Is Ignorance Bliss?

We’ve all heard the term, “ignorance is bliss.” It comes from a relatively obscure mid-18th century poem by Englishman Thomas Gray called “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” It’s fairly short, with just ten stanzas, and the last two include these lines: “Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. 

The whole notion of blissful ignorance is explored in a new book, out earlier this month, by a humanities professor and author named Mark Lilla. It’s called Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, and it explores the many reasons people and societies willfully choose ignorance over deeper knowledge. 

Toward the end of the book, Lilla unpacks the role that nostalgia can play in driving willful ignorance. He says: “...when an entire nation or people or faith begins searching for lost time, darker emotions and fantasies emerge. The more we dream about a lost Eden, the less bearable the present feels, and this feeling then inclines us to yearn even more for what we imagine we have lost.” 

Around the same time Lilla’s book was released, Oxford University Press announced on December 2 that its annual word of the year was the term “brain rot,” voted on by nearly 40,000 members of the public. Oxford defines brain rot (originally used by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, in 1854) as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” 

“Brain rot” and willful ignorance are two sides of the same coin these days and play a central role in the divisiveness of our politics, in my opinion. Let’s face it. No matter who had won the most recent presidential election, half the country was certain to be supremely despondent, fearful, and eager to demonize the victor. 

Why is that? I think it’s because people have lapsed into casting their votes as a statement, not as a sacred privilege that requires the hard work of knowing the issues. We’re not open to changing our minds. We hate others for thinking differently and even consider them evil. We both celebrate and are offended by the trivial while ignoring and downplaying the truly meaningful.  

I’m a registered Independent and have voted for candidates from both parties – locally and nationally – in pretty much equal measure my entire adult life. You’d actually think I have a screw loose if you saw my voting record, or at least that I’m some kind of rudderless flip-flopper with no real convictions. I’m sure both are somewhat true.  

During this recent election, as the rhetoric heated up and political discussions did as well, I employed a sort of parlor trick before getting into any policy discussions at parties and such. I’d say, “Putting aside the two current candidates, can you name three alternative candidates in each party you’d vote for?” If they couldn’t, the discussion ended. It meant I was talking to someone with no real interest in going deep on the critical issues facing our country and/or that they’re a blindly partisan idealogue, which is a big problem on both sides of the aisle these days. 

What I’m hopeful for as we close out this year and ring in the next is that we can all employ a sort of modern-day version of Timothy Leary’s famous call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Let’s turn on the empathy, tune into the issues in a more thoughtful way, and drop out of the trivial conversations online and in person. 

Lilla launched his Ignorance and Bliss book by penning an opinion piece in a national publication and titled it “The Surprising Allure of Ignorance,” broadly outlining the major tenets of the book’s thesis. He closed the piece with: “As we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know – and want not to know. We accept truth; we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.”