MARK LILLA Ignorance and Bliss: On wanting not to know. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

In Ignorance and Bliss, political scientist Mark Lilla gives a timely examination of why we can be so keen to avoid the truth.

The Enlightenment, aka the Age of Reason, is based on the assumption that we want to acquire knowledge about ourselves and how the world operates; that we want to know what is true. Aristotle claimed that ‘all human beings want to know’. Mark Lilla maintains, however, that counterbalancing the desire of wanting to know is the desire of wanting not to know.

… there are certain historical periods – we are living in one – when the denial of evident truth seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological bacillus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless.

Lilla says that we can always identify a recent event to explain a sudden surge in resistance to truth. He rejects, however, the usefulness of such ‘temporal’ explanations.

The source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself, which takes no heed of our wishes.

In this book, Lilla has set himself the task of exploring the desire not to know, ‘this will to ignorance’, and finds that the Western philosophical tradition has ‘astonishingly little to say about acquiring knowledge of this desire’.

In my experience, the deepest treatments of the will to ignorance are to be found in works of the imagination – ancient myths, religious scriptures, epic poetry, plays, and modern novels.

Lilla begins his analysis with the individual, an investigation into our inner selves. We would like to think we are good, and do good. However, while we have this desire, we are imperfect and fail to be what we would like to be: I would like to be kind and generous to others, but in reality, I am selfish and greedy. But I don’t want to confront my selfishness and greed. Lilla sees us playing a continual game of hide-and-seek, or peekaboo with ourselves, that ‘We all suffer from delusions, and we all … use tricks of self-deception to keep ourselves from acknowledging truths about ourselves.’ This game may lead to psychological distress and despair.

Society, on our behalf, will invent taboos and ‘veils’ in an attempt to protect us from the parts of ourselves we don’t want to know about, particularly when it comes to sexual desires. Censorship and restrictions on behaviour can be imposed, and the game of hide-and-seek will find other ways to play out as we seek to escape such strictures.

Lilla sees religion playing an important role as a balm to all this, as if we can kick the responsibility upstairs. But it is not as if this will work: ‘as happens so often in bureaucracies,’ Lila notes, ‘the memo was returned with instructions to work things out ourselves’.

There is another problem with seeking an ‘upstairs solution’. Who is to be the conduit for these instructions from above? Experts will develop, such as prophets and mystics, to tell us that they are somehow blessed with the ability to let us know what to do, to curtail our inclination to know – or to not know. But such persons may be charlatans, wolves, devils or even Satan himself waiting for a chance to take advantage of us.

So-called wise men cannot be trusted. This was the position of Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians. The way to overcome the game of hide-and-seek was to empty the mind to enable the Holy Spirit to fill the void and thus be transformed, as Lilla puts it, into

God’s esoterically enlightened deputies, with a license to descend on the world like a posse of whirlwinds, bringing God’s truth and judgment down on benighted sinners everywhere.

This is the sort of thinking that lies behind Pentecostal movements. Lilla sees this Pauline attack on ‘wisdom’ and ‘expertise’ as having a broader secular resonance.

One sees it at work in the fallacy, precious to anti-science fanatics, that the more  ignorant a believer’s opinions and ideas might appear in the eyes of the educated world, the more likely they are to be correct and divine in origin … Paul’s theological principles … [have] affinity with the degraded politics of our times: the equality of all believers, justification by faith, blessed ignorance, the pointlessness of learning, the sanctity of inspiration, secret wisdom, the unassailability of inner conviction.

We are all hardwired to protect our young. At one level we see them as innocents who are yet to play the game of hide-and-seek. We want to maintain their innocence, protect them from themselves and the wicked world; seeing in them hope for a better future. Against this is the fear of their inevitable loss of innocence, the knowledge that children cannot overcome our weaknesses and errors of the past. As we watch them, it dawns on us that they are just younger, more naïve versions of ourselves.

The evil child, the one who murders his parents, who burns down the house or tortures the cat, haunts the imagination. He confronts us with everything we prefer not to think about ourselves and our supposed original innocence.

Societies introduce rules to ensure the young are kept in ignorance of things that they should know about. An obvious example is sex. Restrictions may be placed on the young because of imagined problems associated with masturbation. It is difficult to ignore here the seemingly universal problem of pedophilia associated with so many religious organisations. Lilla points out that ‘hiding away’ has had damaging effects on women in particular, confining them in sects where predators can take advantage of them. More generally, seeking to shield youth from the things they need to know about the world can have devastating impacts when they are invariably forced to deal with them.

Nostalgia is another way in which we can indulge the desire of not knowing. Lilla uses the example of viewing vacation pictures to ‘remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now’:

What we ache to recover is a world, a previous state of affairs and the states of consciousness that accompanied them … In truth, the nostalgic do not so much want to recover something as to lose something. They want to flee what to them tastes like toxic knowledge about the world and themselves. For this distaste there is no cure. Time is linear and irreversible, its arrow points relentlessly forward. We have no choice but to accept this. Yet we can’t, not fully.

This notion of nostalgia can be applied to society as a whole, and how prophets will preach about returning to a glorious past:

Political nostalgics are sick with history itself. They see themselves as victims of a cataclysm that has stranded them in the present, a foreign country. Some become paralyzed, incapable of taking nourishment from what life still offers, and begin to waste away. Or they feel the coffin closing and panic; adrenaline races to their hearts, and they become capable of anything.

Lilla goes on to show how such nostalgia can turn into fascism, and the associated need to eradicate, expunge and exterminate those they perceive to be stopping them returning to the Garden of Eden.

The great strength of Ignorance and Bliss: On wanting not to know is how Mark Lilla clearly unpacks difficult conceptual, religious and philosophical issues for a general audience. He provides readily accessible accounts of the parables and stories of the ancients, religious and contemporary thinkers. His engagement with these texts makes for engaging reading. His most important contribution, however, is his valuable insight into the current ascendancy of ‘the denial of evident truth’, which is suddenly now upon us. 

Mark Lilla Ignorance and Bliss: On wanting not to know Hurst & Company 2024 PB 256pp $32.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things. 

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Tags: human nature, ignorance, Mark | Lilla, nostalgia, philosophy, psychology, religion, self-deception, truth