QUOTATION MARKS 53 - The Way of Ignorance

This is an extract from Wendell Berry's excellent essay The Way of Ignorance. Its heavily edited, but it does give you a sense for how his mind first examines by noting all its constituent ideas, assumptions and what is missing or left out, before restoring them to a whole.

' Except to the arrogantly ignorant, ignorance is not a simple subject. It is perhaps as difficult for ignorance to be aware of itself as it is for awareness to be aware of itself....

There is, to begin with ,the kind of ignorance we may consider to be inherent...A part of our inherent ignorance, and surely a most formidable incumbrance to those who presume to know the future, is our ignorance of the past....

There are several other kinds of ignorance that are not inherent in our nature but come instead from weakness of character. Paramount among these is the wilful ignorance that refuses to honour as knowledge anything not subject to empirical proof. We could just as well call it materialist ignorance....this rejects useful knowledge such as traditions of imagination and religion, and so comes across as narrow mindedness.....To this kind of mind, there is no longer a legitimate wonder. Wonder has been replaced by a research agenda, which is still a world away from demonstrating the impropriety of wonder.

A related kind of ignorance, also self-induced, is moral ignorance, the invariable excuse of which is objectivity. One of the purposes of objectivity, in practice, is to avoid coming to a moral conclusion.

There is also ignorance as false confidence, or polymathic ignorance. This is the ignorance of people who know 'all about' history or its 'long term consequences' in the future...this is closely akin to self-righteous ignorance, which is the failure to know oneself. Ignorance of one's self and confident knowledge of the past and future often are the same thing.

Fearful ignorance is the opposite of confident ignorance. People keep themselves ignorant for fear of the strange or the different or the unknown, for fear of disproof or of unpleasant or tragic knowledge, for fear of stirring up suspicion and opposition, or for fear of fear itself....there is the related ignorance that comes from laziness, which is the fear of effort and difficulty. Learning often is not fun....

And finally there are for-profit ignorance, which is maintained by withholding knowledge, as in advertising, and for-power ignorance, which is maintained by government secrecy and public lies.

Kinds of ignorance....having sorted them out, one must scramble them back together again by acknowledging that all of them can be at work in the same mind at the same time, and in my opinion they frequently are.'

The complete The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry can be found in The World-Ending Fire, Published by Penguin.