Is Our Time the Golden Age of Ignorance?
Ignorance I propose is a human conundrum.
All of us are ignorant of something in some way. None of us can know everything even the so-called "Polymaths" of our world have blind spots of knowledge.
The reality is God made us all limited and finite. Even with the gifts he gives each of us, we fall short.
Some people arrogantly assume their God-given intelligence from a lofty peak to look down upon the rest of us. Yet they also will succumb to the vagaries of age and the loss of cognition that goes with it and then the great equalizer of death takes even the smartest among us.
But in the meantime is our ignorance a virtue?
We all go through life not knowing, we are ignorant. We learn as we go. We in fact are never truly completely "done" in life. We are an ongoing project until we die and meet Jesus. Our current earthly journey is indeed a story that someday we will tell, looking back.
But right now you are alive, and within God's graces and under his mercy even if you don't know it.
Yes, our ignorance extends even into our understanding of our faith, our God and our Lord.
In living life, we learn to navigate our ignorance. Sometimes that benefits us and sometimes it does not.
In America today our popular ignorance benefits autocrats like Trump who seek to control us. People who are ignorant of the evils of the so-called Left are no different. Our founding fathers understood this. James Madison stated: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance."
Today we seem to have acquired a "full spectrum" ignorance of everything. We know a lot today and have access to the most knowledge yet we seem hellbent on willfully being ignorant. The chronological snobbery we so often promote has become a shortsighted denial that those that came before us often knew more than we do now.
We as a culture are impressively ignorant of geography, history, and the religion we claim as well as the religions of the world around us.
Cultural Christianity has made ignorance of Christ and the church a new normal.
We must also be aware that there are exceptions everywhere but they are the exceptions and not the rule. This is a decline.
So what should you do?
Be curious, become a lifelong learner, start a new career, buy books, read as much as you can, and pray for wisdom and discernment.
Proverbs 1:7
7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays
by Emily Ogden
This is a wonderful book of essays on the virtue of not knowing! I highly recommend it! Here is an excellent review.
"Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can’t set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love.
Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that.." from the article: On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays
The book below by Peter Burke gives us a broad overview, another good read!
Ignorance: A Global History
A Studied Ignorance
Three years ago Peter Burke published The Polymath (Yale University Press), an illustrated history of what are usually called Renaissance men or women. Burke, an emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, defines polymaths as having “interests that were ‘encyclopedic’ in the original sense of running around the whole intellectual ‘course’ or ‘curriculum.’” The label certainly applies to Leonardo da Vinci—although he also shows the contrast between interdisciplinary scholarship and Renaissance virtuosity. The latter also requires some combination of artistic creativity, practical skill, and inventiveness, as observable in Leonardo’s command of anatomy, painting, drawing, mathematics, architecture, engineering, music, and military science (to keep the list short).
Burke lists 500 polymaths from the past six centuries (with a scattering of true Renaissance-model geniuses, such as Benjamin Franklin and Emanuel Swedenborg) and devotes his book to finding patterns among them. He makes the interesting suggestion that polymaths do not reject the necessary role of specialists in producing knowledge but complement it by making connections across disciplinary boundaries. That seems likely. But the fascination of reading about polymaths also derives, in large part, from the sheer mental exuberance they display.
The polymath embodies a greater intensity of attention than the non-polymathic norm. “An overdose of curiosity, long known as the libido sciendi and described by the polymath Francis Bacon as ‘inquisitive appetite,’ is surely the most general as well as the most obvious characteristic of the species,” writes Burke..' in the article: A Studied Ignorance
Comments