By Tim Shaw
It is obvious that the sum of all the things you don’t know vastly outweigh the things you do know by some impossible number. A statement so obvious as to be almost comical. But, consciously or subconsciously this doesn’t sit easily with us; it’s something that we would rather ignore. We get no consolation from this simple fact; if anything, it just underlines our feelings of intellectual fragility. We may have come some significant way as a species, but on a cosmological level we are still as dumb as a tree.
Any knowledge that you do have is relative to your current point of development, and (if we are being realistic) we are all existing on a continuum of expanding knowledge – or we should be. We ought to take comfort from this fact; knowledge is a journey not a destination. Any of the intellectual disciplines tell us that from any new piece of knowledge a whole world of extra questions spring forth; all of this leads us onwards and upwards and a pathway of exploration is rolled out in front of us. But the starting point has to be with being honest about our own ignorance.
This is nothing new. Socrates (469 – 399 BCE) had worked it out (and was despised by some of his contemporaries for this). Here is a quote from the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [online], “[The] awareness of one’s own absence of knowledge is what is known as Socratic ignorance, … Socratic ignorance is sometimes called simple ignorance, to be distinguished from the double ignorance of the citizens with whom Socrates spoke. Simple ignorance is being aware of one’s own ignorance, whereas double ignorance is not being aware of one’s ignorance while thinking that one knows.”
A teacher asks a student which is worse, ignorance or apathy? The student replies, “I don’t know, and I don’t care”. This Internet meme has been around for a while, but it’s one that chimes with me because I spent many years working in education, and as part of my job I often had the chance to speak to students and offer advice about how to adapt to university life and how to survive in such an environment. One thing I used to say was that perhaps the worst insult that could ever be thrown at them was for someone to describe them as ‘ignorant’… I also included ‘shallow’ as well,,, but ignorance was the crime that deserved the heaviest of punishments.
An obvious part of this is to be aware of the lenses you are looking through (check out, ‘observer bias’ and the closely related ‘cognitive dissonance’). We see this when someone has a pet theory, or a favourite concept and feels a need to carve it in stone; usually over the Internet. Once it’s gone that far down the line there’s really no going back, and even in the light of new evidence which contradicts or turns over the pet theory they are stuck with it and it becomes a millstone around their neck.
The error is in not acknowledging your own ignorance; feeling you should set yourself up as the authority in all things.
We are not very good at understanding the limits of our own knowledge. We make an assumption that in all areas of life we are existing on the cutting edge of what is possible – that may be true but we still encounter stuff that is either imperfect, or goes wrong, or breaks down; be that in systems, societies or technology. Deep down we know there is the possibility of improvement and advancement, but that’s always for tomorrow.
If we look at medical science as an example; someone recently said to me that there’s never been a better time to be ill. Now, I take issue with that in more than one way; the obvious one being that really there is no ‘better’ time to be ill at all! Another point is that this comment was probably the same one used by an 18th century surgeon when he was just about to saw someone’s leg off without anaesthetic.
I suppose it is the arrogance within humanity that arrives at these rather bizarre conclusions. Perhaps in a way it is a kind of comfort blanket; maybe we are hiding from a much more sobering reality? Sometime in the future will some social historians be looking back at us and marvelling at how primitive and naïve we were? Or perhaps this is already happening within our own lifetime? Maybe my generation has been the first to witness such a dramatic rate of change and advancement. It’s a fact; compared to previous centuries the rate of change has accelerated phenomenally. One factor alone sums it up nicely – the Internet. I think we can talk confidently about ‘Pre-Internet’ and ‘Post-Internet’. Just imagine if you had a time machine and you decided to go back to 1620 to the city of London; you would notice that all goods were transported around the city by horse and cart. Then you set your time machine forward another hundred years to the same place and in 1720, lo and behold, all goods would be transported around the city by horse and cart – no change. Then try the same experiment from 1920, but this time kidnap a person off the street and transport them to 2020, on all levels and in all aspects the person from 1920 would be in a state of overwhelming culture shock. What a journey we have been on.
However, to specifically look at human skill development at a physical level, we find that this does not increase at the same high speed that technological development can. For example, athletes can still shave a hundredth of a second off a 100 metre sprint, but it can take years to achieve this comparatively tiny gain. In fact, any significant human skill still takes hours of dedicated practice to achieve. A 21st century aspiring pianist still has to put the same amount of hours in that an 18th century one did. Of course, we are smarter about how we organise the learning process, this is sometimes supported by technology but the body still has to do the work. Also, our attitude towards human physical achievement and ambition has changed over the last 100 years. Take the example of Roger Bannister’s breaking of the four-minute mile in 1954; critics at the time (perhaps piqued with jealousy) claimed that Bannister had cheated because he had the audacity to actually train for the event! Their attitude of course was that Bannister should have done it based upon his own innate, undeveloped physical attributes; put another way, his God-given talent.
The acknowledgement of ignorance is inevitably a positive thing; it’s the acceptance that there is a whole big world out there, a boundless uncharted territory which is loaded with amazing possibilities. Ignore it at your peril.
As a postscript to the supposed statement by Socrates that, ‘All I know is that I know nothing’ the later Pyrrhonian Sceptics (2nd century C.E) added a cheeky extension by slotting on the end ‘…and I’m not even sure about that’. Not so much a whimsy, more of a Zen-like refutation, or a bow towards intellectual humility, who can tell.