Subtitled “On Wanting Not to Know”
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 2024, 239p, including 12p notes and acknowledgments)
This is a little book published just a couple months ago that appealed for a couple reasons. First, I read the author’s previous book, THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERAL (review here), which was a decent-enough summary of various political matters, if not especially revelatory. And second, this book suggests it might inform associated themes about disinformation and fake news, about why people would prefer conspiracy theories to objective truth.
Before I began reading I jotted down some potential expectations. It’s easy to imagine why some people would not want to know (or want not to know, as the subtitled puts it), the most obvious being the rejection of objective knowledge in favor of religious or community myths. Knowing too much makes life too complicated. Thus the “bliss” of the title; most people prefer to live untroubled, simple lives, and the ‘truth’ of what is real is irrelevant. Further: why are there religious admonitions *against* knowledge, as in Genesis? Well, as I’ve gathered and provisionally concluded, to ensure conformance with the community, with the tribe, where learning anything new could be dangerous to tribal solidarity.
The Introduction touches on some of these themes, on pages 5-6:
Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human begins also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods — we are living in one — when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological bacillus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. One can always find proximate causes of such surges in resistance to truth, whether historical events or social changes or new intellectual and religious currents promising a holiday from reality. The source lies deeper, though, in ourselves and in the world itself, which takes no heed of our wishes.
So here we have a framing of current events within the larger philosophical perspectives to be explored. This is a philosophical book, not one about current issues of fake news or misinformation. Some of its ideas, how sometimes it’s better not to know, echo Sam Harris’ book LYING. As a philosophical book, it’s fairly dense with ideas considering its brevity.
The book’s chapters describe five broad flavors of ignorance: evasion, taboo, emptiness, innocence, and nostalgia. Lilla begins with a variation on Plato’s cave parable, then outlines the book in the introduction, beginning with Oedipus and our unwillingness to understand the world around us. Then it considers fantasies, and several illusions. One, that there’s a secret way of being in the world that provides access to special knowledge that is somehow ‘beyond’ reason. Two, a hope to preserve our original innocence, or to achieve a second one. Another, to escape the historical present by returning to an imagined past of bucolic simplicity. The boy from the cave found that seeing the truth was oppressive; the price of living that way was too high. There’s an eros of intellect, and also the Thanatos of intellect, and we need to understand both.
Chapter 1 is on evasion. We look the other way to avoid self-knowledge. Today’s evangelical churches promote a Happy Meal version of Christian conversion in which the old self is simply wiped away. Freud understood that being *unable* to know ourselves is necessary; it protects us from knowing ourselves. The codes of society are internalized by each individual, without conscious awareness. Neuroses are jailbreaks, escapes from rigid social mores. Psychoanalysis is imagined to find the key problem and vanquish it, but such self-mastery can never be complete. Freud thought progress could be made. Almost everyone resisted it. They don’t want to know. In every age people resist knowledge of abstract truths and external reality that might help us navigate the world. With comparisons of Socrates and Plato. Almost all inquiry begins with received false opinions in which people have an emotional stake. Even mathematicians. It was Socrates persisting in undermining people’s opinions that brought him down. People didn’t mind others being clever; they minded others presuming to teach them what they’ve learned.
We willingly give up a shot to acquire true beliefs about the world out of fear that truths about ourselves will be exposed in the process, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusions of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reasons than it is ours.
Thus the wiseacre cynics who think everyone is a crook and has a hidden agenda. It’s a simple way out; you no longer have to think about anything.
Chapter 2 is about taboo. They exist many cases where it’s better off *not* to know something, where it’s better not to over-share. A theory of religion is that we create parental gods as authorities to resist [[ as if the gods are an excuse for not doing better ]]. Thus taboos against curiosity, the garden and the tree, the Greek gods too: know thy place. But the bible undermines itself.
Martin Luther called reason the devil’s bride. Prometheus was in vogue during the Enlightenment, later denounced by the church for dehumanizing people and turning the world to clockwork.
Modern examples: we know we will die, but not when. Would we want to know? Genetic testing can tell us more than we might want to know. Decades ago doctors did not feel obliged to tell their patients they had cancer, since it was incurable.
Chapter 3 is on emptiness. Uncertainty can lead to rage. So people resort to oracles and prophets. The prophets who are illiterate are the most effective; they are empty vessels. Christ’s return was delayed again and again, so many others proclaimed themselves to be prophets, beginning with Paul of Tarsus, and they were the beginning of the anti-intellectualism of Christianity. [[ Almost a requirement of religion; learning about the world would undermine the faith. ]] Thus the ‘holy fool.’ In retrospect we recognize some of those famous figures as suffering mental illness, or autism. Paul despised culture, and preferred willful ignorance; his ideology was a death wish. Humans needed to be empty to allow room for the Holy Spirit — a hydraulic conception of the soul.
Devils and spirits can also enter the body, by this reasoning; thus the 19th century demon panic, Salem’s witches, the spirit world of the early 20th century, and modern belief in demonic possession, and exorcism, as seen in the movies.
Chapter 4 is on innocence. We think of newborns as blank slates, or as innocents, whose moral purity will diminish over time. They are an alternative to our fallen world, so their innocence must be preserved. In ancient times children were used as spiritual mediums; thus, “out of the mouths of babes.” A Hollywood cliche is how children are wiser than adults. In some stories children were evil, as Jesus was in the Gospel of Thomas.
The “unhealthy dynamics of the Christian innocence ideal” presumes that children are pure and must be protected until they are adults. So books are bowdlerized, or banned. Freud tried to sort this out. Yet by the 1970s movies and commercials made up girls in titillating ways; beauty pageants were held for young girls. Now, pedophilia is a national concerns. Yet children are not *for* adults; they have no concept of their own childhood. So children grow up unprepared, and adults remain in adolescence as long as they like.
The ultra-pious feel the need to protect the innocent from behind walls, either religious, or gated communities, or home schools. But that premise is false; to know good, one must have knowledge of evil. Women are especially targets of such protection illusions. There remain pockets of religious fanatics in the US today, who raise children with no knowledge of the outside world. Can a Christian be an adult? is a fair question. We learn little about adults in the Gospels; Jesus tells his disciples to hate their families.
We are never innocent; we are a bundle of disordered drives and desires, to be transformed into mature adults with experience and knowledge, [[ i.e. our inherent human nature is not blank .. as Pinker and others have established; and here’s the repeated theme of how things necessarily change given experience and knowledge ]]. Can we mature and still be open to wonder? That was the theme of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. [[ this challenge is perhaps a key theme of science fiction. ]]
Chapter 5 is about nostalgia [[ and here we get to a common psychological issue in modern politics ]]. During the wars of religion in the 17th century soldiers were diagnosed with what came to be called nostalgia for their homes. Now we think of nostalgia of being a matter of time: imagining a simpler, happier world of the past. It’s a desire of people to lose what seems like toxic knowledge about the world and themselves. Which can’t be done. History is pastiche; some ancient traditions turn out to be not so ancient.
Too much nostalgia leads to obsessions with the innocent and pure past that we once had. Thus the many myths of the Golden Age, of Greece, Genesis, the Middle Ages. Failure to make progress; a sense of inferiority; worries about vital essences being sapped.
Some nostalgic people flee into the future, adopting an apocalyptic mindset, looking to a cataclysm as a chance for rebirth when return to the past is not possible. Modern fascists look back to the Aeneid, or to a Roman book called Germania, which inspired the Nazis.
Only the displaced, migrants and victims of war and natural disaster, have earned their nostalgia. The ideal of a better future is an ache for the past. We live in a permanent revolution; life is ephemeral. [[ as my key theme: change ]] Thus reactionary politics.
Historical nostalgia is a peculiar manifestation of the will to ignorance. It is a failure to accept and mourn the loss of a world that sufferers have never had direct experience with. That world must first be conjured up in the imagination before it can just as imaginatively be made to disappear.
The present will always be found wanting.
The final few pages are titled Envoi:
At one extreme, there is the person who treats his life as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it… At the other, there is the person who anticipates loss and harm, and so build dikes against the tides and flees if the waters crest over the top.
…
We all want to think of ourselves as courageous and open to experience, as seizing life rather than being buffeted by it. Who would want to look in the mirror and see himself working hard to maintain a false picture of the world, hiding evidence from himself and patching the inner tube of his beliefs to keep the bicycle of his commitments rolling? Stated this way, none of us. And yet people do.…
This book happens to appear in the middle of a perfect storm, when different manifestations of the resistance to knowledge have combined to create ideological winds that batter us.
Returning to Plato’s cave: do we risk venturing out into the real world? Or retreat to the familiar where we feel protected?
