simplistic worldview which consigns important issues and signals to the ignored "noise" category. Each person has to find the level of knowledge, ignorance, and filtering which seems optimal for survival and growth.


The next question: is one allowed to freely express one's ignorance?


I can see opponents to my point of view marching in protest, waving placards on which their slogan is printed:

"Down with Ignorant's!"