There’s an old Latin tag of uncertain provenance: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur – “the world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived”. More succinctly, “ignorance is bliss”.
Mark Lilla, political scientist, historian, journalist and professor of humanities at Columbia University, purports to explore why in his latest book. The rather banal answer is that human beings prefer comfortable self-delusion over uncomfortable truths, but Lilla’s thesis rewards careful reading.
Through a collection of essays, Lilla goes on a open-ended tour, an “intellectual travelogue” of various facets of Nietzsche’s “will to ignorance” via literature, religion and psychology. It must be said that it reads like a book written in the expectation that the reader knows this stuff already. And it’s in the recherché, slightly supercilious tone of one who writes opinion pieces for The New York Times, which of course Lilla does; style is often prioritised over succinctness and clarity. Intellectual history, Lilla shows, is split between those who view Prometheus as a hero of Enlightenment, and those who see Prometheus as traitor to the gods who got what he deserved.
There are the usual suspects, like Socrates, whose professed ignorance was the foundation of his philosophy, and Plato. Indeed, the book begins with an inversion of Plato’s “cave” where the liberated inmates can’t cope with the outside world and want to go back. Freud’s “unruly desires that churn our souls” are pondered, which seems a waste of time given how discredited he is these days outside a sprinkling of Lacanians, though the headings do give the impression of someone who has spent too much time on the analyst’s couch: “evasions”, “taboos”, “emptiness”, “innocence” and “nostalgia”.
This, in turn, takes us to religious and cultural prohibitions against the pursuit of knowledge, with some thoroughly dubious takes on the Reformation and St Paul, and how they viewed the soul as an ideal empty vessel for divine inspiration. Paul is poorly miscast as the originator of populist anti-intellectualism, a “cultured despiser of culture”, while Christianity itself was an attractive alternative to Roman cruelty and elitism. “The teachings of Jesus,” says Lilla, “presupposed nothing about a person’s intelligence or level of culture.” This, of course, ignores the philosophical speculations of Paul’s mysticism, and Jesus as Messianic apocalyptic prophet risen from the ashes of Roman Palestine.
The Christian view of the innocence of children (apparently a kind of ignorance, which is debatable) is, Lilla tells us, treated as “symbols that orient us” in a fallen world, and when they fail to uphold this role, they instead become symbols of “the bad seed planted in our souls”. It’s an important reminder that children are sentient beings rather than ciphers, but would have early childhood development experts rolling their eyes. Also, I’m not convinced you can just blithely skim the surface of the Victorian obsession with childhood and sexuality without more context in the era of Pizzagate and QAnon.
Lilla treats nostalgia as a strategic form of ignorance of the present: “innocence is central to the American political mythos”, on to which he awkwardly tacks fascism. “When an entire nation or people or faith begins searching for lost time,” he writes, “darker emotions and fantasies emerge.” That’s the closest Lilla gets to examining the contemporary political landscape, which makes the argument feel overegged. Nowhere does he tackle political delusion and “fake news” in the Trumpian era, which is distracting this side of January 6, 2021.
Intriguingly, Lilla asserts that ignorance is not a human failing but rather essential to our self-awareness in a contradictory and often disturbing reality that could otherwise lead to mental paralysis or, one presumes, annihilation of the self. A missed opportunity to bring up the romantic sublime, or cosmic horror in fiction. To chase after unfiltered truth, Lilla suggests, is to betray our social and customary ethical obligations to ourselves and the rest of humanity (someone tell the Buddhists). “Ethical action requires a sense of self-mastery, a false belief that I am fully and solely the author of my actions.” Good stuff, feeling adjacent to Richard Rorty’s “ironic pragmatism” but, shockingly, no mention of America’s greatest 20th century philosopher.
Lilla is very knowledgeable, but in many areas it’s broad rather than deep. His quotations of everyone from Dostoevsky to Augustine are always on point, but frequently cherrypicked, idiosyncratically out of context. Choices are eccentric. Obscure Nobel laureate Elias Canetti rates attention, yet Erasmus, author of In Praise of Folly, the most read book of the 16th century, does not. Erasmus anticipates much of Lilla’s reasoning but wasn’t a fan of self-indulgent intellectualising, and Lilla’s apathetic agnosticism would have infuriated him.
Ignorance and Bliss is all about the journey, and a stimulating journey it is, though the book’s conclusion is nowhere near as profound or provocative as advertised.
