I had occasion today to ponder one of the universal conditions of human existence: ignorance. No one human being can know everything. We are all ignorant on this or that topic, but because the topics on which we are ignorant vary, as individuals we can specialize in something while trusting/hoping that someone else will specialize in something that we need but don’t have time to learn about. Assuming our society is functioning properly, whether through some form of central planing (gasp!), an invisible hand (huzzah!), or some combination of the two, together we can solve many things that we wouldn’t be able to do separately. E pluribus unum, am I right?
The occasion for this rather banal insight (so banal it’s been on U.S. coinage since 1795, and on some state coins as early as 1786) concerned (what else?) my own ignorance. I am learning to play finger style guitar, a technique where the thumb plays a steady bass line and the fingers express the melody line. It’s a challenge, particularly for someone like me whose dexterity can most charitably be described as “maybe slightly improving?”
But just because I’m kind of a klutz, and I’m not able to master a difficult technique in a few short months doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of the beauties of music played using that technique. (BTW, in case you’re wondering, finger style isn’t a “style” per se, it’s a technique. People can, and have, played anything from heavy metal to rock ballads to blues to, of course, classical guitar with their fingers instead of a plectrum.)
In order to improve my odds of learning finger style guitar, I study. David Hamburger, a guitarist, writer, and guitar teacher whose style works quite well for me is starting a new online course, and he was soliciting feedback from his newsletter subscribers, of which I am one. And so I watched the introductory lesson and was moved to comment on it, something to the effect of “Thanks for the intro lesson; it looks great! I ‘know’ about a half dozen blues finger style songs, but that’s about as far as my journey has gotten.” You know, the typical academic use of scare quotes to problematize a concept in a somewhat offhand or lazy way.
He replied almost immediately, and it was his reply that started me thinking about claims of ignorance and knowledge. He said something like “I love your use of the quote marks — I too ‘know’ a lot of tunes.” Right away, that struck me as both unusual and insightful. Unusual, in that here he is, a teacher whose claim to my pocketbook depends on his knowledge, explicitly denying himself the authority of the know it all. (If you’re at all familiar with his lesson style, this will be unsurprising; he constantly lets us know that point a or claim y is as far as he’s gotten and he’s sure others have different or better knowledge.) Insightful, in that he is putting us both on the same level—that of the learner. No matter how much one knows (he “knows” a lot of tunes; I “know” a handful), given the nature of the human condition, it is impossible to know it all. But two together can know more than one alone. And if we go on the journey together, we both stand to learn something.
Now for some people, ignorance is just a pose or a stratagem. The classroom teacher might adopt Socratic ignorance in order to elucidate discussion among his students, even though he already “knows” the topic better than his students (at least, one hopes). The scientist might adopt a kind of blank-slate ignorance to ensure that no preconditions color her hypothesis, even though that approach can’t lay aside the immutable laws of the natural world that will govern the experiment—indeed, the experiment itself will be designed to learn more about those laws. Those claims of ignorance are productive—they generate knowledge.
There are other claims of ignorance that are less beneficial. Over the past several years, many politicians have claimed ignorance in order to be able to sidestep certain basic facts about the world (“I’m not a scientist…”). While this might be pleasing to some of their constituents, it seems like a shallow, even callow, disservice to the power of ignorance. And there are of course the scared eyewitnesses to (or hardened perpetrators of) violent crime: “I don’t know nuthin’. You got nuthin’ on me.”
What it all seems to boil down to is this: Ignorance can be empowering if approached from a position of openness to ideas or experiences. It can be a shield against authoritarian power or the inability of the state to protect its citizens from harm. It can also be threatening, if one’s position or prestige depend on a claim to expertise or mastery. It seems to me that the confident person is able to admit their ignorance, while the pretender is determined to insist that they know everything (“Nobody knows x y or z better than me!”).
Socrates, I imagine, didn’t just pretend to ignorance. He recognized in a profound way the absurdity of any other approach to knowledge than a humble admission that we don’t know. Particularly in this time of heightened political tensions, nothing is more frightening to me than the person who claims to know more than anyone else.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about today, when I uncovered yet another level of my own personal ignorance: one of my all-time favorite Talking Heads songs (“Take me to the river”) is actually an Al Green song. And I like his version at least as much as the later one!
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll think about the flip side of this coin: expertise.