Ignorance is Bliss Because Smartening is Hard

I’ve watched a lot of finger-pointing this week as folks on either side of the Olympics opening ceremony brouhaha have become Internet-fueled art historians, art critics, mind readers and apologists. The number of reports available on the subject is overwhelming, and none of us is capable of absorbing and making sense of them all — yet many people are pleased to share what understanding they think they’ve gleaned. (If ever there were a good use case for the automatic aggregators commonly passed off as artificial intelligences, collating and distilling all of that data would be it … except they can’t be trusted because their programmers seem to have inserted curious biases into them.)

(Image: “Knowledge over Ignorance,” by thepixelsmith, on DeviantArt under Creative Commons.)

As the opinions and reference sources (complete with hyperlinks) flew back and forth, often with unnecessary barbs and insults, I thought about how hard it is for us to consider deeply and honestly opposing viewpoints and reportage that contradicts what we think we know. Robert A. Heinlein once wrote that “To stay young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods,” but it ain’t easy. And I was reminded of this passage:

Everyone is familiar with the experience of learning something, believing it to be true, and finding out later it was not quite accurate. Perhaps the difference was in the details—learning that the planet has two north poles, geographic and magnetic, for instance—or perhaps what we learned was false or incomplete, e.g., the characteristics of life at one or both of those poles. We “learned” that the moon was made of green cheese, that Mars had canals, and that the solar system had nine planets; one was nonsense, one supposition, and the third science; but, after the discovery of the tenth planet (at the time “2003 UB313,” now Eris) and then the rejection of it and Pluto as true planets in favor of the “dwarf planet” designation, we now know that all three things we learned were wrong—or, in the last case, premature.

This process—collecting new information, enjoying or enduring new experiences, and reevaluating what we learned—can be uncomfortable, so we may not appreciate it at the time. We may think of it as going through intellectual and emotional growing pains. But when it comes to history, this growth experience can produce mistrust if we put too much stock in what we already learned. We may deride new interpretations as “revisionist history,” forgetting that all history must be subject to revision —literally, “looking again”—as new facts are discovered.

Unfortunately, facts are not always recognizable or readily available. Where facts are obscure or absent, we must interpret, interpolate, and speculate in order to derive anything approaching understanding or discernment. This is a natural process, i.e., inherent to our nature as thinking beings, and we routinely accept an abridged understanding of things that cannot be proved by fact or rationale.

(If you’re interested, that’s from the preface to this book.)

The problem is when we think we know quite well, thank you very much, and how dare you present us with new information or contradictory facts to chip away at the edifice of our understanding? And when different authorities present alternative explanations, how dare you imply that our choice of one over the other was misguided? And so forth, and so on, with our emotions ratcheting higher with every comment.

Sometimes returning to the Garden, to the Age of Innocence, seems all too tempting. But would it be more satisfying? I’m not sure.

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