15-05-2025
Review of Mark Lilla's ‘Ignorance and Bliss'
If ignorance is bliss, as a poet once wrote, it also can be said that human beings 'are creatures who want to know and not to know'. The world, writes American political scientist and historian Mark Lilla in his timely book, Ignorance and Bliss, is going through a phase in which the denial of 'evident truth' is rising. It's a world where 'mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise'.
'Holiday from reality'
A professor of humanities at Columbia University, Lilla's arguments that people seem to favour ignorance are compelling. In these murky days when everything seems to be at sea, he offers an amazing insight on the human being's incorrigible 'will to ignorance', a term coined by German philosopher Nietzsche. It seems after spending a lifetime searching for knowledge, humans have taken 'a holiday from reality'. No wonder, resistance to knowledge is now being backed by an ideology that is supportive. In the face of such developments, those devoted to reason and logic have started to feel like refugees.
Quoting from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Lilla asks: 'It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance?' While some people are naturally curious about learning why, there are many others who are indifferent. There are reasons to avoid knowing about particular things, and many of those reasons are perfectly justified. And then there are those who have developed a disinterest for gaining knowledge simply because they believe what they already know is the truth.
Lilla provokes readers to think about this. In the Introduction, he writes that Greek philosopher Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. 'Our own experiences teach us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so.' The most obvious resistance to knowing is rooted in fear. People resist any aspect that is related to their morality and religiosity being questioned, because they are afraid of getting exposed. By questioning such firm beliefs, people run the risk of upsetting ideas they've built their lives around, with no guarantee of any satisfactory replacement. However, if ever questions have to be raised without any chance of them being resisted, it has to take place in a state of total ignorance.
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
Mark Lilla
Hurst, New York ₹1,765
Imagined pasts
Ignorance and Bliss is all about how ignorance ought to be viewed and how it should get valued. It views ignorance independent of bliss, and for good reason. At this time when politics is filled with lies and fake news, the question worth asking is whether the root cause of the problem lies with the public.
Gaining knowledge is an emotional experience, as is resisting knowledge. How to live with such contrasting emotions in a given time is the focus of the book, and our present predicament. The intimate struggles with aspects of self-knowledge feature prominently in it. Even self-knowledge depends on resisting other kinds of knowledge about the world. The chapters in the book concern fantasies, exploring that power in us which inspires resistance to acknowledging reality.
Lilla explores several human sentiments such as innocence, nostalgia, emptiness, and taboo, to get some clarity on the knowledge/ignorance dilemma. Clarity is hard because the search for an answer often remains subjective. Knowledge and ignorance co-exist. Those who feel ignorance is bliss may actually have a 'distaste for the present' and go rushing to 'restore an imagined past', says Lilla. On the contrary, the more we know leaves us with the challenge to know more. A quest that never ends.
Fascinating and challenging, the book makes a compelling argument that a will to ignorance is as strong in us as any desire to have knowledge, and that we are caught between the will to know and the will not to know. Such are the times that wanting not to know appears to be much stronger than wanting to know.
The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic.
