[url=http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/03/42c0db19e37f4]The Land Institute – Towards An Ignorance-Based Worldview[/url]
“Imagine an ignorance-based science and technology in which practitioners would be ever conscious that we are billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable and always will be.”
Now if you know that knowledge is not adequate to run the world what do you do? What do you do if you recognize that you are up against ignorance?
You ask before launching a scientific or technological venture: How many people will be involved? At what level of culture? Will we be able to back out? Scientists technologists and policy-makers would be assiduous students of exits.
Knowledge seeking would not stop but would as Wendell Berry has said “force us to remember things cause us to hope for second chances and provide an incentive to keep the scale small.” Acknowledging ignorance might be the secular mind’s only way to humility.
Harvard’s Dick Levins a sort of a mathematical modeler ecologist wrote “Structured ignorance is a prerequisite for knowledge.” Also “Ignorance is not passive. It requires energy to sustain it.”
By embracing an ignorance-based worldview at least we go with our long suit. Knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview.
At the conference Wendell said “Our purpose here is to worry about the predominance of the supposition in a time of great technological power that humans either know enough already or can learn enough soon enough to foresee and forestall any bad consequences.” He said this supposition is typified by Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins’ assertion in an open letter to Prince Charles: “Our brains are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.”
Wendell said “When we consider how often and how recently our most advanced experts have been wrong about the future and how often the future has shown up sooner than expected with bad news about our past Mr. Dawkins’ assessment of our ability to know is revealed as a superstition of the most primitive sort.”
Several people brought to the conference something Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a news briefing: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
The conference then took up a Harvard Business Review piece called “Wanted: A Chief Ignorance Officer.” It said that ignorance management is arguably a more important skill than knowledge management.
In the early 17th century Rene Descartes’ Meditations on the First Philosophy said that we can remake the world in the interests of humanity with no discussion of negative consequences. Imagine if in the 21st century we could see the end of the idea that knowledge is adequate to run the world. This would cause us to feature questions that go beyond the available answers. We would learn patience and we would enjoy a kind of yeastiness for thought. I think this also would do the absolutely necessary job of driving knowledge out of its categories.
Well maybe it’s time to start with a certain amount of humility and say we’re fundamentally ignorant about the way minds change. Acknowledging that we are fundamentally ignorant we now can ask a question that goes beyond the available answers and that’s going to force knowledge out of its categories.
We would be fundamentally respectful of our original relationship with the universe. There might even be a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.