On Being Ignorant

I’ve been reflecting, in these days of relative calm, on my own ignorance. On how little, inevitably, I know, if anything at all, about an infinity of things.

Awareness of one’s own ignorance is a powerful tool, the spur that drives us to read, study and think things through, to move beyond mere rote knowledge and, passing through one ignorance after another, to push our understanding forward.

My secret dream, as a self-confessed ignorant, is in fact to devote myself almost entirely to reading, research and study for the rest of my days. But that’s another story.

One must then distinguish between the silent ignorant, who keeps quiet about what he doesn’t know, and often about what he does know too, and the chatty one, who shouts his ignorance urbi et orbi.

Silence would do us good. It is precious, and by now almost impossible to find in this world of ours, dominated by verbal incontinence and by a rampant narcissism that finds both its stimulus and its natural outlet in social digital spaces.

This, it seems to me, is what the human being of our time has become. He talks, he writes (as indeed I am doing myself), he puts himself on display because he craves an audience. He wants a following and is forever seeking approval, at all costs, even at the cost of publicly displaying, and demonstrating, his own crass ignorance.

We are ignorant. We would do well to start admitting it to ourselves.