Graef - Ignorance: Everything You Need to Know about Not Knowing

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Elbert Hubbard

Up and down, light and dark, yin and yangit seems that so many concepts are split between polar opposites that one might imagine the book of Genesis's metaphoric passage vary, no one disputes the importance of the difference between knowing and not knowing or the dangers of knowing the wrong stuff.

The Bible story offers a thumbnail clue of how we got where we are. Along the way, brave souls pioneered new paths of knowledge, following them wherever they led, discovering that their routes traced narrow lines through the untracked terrain of ignorance. Stepping off the path invites both threats and adventures, just as swimming beyond the reef puts us perilously within the food chain. While ignorance poses real threats to comfort, safety, security, health, and contentment, knowledge is one of our best means of assuring positive outcomes. Experience confirms that the rewards of pursuing the right knowledge are sufficient to justify a lifetime of learning, especially when they include learning how to avoid and combat ignorance. It begins with learning how to identify ignorance for what it is and does, and this is not a simple task. If the tree of ignorance may be thought of as situated at one pole and the knowledge tree at the other, then all of our growth toward the knowledge tree increases our distance from the tree of ignorance and erodes the remaining distance, all of which carries the name of ignorance.

There you have it, a definition. But like all definitions it has an upside and a downside, for every definition is a clarifying trap. While definitions seek to explain, they also put limits on concepts by locking ideas within tidy, rigid boundaries. Thoughts on ignorance shouldn't be so limited because it takes light from many sources to expose how its constraints set people and their ideas against harmony, progress, and each other. Because definitions lack what it takes to complete Big Pictures, they are assisted by airy metaphors herein. In this book, I will draw on a variety of sources, including allegory, theology, myth, folkways, science, literature, and other images of reality, since there is no corner of human history that is free of the fingerprints of ignorance.

Since there is so much more that is unknown than is known, ignorance will always cover more territory than knowledge. With the totality of human thought having touched only bits of the cosmic whole, we are left with a vast and enticing mystery that begs to be explored. Yet the unknown is every bit as real as the known, which means that poorly understood forces and dynamics account for much of what we experience, including weather, disease, seismic events, and sun spots. When a tornado touches down or an El Nino event in the Pacific scrambles weather patterns, mystified people write off their effects with exclamations of How odd! or Stuff happens!

Put yourself in the picture as we explore a mental model that compares the known with the unknown: