'Ignorance', by Peter Burke: the worst thing is not knowing that you don't know

In our days, ignorance is the great ignored. Although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is the great misunderstood. To a large extent, the misinterpretation derives from a basic confusion, which takes for granted that ignorance exhausts its definition in that of the absence of knowledge. In this way, it is identified with negativity without further ado or, if you prefer, with complete emptiness.

But ignorance cannot be reduced to simple and concise not-knowing. It is possible to predict its status as an active ingredient, capable of generating its specific effects. Well, it is the description, analysis and criticism of the most outstanding ones that the emeritus professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge Peter Burke dedicates himself to in his stimulating, original and brilliant book Ignorance. A global story. Throughout its pages, the author reviews some of the most important consequences that have arisen from ignorance on various levels (political, religious, war, scientific…) in the last 500 years.

Indeed, if ignorance were reduced to the absence of knowledge, a book about it would have blank pages, the author points out ironically. But it is known that, to paraphrase for the umpteenth time the famous dictum Aristotelian, non-being (of non-knowledge) is also said in many ways. Of all of them, perhaps the least disturbing, to the extent that it hardly gives rise to theoretical misunderstandings, is the one that recognizes its status as pending knowledge. This happens when, for example, an astrophysicist states that we do not know, because we do not have the appropriate instruments, whether there is any form of life in a galaxy thousands of light years from ours.

The cause of the so-called innocuous condition of this variant of ignorance seems clear: it is an ignorance that recognizes its condition as such, an ignorance—permit the paradoxical formulation—self-conscious. Problems arise when certain discourses or approaches that pass for true knowledge without objectively being so obstruct the very possibility of said self-awareness. In that sense, and from a strictly epistemological perspective, it could be argued that falsehood is a form of ignorance that ignores its own condition. Unlike the previous mode of ignorance, in this the place of knowledge is not occupied by the silence of the blank page but by error.

Far from being a nuance without much importance, it is in the self-awareness of one's own condition that the sign that ignorance is going to take is elucidated. That, it is worth emphasizing in the face of some very consolidated topics, is not negative in principle. Even on the contrary: there is no more powerful engine or firmer starting point for the search for knowledge than the awareness of being ignorant (the Socratic “I only know that I know nothing”). Hence, it is manifestly wrong to describe someone as ignorant because they do not know something, among other reasons because there is no one who knows everything and, consequently, everyone without exception is ignorant to some extent. What really defines the ignorant in the proper and strong sense is another fact, that he does not know that he does not know.

This other modality of not knowing oneself gives rise to specific effects, certainly relevant, as Burke points out with plenty of examples in his book. Because, declaring the search for knowledge with truth claims unnecessary, ignorance as erroneous knowledge fulfills the function of taking its place. In times like these, of an overabundance of pseudo-knowledge that makes us falsely self-sufficient, a splendid future awaits the worst ignorance.

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