What’s Wrong With The World Part XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance
The Necessity of Ignorance
Now, in order to maintain this make-believe pretense that modern man is enlightened and that all prior ages were benighted, one must take very special care never to discover any real history, never to read any recent nor ancient authors, never to know anything outside one’s little precious circle or clique of like-minded ignoramuses.
Normal parochialism can be cure by exposure to other ways and other times, either by travel or reading or even the simple act of imagining things other than they are. Deliberate parochialism is incurable.
To be Modern means to be incurably parochial. To be a Modern man means to know nothing and to want to know nothing about any other land or culture, any other period of history or prehistory, and not even to know the teachings of one’s own tutors. Ignorance is strength.
In order to justify this ignorance, modern philosophy goes to great pains to invent flimsy excuses that, since perfect and apodictic knowledge is impossible for men to know, therefore (so leaps the leap of logic) all knowledge is opinion, no knowledge is certain, no knowledge is true, and no means of distinguishing true from false exists.
Those who propose this argument do not notice or do not care to notice that it refutes itself. If no knowledge is certain, the knowledge that no knowledge is certain is itself uncertain. Obviously this is not proposed as a serious theory of epistemology; it is a verbal trick, a polite word-noise made to excuse oneself from the necessity to know a theory of epistemology, or indeed to know anything.
Philosophy cannot cure ignorance if the ignorance is a matter of deliberate policy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
