Earth in Our Care: Ecology, Economy, and Sustainability

1: Of Ignorance and Knowledge

5 1 Of Ignorance and Knowledge If we could see all the never-ending stories occurring in the eternal now, we would be experiencing the unifying principle of the universe: The Eternal Mystery, the Original Storyteller, the Author of The First Never-ending Story—out of which all the others are born, wherein all the others are contained .—Chris Maser Although ignorance is thought of as the lack of knowledge, there is more to it than that. Our sense of the world and our place in it is couched in terms of what we are sure we know and what we think we know. Our universities and laboratories are filled with searching minds, and our libraries are bulging with the fruits of our exploding knowledge, yet where is there an accounting of our ignorance? Ignorance Is Simply a Lack of Knowledge Ignorance is not okay in our fast-moving world. We are chastised from the time we are infants until the time we die for not knowing an answer someone else thinks we should know. If we do not know the correct answer, we may be labeled as stupid, which is not the same as being ignorant about something. Being stupid is usually thought of as being mentally slow to grasp an idea, but being ignorant is simply not knowing the acceptable answer to a particular question another person is interested in. Without ignorance, knowledge could not exist because all knowledge is born of a question, albeit often an unconscious one. In turn, all questions reside in the domain of ignorance. Like every paradox, ignorance and knowledge are two halves of the same dynamic—consciousness. However, society’s preoccupation with building a shining tower of knowledge blinds us to the ever-present, dull luster of ignorance underlying the foundation of the tower, from which all questions must arise and over which the tower must stand. Although acquiring knowledge may reduce a sense of ignorance, the greatest danger for society is the delusion of omnipotence that accompanies the certainty of its knowledge—not the scope of its ignorance, which is infinite and thus grounds for humility. Nevertheless, the search for knowledge in the material world is a continual pursuit, but the quest does not mean that a thoroughly bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb schooled person is necessarily an educated person or that an educated person is necessarily a wise person. And despite our most fervent wishes, knowledge is no guarantee of wisdom. In fact, teachers, in common with us all, are often blinded by the certainty of their knowledge and thus unable to comprehend the vast landscape of their ignorance. The only thing worse than not knowing is being unaware that you don’t know. “Man is much more afraid of the Light than he is of the Dark,” observed astrologer Alan Oken, “and will always shield his eyes against a truth, which is brought to him prematurely. He will throw stones at it or even crucify it in order to remain in the comfortable shadow of his ignorance.” That is the unspoken motive behind the notion “ignorance is bliss,” a notion through which we absolve ourselves of responsibility by pleading ignorance. People choose ignorance because knowledge is deemed too painful, too uncomfortable, or too limiting in the array of choices it allows. Knowledge Is Some Version of the Truth In the confrontation between a stream and a rock, the stream always wins . . . not through strength, but through persistence.—Anonymous Because knowledge is always relative, all we can navigate is an ever-shifting version of the truth through the accrual of knowledge. Therefore, we must learn to accept our ignorance, trust our intuition, and doubt our knowledge. The realities we accept as obvious, neutral, objective, and simply the way the world works are actually structures of power, which we create as we think and live. They are created by our rendition of history and by our understanding of our society , our world, and ourselves within it. Moreover, our intellectual fabrications are always partial with respect to the whole. Over the years I labored as a research scientist, I came to appreciate how much—and yet how very, very little—we humans understand about the three spheres of which we are an incontrovertible part. There is so much for us to learn about ourselves as individuals, as a species, and about the Earth we influence in our living, that I firmly believe the complexities of life and its living are permanently beyond our comprehension. The salient...