Ignorance and Bliss – On Wanting Not To Know
Mark Lilla, Hurst, £18.99

MARK LILLA, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, purports to investigate the contrary disposition to curiosity: the will not to know, the will to ignorance. 

Certainly an interesting subject, but he treats it quintessentially as a disquisition from the ivory tower of academe. He takes us on a seemingly aimless ramble though the thickets of mythology, Biblical narratives and religious belief. 

He begins by using the example of Oedipus, the most notorious case of someone whose ignorance determines their tragic fate, then races on through the mythological basis of fascism, to the role played by Christian fundamentalism in the historical self-narrative of the US, but in a very superficial way. 

Lilla flaunts his erudition and peppers the book with references to Greek philosophers and classical authors, from Cervantes and George Eliot to Dickens and Dostoevsky, and his head remains in this rarefied atmosphere, blind to the realities on the ground.

The will to ignorance is indeed the complementary force to curiosity, but a will to ignorance can also be a means of protecting our sanity. If our curiosity were such that we aimed to know everything knowable, we would drive ourselves mad. I am wilfully ignorant of higher mathematics because I see no value in knowing something that has no relevance in my daily life; just as others will be wilfully ignorant of the identities of the birds singing in their gardens or of the trees they walk past every day. 

If we overburdened our neural system with excessive and seemingly useless knowledge we would become incapable of separating the useful from the useless. Usually, we remain curious only about what we consider of interest and relevance to us.
 
What Lilla totally ignores here is how society, or rather the ruling elite in society, deliberately promotes ignorance as a means of maintaining control. 

Early religions, and particularly Christianity, aggressively fostered ignorance. In its early stages the church hierarchy refused to have the bible translated into a comprehensible vernacular and emphasised that “the ways of our Lord are unknowable” in an attempt to keep the masses in a state of ignorance. Curiosity was deemed heresy. 

Today our ruling elites continue to promote ignorance and an unquestioning lack of curiosity into the political and economic systems under which we live. This is done in two ways: first, by using the means of mass communication primarily for soporific  entertainment, consumerism and rampant individualism, rather than as a genuine means of informing people about the real issues and helping them understand social processes; and second, by promoting false narratives of history. 

It is also done through an education system that prioritises rote learning of “facts” rather than inquisitiveness and sceptical thinking.

Now that would be an interesting area for investigation, but this author feels, perhaps, that it would be too mundane a subject and would cheapen his philosophical deliberations.
 
Lilla argues that there are two basic types of human being, those “who treat their lives as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it, and those who anticipate loss and harm, and so build dykes against the tides and flee if the waters crest over the top – two human types, two ways of living for us to choose between.”

Here, again, he ignores the basic question of how free we really are to make such a choice and what it is that determines the decision we make.