Ignorance: 6. Wisdom

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Ignorance is the central overwhelming fact of life. The philosopher Brian McGee averted what it is like to move about in a world that we can never fully classify or know. Even something as simple and everyday as the sight of a towel dropped on a bathroom floor is inaccessible to language. And inaccessible to it from many points of view at the same time.

No words to describe the shape it has fallen into. No words to describe the degrees to shading in its colours. No words to describe the differentials of shadows in its fold. No words to describe its spatial relationship to all the other objects in the bathroom. And even our focus on that towel is only shining a weak and narrow beam of light into a universe of which we can see and describe even less. As William James observes Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.

Ignorance has immense power. But in this, our final episode, I want to reintroduce the power of knowledge and show how the synthesis of knowledge and ignorance creates something other and new. The long From Confucius. Thank you. The final episode Wisdom We know so little, and we will die knowing so little, and this can be deeply troubling. I had a massive crisis when I was forty two. Ironic numbers.

And I woke up. I couldn't see the point of anything. I'd won a a ridiculous number of prizes. I worked very hard. I missed everybody's weddings. By the time John Lloyd had reached this point in his life, he was a celebrated producer. Of some of the most loved television comedy shows. Yes, Percy, I don't want to be pedantic or anything, but the colour of gold is gold. That's why it's called gold. What you have discovered.

I remember going into my little office at home and every wall was covered with certificates for this or that achievement. I thought is this Well I am to, you know, forty pieces of cardboard covered in glass, that's me. I couldn't understand why I was so angry and unhappy. And one of the things that happened to me in that crisis was that I suddenly realised I didn't really know very much and that came swinging in at me like an enormous wrecking ball.

After a couple of years he started reading as many books as he could and traveling the world. But none of the places I went to were anything like the cliche I'd believe in. And so this sense of efflorescing and opening up to Whoa, I thought I was ignorant but now I am so ignorant, it's astonishing. I mean Today, I was just thinking this morning, the horizon of knowledge is rapidly it's going even faster away from me than it has been.

In two thousand three, John channeled his experience into the TV show QI. Each week, the panel of comedians are introduced to things about the world that we assume we know. What happens to a hedgehog if you remove its flea? David. Oh Damity, wavedy, dabity woo. No. The byproduct of a search for meaning is QI, which is, you know, the world is inherently interesting, but it for some reason is concealed from

that the world presents as boring, annoying, confusing, you know, pointless. That's the way most people would view it if they especially if they're getting a bit fed up. But actually it's not, it's actually in every possible particular extraordinary. Every leaf, every pebble, every every molecule of anything is extraordinary. Every potato, every zebra.

For the sculptor Anthony Gormley, the answer to our anxiety about knowledge is not to pile on more knowledge, but instead, through meditation, to step away from the anxieties that knowledge brings us. As individuals. And as a society. this revelation of you you could say the ultimate universe That we are a part of a system of perpetual change and the acceptance of that deep in one's being. Yeah, that was a kind of blessing, a kind of release.

from all of that Protestant kind of work ethic that is connected to this notion of self worth coming from Well, having received a certain education, having learnt certain things by heart, knowing how to communicate and present your proposition in a defensible and articulated manner. What you found through meditation is that you you break through whatever status is bound up with your knowledge and achievement.

And through sensation you discover something more universal, which makes you more equal with other humans. What meditation is all about is about the imminent. We want evidence, we want proof of in a way state. And meditation shows us something completely other than when we finish our meditation, we make that mental empathic connection with all other living beings. We say, May all beings be happy. May all beings reach fulfilment.

We live in a time of massive like return to the most crude ways of settling differences. unless we can feel balance within ourselves. There's no point in having these politicians deciding on the on the future. We are each of us making the future. At the moment it doesn't look good out there, but I think if everybody could recognise their potential I think we'd have a better chance. And this in part requires valuing people for things other than their intellects and knowledge.

Iceland has more or less eliminated the occurrence of Down syndrome. Rowan Williams. partly by selective abortion. And I really do scratch my head about that and think, well, that is saying very clearly, we would rather have a society which had no people in it with Down syndrome, so people currently existing in the in our society living with Down syndrome. Are people we could in an ideal world do without you know their lives make no contribution worth measuring?

And that's where again my red flags begin to to wave furiously. My younger sister has dance syndrome. So um and so she's my only full sibling and s and Fiona's now in her mid forties and still living with my mother. And I think that's a really interesting way in because we put this huge emphasis, don't we, on knowledge and intellect. And and you know Fiona is, as you as you can imagine, very engaging, very loving, but in some ways I have a seven year old boy.

And there are some things that my seven year old boy can do that she can't do. Um so then there's an interesting question about um the meaning of her life, the purpose of Yes. a degree keep me awake at night as I think about about our society. It's probably the case. that someone living with Down syndrome is not very likely to become a billionaire or win a Nobel Prize. So, if their lives are worth living, then you have to say there's more than one way of

human excellence. And I guess you would agree that there there is in so many people with living with Down syndrome that excellence Candor, warmth, simplicity, fidelity, which And has nothing much to do with how you perform in the various kinds of circus that the rest of us invent and and sustain. And recognizing that there really are different ways of being in fact to come a successful human being. That surely is the beginning of wisdom here.

Again, it's tempting to think that the only important thing about ignorance is that it encourages us to ask more questions. Wait, I've got a question for you. Why are the colours of the rainbow in this order? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue? ぷぷぷぷぷぷぷ I'd like to use this story, a great physicist named I. I. Robbie, who uh won a Nobel Prize in nineteen forty one. The biologist Stuart Feistein.

Apparently you used to tell this story about growing up as a young immigrant child on the lower east side of New York. And when he would come home from school with his friends, their mothers would all ask, So what did you learn today? But Mrs. Robbie would say, So Isidore, did you ask any good questions? And I think that makes all the difference in the world. I think Mrs. Robbie had it exactly right. Right. Izzy used to say, that's why I won the Nobel Prize, you know. I asked questions.

That that's that's absolutely wonderful. I'm gonna steal that and I'm gonna ask my children that when they get home. By all leads. But there are better and worse ways of asking questions and accumulating knowledge. Rowan Williams. In the Middle Ages people in the tradition of Saint Augustine or would have said The problem is what he calls curiositas, which doesn't just mean curiosity in the modern sense, it means the anxiety to accumulate knowledge as an end in itself.

But at the same time, in medieval communities and medieval religious communities, there was no problem about exploring, about acquiring knowledge. The question was, was it an occasion for delight and increased wonder and increased love? And I think if if our quest for knowing is a quest for those things, Then there's no contradiction. But there are many ways of asking questions too, aren't there? Anthony Gormley The attentive gaze that is occasionally.

Oh, what did you mean? That's a pretty powerful way of uh asking a question. And indeed the whole wonderful thing that we're doing now, which is sort of accepting a gift which is the proposition or or kind of realisation that, you know, you've just given me with this idea of the questioning And then m me trying to give it adequate space. I have a friend, Stephen Levinson, and he says that on the whole we spend a great deal of our attention preparing an answer.

to somebody whose proposition has only kind of achieved thirty percent of its transfer. So I think there's a lot to learn in terms of listening and allowing the gift of that, whatever it is, whether it's a realisation or a question to arrive. and find its place in your thought world. If our education is more about learning how to learn,

And it I think it inc inculcates in us a sense both of humility and of expectation. And that seems a rather more realistic as well as rather more ethically sound way of approaching the world that we're in. I think it's very different from I hope what we're trying to do now. which is actually just walking around a landscape of possibility. scoring points or trying to impress somebody, but actually recognising that we are all finding out the whole time.

in encounters with places and people, territories that you know are necessarily unknown.

Whatever value we place on intelligence, knowledge, and questioning, we cannot escape our intimate, perpetual immersion in the ocean of ignorance. And it's here that we begin to move towards our final destination, wisdom. With wisdom, our task is no longer simply to challenge ignorance or to use it for other ends. Our task is to allow it to exist in and of itself.

Here, ignorance is not simply a frontier or a tool. It becomes central to the meaning of life, central to what the ancient Chinese text, the Tao De Qing, calls the path of To know not knowing. The Taoist approach is directly against this notion that everything can be quantified. And that in quantifying you know what it is. So the opening line of the very first chapter of the Tao De Qing is the Tao that can be named. is not the

And with this paradox we are entering much deeper waters because we are approaching God. All religion deals with the unknown. In Saint Augustine's words, the If you understand, it is not God you understand. This is in part because all these writers conceive of a God prior to and beyond the categories and limits of human language, thought, and experience. So much so, in the view of some theologians,

That it hardly makes sense to talk of God existing or not existing. Henry Vaughn, the seventeenth century poet, writes that there is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness. And yet this is not, to repeat again, an argument against knowledge. Instead, religious traditions are focused on trying to establish the truth. They invest heavily in scholarship. Now go back to Aquinas and Yeah.

Because Aquinas writes ten volumes of the Summa Theologica, the the greatest text of philosophical Christianity in relationship to Aristotelian thought, to Arab thought, to the classics, etcetera. And then he has a three second experience of the love of God. That just swamps him. And he never speaks or writes another word, except to his amenuensis he says there is no use of language anymore.

It hadn't been a waste of time his writing those things that he wrote, and they have helped a lot of people. The psychiatrist Ian McGillchrist. But once again he had reached that point of wisdom in which one sees that what one has been pursuing had its use and is now being cast off, rather as a butterfly casts off the chrysalis. And yet Aquinas is precisely someone who neglected neither his quest for knowledge nor his awareness of ignorance.

But instead achieved his enlightenment through fourteen-hour days over decades, deepening his sense of both. His knowledge revealed his ignorance, his ignorance his knowledge, and it was his profound awareness. Of those contours and gaps that focused his face. Polemicists against religion sometimes imply that believers are simply gullible, idle dupes who've given up on the quest for knowledge.

But it's precisely because people like Aquinas analyse in painful detail all the problems and inconsistencies, all that is unbelievable and unknowable about their religions and experience doubt. That they require faith. Faith, hope, and love, St. Paul says.

And here too is something central to the engagement with ignorance. Which is to resist the lure of pessimism. Never to allow ignorance to so overwhelm our knowledge of ourselves and the world. that it paralyzes us or drains us of hope. It's also true of our encounter with knowledge and ignorance in relation to death. Well I'm not suggesting that we have school trips to crematoria, necessarily.

Ron Williams But I I think we do have to ask ourselves what happens when we allow death to become either ignored or regarded with such terror as something alien that we we have no way of living with it, I I I think that is that is part of the the wisdom we are very likely to lose if we don't have to be able to do that.

face that fact of mortality and that fact of our living as bodies which are wearing out, which have limits built into them. And that's fine. We can live with that, we can make something meaningful, something shapely out of the time that we have. we have no clear knowledge of any scientific kind of what death might be from the other side. Faith has its own story, which is the story I I hold to, that it's not Simply a line drawn, but a door opened.

We can't simply know that. We trust that. We trust it because those of us who have faith, we trust it because of our experience of of the divine and and we don't have to know. And ultimately this is where I go back and um put Bach's cantata Gottes Zeit, God's time is the best time. on the machine and listen to it because that's a sort of twenty minute meditation on mortality, fear, resignation, and final welcome and homecoming.

We are approaching the end of this series, and we are always ignorant of endings. A life with total knowledge of how it unfolded and ended would be both godlike and unbearable. It is our ignorance of the future which shields us from horrors to come, Which allows for future revelations and delights. You may deliberately sequester yourself from some kinds of information, such as the spoiler alert. Stephen Pinker.

If there's a uh mystery, you really don't want to know who done it, uh, so that you can enjoy the pleasure of suspense and resolution. You may want to kind of sequester yourself until you get a chance to go home and watch the match. If you know how it turns out, that takes away the pleasure. There can be no punchlines without ignorance. But ignorance and life is something beyond ignorance and art.

Even Hamlet, with all its power, ambiguity, and possibility, is still only an object in space written 400 years ago. But our lives are not a text accessible in a library. Our happiness, as Aristotle observes, is not a state, but an activity through time. We seek a meaning of which we are still ignorant. Our futures we sense are uncertain and undetermined. They can be shaped and they might still be redeemed. This is the bedrock of our very idea of free will.

Someone who knew everything that was about to happen, who was not ignorant of the future, would have nothing to discover, no agency, no choice, no life worth living at all.

a powerful and original mathematician with a thirst for learning, and an encyclopedic memory, he observes. Rydw i mewn gwirionedd i mewn gwirionedd i mewn gwirionedd i mewn gwirionedd i mewn gwirionedd i mewn gwirionedd me beyond all grasp of reason, and there to seek the truth where impossibility meeteth me.

The coincidence of opposites runs through our discovery that ignorance is often knowledge, and to be knowledgeable is often to be ignorant. All of this can seem incomprehensible, frustrating, even enraging. But that's because we're struggling to see knowledge and ignorance as anything other than contradictions. Nicholas of Cousa's phrase, the coincidence of opposites, suggests a different kind of relationship.

Ignorance doesn't cancel out knowledge in the way that one plus minus one equals zero. As the poet William Blake wrote, There is a negation and there is a contrary. Ignorance, in Blake's words, is a contrary to knowledge, but it's not a negation. Instead, the relationship between the two ideas creates something new. Neither are good or bad, only too much of one is not good.

To fly, we require the wing of knowledge to be as strong as the wing of ignorance. Without ignorance, there's no privacy, creativity, or fairness. But focusing only on your ignorance can engender a paralysing pessimism. Without knowledge, there's no information, self-knowledge, or truth. But focusing only on how much you know and knowing more can make you arrogant, overconfident, dogmatic, technocratic, and intrusive, or it can bias you, or it can make you paranoid or even overwhelm you.

So you must work continually to deepen both your ignorance and your knowledge and learn how to use their relationship to transcend both. It's as though combining one with minus one created not zero, but a new miracle. This dialectic is at the core of our ability to think, create, develop, love, govern, and be wise. And this is why this series is ultimately not an argument for ignorance only. but for strengthening ignorance and knowledge simultaneously.

In the way in which we talk now, there are things that are good, and they are goals to be pursued, and it doesn't matter how far you pursue them, they are still good. Ian McGochris. But unfortunately they bring with them their shadow side. And it's this shadow side that we're completely ignorant of because of our belief that things are cut and dried and simple and they belong to two camps, the good and the bad. But the things that we consider good

if pursued too far, will bring with them evil, and not only uh just some evil, but the very evil that was being fled from. Say for example, the classic example is freedom is a good, but freedom stretched

so far that it produces anarchy, leads to tyranny, the absence of freedom. And I think that if only we could see that we are always balancing things a thing and its opposite at the same time, holding them together, not just finding a midpoint, but actually honourably holding both of them to be important, we would be in a much better place today than we are. not a weaker, diluted form of knowledge and ignorance. but a stronger sense of both.

I sometimes say if you want a really good apple pie, you don't take bland apples, you take tart apples and put honey with it. The boundary between knowledge and ignorance is never static. We are always dealing with the limits of knowledge. But we must explore and respond to those limits in every conceivable way. In episode one, we saw that knowledge can become a fence that traps us. In episode two, we saw ignorance as a frontier which the scientist seeks to expand.

In episode 3, it's a prison wall, which the artist leaps for inspiration. In episode four, the politician or civil servant carefully maps the boundary between knowledge and ignorance, using its contours to design new democratic institutions. In episode five, the conspiracy theorist fantasizes that there are no limits to what he can know, but others build screens of ignorance.

Finally, in this episode, the limit of knowledge and ignorance is no longer a barrier to be feared or defined, erected or dismantled, manned or pushed over. but a veil between the material and the spiritual, the symbol of the ineffable and the transcendent. In each case, as Nicholas of Cusa says, the coincidence of opposites generates something new, and not through watering down.

The aim is not to find the midpoint of a stick between the two poles of ignorance and knowledge, but instead to connect them with a string, turning them into a bow and using the energy of their opposing forces to shoot the arrow. So the balance between knowledge and ignorance in private life is It's not a tepid and polite engagement with the other. Instead, it rests on a double strengthening, an ever deeper knowledge of your partner, and an ever deeper sense of their mystery and unknowability.

In the relationship we should push both for ever greater intimacy and for greater autonomy for the other. Two wings of the bird, neither indifference nor jealousy, but trust. In science, we might call the miracle of this dynamic between knowledge and ignorance discovery. In art, creativity. In personal development, equanimity. In public life, we call it prudence and justice. But in every case we are harnessing, balancing and deepening knowledge and ignorance.

Everything begins with the wonder of knowledge. But it's through the dance with ignorance that knowledge becomes wisdom. The Long History of Ignorance is written and presented by me, Rory Stewart, and produced by Dan Tierney. It is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Behind the trap door. We're looking for someone. come find them. Bye-bye. So cold. So cold I wanna die. Finding him won't be easy, and it will be dangerous. So we're getting the cab.

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