Thanks to the Internet — and, in particular, to blogging — the capacity for dialogue has, along with much else, increased exponentially. Now, the aim of this column is to take something someone has said and see where thinking about it leads. But there is no reason why the quoted matter I choose to discuss need be a remark that is famous or one uttered by someone famous.

Recently, I linked on my blog to a piece by Mark Vernon called “How to be agnostic,” in which he quoted something written by Daniel J. Boorstin: “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.”

My friend Maxine Clarke, an editor at the science journal Nature — and who is one of the smartest people I know — posted a comment in which she observed that “ignorance has done immense damage in the historical past, when you look at all the wars, genocides, pogroms etc, which certainly weren’t done out of ‘pretensions to knowledge’ but out of superstition and, er, ignorance.”

In a follow-up comment, I replied to Maxine that, while ignorance has certainly done its share of harm, so had what I called “unwarranted certainty,” pointing out how the medical community of his day incorrectly thought Ignaz Semmelweis had it all wrong about puerperal fever.

To which Maxine wryly responded: “So it all boils down to how you define ‘ignorance’ I suppose.”

I have been thinking about that ever since.

Among other things, I was reminded of something I had written in a review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, namely, that Taleb’s ideas “suggest that the only valid history is one that would enable us to understand a period in terms of the uncertainty and unpredictability facing those alive at the time. In other words, it would involve reconstructing, as it were, their ignorance.”

The consensus among informed observers when World War I started in August 1914 was that the conflict would be over by Christmas of that same year. Closer to home, according to the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org, Obama Administration officials argued earlier this year that, if the economic stimulus package were not enacted, the rate of unemployment would reach 9 percent by early next year, whereas, if enacted, unemployment would peak at 8 percent this year. Unemployment is currently at 10.2 percent. In other words, it is higher than what was predicted would be the case if the stimulus were not enacted.

In both cases, the assessment of reality was based on what those making the assessment knew — or thought they knew. Last year’s economic meltdown, the housing bubble, and the dot.com bubble of the late ’90s were all in part caused by people in positions of authority thinking they knew more or better than it turns out they did.

That is why Maxine’s quip has been so much on my mind. To define means to demarcate, to set limits, establish boundaries.

Ignorance, however, is practically boundless. The sum of human knowledge is a small and fragile oasis right smack in the middle of a vast Sahara of ignorance. Usually, we do not even fully know the little that we do know — hence the law of unintended consequences. The wars Maxine refers to may have owed much to ignorance, but they also owed much to the knowledge and ingenuity of people like Alfred Nobel and Richard Gordon Gatling. Whatever else may be said of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, accusations of ignorance or stupidity would not be among them. And it took some sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to come up with sarin.

Anyway, thanks to Maxine, I kept thinking about what would be a more precise and practical definition of ignorance. And this led me to realize that it is the limits and  boundaries of our knowledge — to say nothing of its destructive potential — that we should focus our attention on. We should, in particular, be extremely cautious when it comes to translating what we think we know now into predictions of how things are going to be.

Robinson Jeffers, writing between the wars, puts it well in his poem “Science”:

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

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