Wilful ignorance is not innocence

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. — T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

One can’t reread the novels, essays and speeches of Kurt Vonnegut, as I have been doing lately because I dug them all the first time around, without being struck by something that always made him sad: the absence of curiosity by and blinkered imaginations of so many people.

Especially young people, who have no excuse. At least no valid one.

“What makes the students of today so unresponsive?” the author asked in an essay in his 1991 “autobiographical collage,” Fates Worse Than Death. He posed the question in dismay after no one took him up on a challenge he delivered during a 1985 address at MIT, urging idealistic go-getters in the audience to draft a code of ethics for scientists willing to forswear work on dangerous military projects.

“I’ll tell you what makes the students so unresponsive,” Vonnegut wrote, answering his own query after it turned out there were no idealistic go-getters in the lecture hall. “They know what I will never get through my head: that life is unserious. (Why not make Caligula’s horse a Consul?)”

In Vonnegut’s 1987 novel, Bluebeard, narrator Rabo Karabekian, an abstract painter who made a short appearance in 1973’s Breakfast of Champions, grouses that “the young people of today seem to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible.”

This is something old poops have always complained about, I suppose, but it’s particularly acute in an Internet age when vast stores of knowledge are a few keyboard clicks away.

In a 1989 interview compendium titled Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen, the novelist lamented the historical illiteracy and lack of common reference points he had observed among younger generations: “It’s very helpful if you’re painting or telling a story to assume your readers know something. If you can’t count on the churchgoers knowing that, then how do you begin the sermon?”

But that’s just a technical challenge for writers. The far graver problem for society is that after twigging to the fact that they were being brazenly lied to by their governments during the Vietnam War, a huge swath of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” generation — and every generation since — has decided to turn off rationality and tune out humankind’s most reliable paths to knowledge.

Whether or not one takes life seriously, it’s less stressful, as Voltaire counselled at the end of Candide, simply to keep one’s head down and cultivate one’s garden. To remain in the dark. To turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. To stay under a rock and out of the loop until the ICE agents of the future show up at your door to haul your family away.

In the meantime, I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours and we’re all good. As Thomas Gray so memorably observed in his closing line to his 1742 poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, “where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

The basic idea adhered to by millions, even if never explicitly enunciated, is that if not knowing the truth brings a measure of contentment, then seeking knowledge is foolish because it could cause unnecessary sorrow, anxiety or pain. Who needs the aggro? Why watch the news?

Concurring with the unlikely pairing of T.S. Eliot and Col. Nathan R. Jessup, Jack Nicholson’s character in the 1992 film A Few Good Men, that you can’t handle the truth, this was Friedrich Nietzsche’s trenchant judgment 140 years ago in Beyond Good and Evil:

From the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom. … And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far — the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue.

Which brings us to historian Mark Lilla’s diagnosis of the human will to find comfort in vapid nostrums and mindless pieties in his recent book Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, a longing for obliviousness that he suggests has become as virulent as anti-vaccine idiocy:

The denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological bacillus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.

Which is how we wound up with Trump and his skein of unfit and amoral sycophants running the Western world. Ignorance is no excuse, but it’s an essential precondition for the rise to power of all il duce-style con artists.

And which is why, as Italian literature prof Robert Pogue Harrison wrote in a review of Lilla’s book last month in The New York Review of Books:

Just as our sensory organs filter out all but a fraction of what surrounds us, our minds deflect from consciousness a great deal of what we can bear only in small measures. Our ability to ignore, repress and deny is matched only by our ability to believe the unbelievable and to give chimeric notions the power to found religions, nations, and institutions.

An insight into why this is such an integral part of what makes us human was offered long before Freud by 17th-century philosopher Blaise (le moi est haïssable — the self is hateful) Pascal:

The self wants to be great, and sees itself small; it wants to be happy, and sees itself wretched; it wants to be perfect, and sees itself full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem, and it sees that its defects deserve only their dislike and contempt. This embarrassment in which it finds itself produces in it the most unrighteous and criminal passion imaginable, for it conceives a mortal hatred against this truth, admonishing and convincing it of its faults. It wants to annihilate this truth, but, unable to destroy it in essence, it destroys it as far as possible in its knowledge and that of others.

To Pascal, avoiding harsh realities about ourselves means ignoring recalcitrant realities about everyone and everything else. And so we adopt a deliberate will to ignorance, believing — as 19th-century Romantic poet/philosopher Giacomo Leopardi wrote in the last of his Moral Essays — “not the truth, but what is, or seems to be, suited to its purpose.”

Harrison continues:

Lilla devotes several pages of his book to the question of children and the way our culture swings between the extremes of considering them innocent on one hand and evil by original sin on the other. He subscribes to neither view and is more interested in the way adults today conspire to remain childlike in their behaviour and mentality. As he puts it, “keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like.”

Hence all the 45-year-old single men in mind-numbing, soul-sucking jobs who smoke dope 24/7, construct AI girlfriends, amuse themselves to cyber-death in bloodthirsty video games and are easily deluded by racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, faux Christian influencers.

Harrison:

We need a new term for this arrestation or retardation of development. Genuine adolescence is a stage of life that intensifies growth, transformation, introspection, and thoughtfulness. The greatest threat posed by the blockage of that maturation process is an unwillingness to think for oneself, or even to think at all. There is more to this unwillingness than wilful ignorance. I would call it the will to defer or abstain — to defer to the thinking of others or abstain from thinking altogether. In short, a will to immaturity.

And this is the point where things get a little uncomfortable, because the will to immaturity is not just some sociological curiosity afflicting other, more benighted people — the podcast-addled, the algorithmically sedated, the proudly unread. It’s ambient. It’s in the air, like whatever it is that makes airplane coffee taste faintly of despondency and heated plastic.

You can feel it in yourself if you’re even minimally honest, which already puts you in a statistically insignificant minority.

The temptation is not merely to avoid thinking, but to subcontract it — to offload the unpleasant, calorie-burning labour of judgment onto something or someone that promises both certainty and relief.

This is where the contemporary landscape gets interesting in a bleakly comic way, because the available subcontractors now form a kind of buffet: you’ve got your influencers with their ring lights and monetized outrage; your algorithmic feeds that learn, with unnerving speed, exactly which flavour of nonsense you’re most likely to swallow; your resurrected species of prophet, now rebranded as “thought leaders,” who offer totalizing explanations in conveniently shareable formats.

And now, of course, you also have machines that will generate, on demand, something that looks very much like thinking — syntactically correct, tonally reassuring, frictionless.

Which is to say: the will to ignorance has found its perfect accomplice in tools that make ignorance feel like knowledge.

There is comfort in being told what to think in a voice that sounds calm, confident and vaguely omniscient. It mimics the authority once reserved for priests, professors, or at least that one friend who had actually read a book.

The difference is that the old authorities (ideally, anyway) made you feel the weight of what you didn’t know; the new ones are engineered to make you forget that there was ever any weight at all. You ask a question, you receive an answer, and the little loop of curiosity closes so quickly that no real inquiry — the messy, recursive, often humiliating process of discovering how little you understand — has time to occur.

And so the will to immaturity expresses itself not just as laziness or arrested development, but as a kind of preference for pre-digested cognition. Why wrestle with ambiguity when you can scroll past it? Why endure the anxiety of forming an opinion when there are thousands available, pre-formed, each with its own ready-made community and set of enemies?

The psychic economy here is brutally efficient: minimize discomfort, maximize belonging, and above all avoid the intolerable condition of not knowing.

What makes this especially insidious is that it often masquerades as its opposite. The same person who insists on “doing their own research” may in fact be engaging in a highly curated consumption of material that confirms what they already want to believe, which is less research than a kind of epistemological comfort eating. The rhetoric of independence cloaks a profound dependence — not just on particular sources, but on the very idea that thinking should feel good, or at least not bad.

But real thinking, the kind that might actually move you an inch closer to truth, is frequently unpleasant. It involves recognizing contradictions in your own beliefs, noticing how much of your identity is scaffolded by assumptions you’ve never examined, and sitting — sometimes for quite a while — with questions that don’t resolve into neat answers. It is, in other words, a form of maturation, which is precisely what the will to immaturity resists.

And here’s where Pascal’s grim little diagnosis loops back in a way that feels almost unfair: If the self is indeed structured to hate the truths that diminish it, then the proliferation of systems that allow us to avoid those truths is not some accidental byproduct of modernity but the fulfilment of a very old desire. We have built, with extraordinary ingenuity, a world that caters to our least admirable inclinations — a world in which it is easier than ever to remain a child while performing the gestures of adulthood.

The tragedy, if that’s not too grand a word, is that the costs of this arrangement are both diffuse and delayed. A single act of intellectual abdication feels harmless; a lifetime of them produces a person who is, in a deep sense, unformed. Scale that up and you get a polity that is exquisitely vulnerable to exactly the “preposterous prophets” Lilla worries about — not because people are stupid, but because they have practised, over years, the art of not wanting to know.

This suggests that the real counterforce to the will to ignorance is not simply more information — we are already drowning in that — but a different kind of discipline: a willingness to endure the discomfort of thinking, to resist the lure of easy answers, to remain, at least occasionally, in that awkward, unresolved space where curiosity has not yet been anesthetized by certainty. None of which is especially glamorous, and all of which runs directly against the grain of a culture that treats ease as the highest good.

But then again, as Vonnegut might say (and did, in various ways), the alternative is to drift through a life so aggressively simplified that it barely qualifies as living — a kind of extended, low-resolution simulation in which nothing is quite real enough to demand anything of you, and you, in turn, demand nothing of yourself.

Better, I think, to “think without a banister,” as the great 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt exhorted all of us.

Or as the Apostle Paul told a congregation in Corinth a very long time ago:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.