There was a time when strong opinions impressed me. If they came from a politician, a writer or a talk show host, I would say: “Damn, how clear he is!”. When I started writing opinion columns seventeen years ago, I looked for knowledge under the rocks even if I had the same awareness of ignorance as I do today. Then it was worse, since she hadn’t yet given up on learning any more of the six thousand languages ??spoken in the world or taking piano and singing lessons again so she could imitate Nina Simone. At that time I was haunted by nightmares in which I would think of subjects to deal with in the articles even though they all seemed unfortunate. And already early in the morning, after writing the piece, I was invaded by a persistent doubt with which I mentally attacked my own theses.
“Admit your ignorance”, I often repeat myself in the face of the vice of taking things for granted. How should thoughts be tamed if the futuristic story has us in a constant state of alarm? As I read Peter Burke’s Ignorance, a global story (Arcàdia/ Alianza Editorial), I feel comforted. The eminent historian, 87 years old, compiles the different classes labeled as such – “one more of the 57 varieties of Heinz sauces”, he jokes – which range from active ignorance to virtuous, through deliberate, unconscious or selective. A large family that in the midst of the information age extends beyond its antagonist, knowledge. Burke calls “corporate ignorance” what caused Chernobyl to explode, or what emanates from multiple terrorist attacks where warnings were silenced by the suffocating flow of information collected. Warnings ignored in full ostentation of a ferocious security.
We live in a time when the wheel of words connected to ideological artefacts escapes any quality control. There are falsehoods that end up becoming beliefs, before which the most peregriners display an active ignorance. Burke gives as an example the resistance, in his time, to the theories of Copernicus, Darwin, Pasteur or Mendel. Denialisms seem to lighten the vital burden of those who prop up their truth with conspiracy theories. Montaigne summarized it briefly: “And what do I know”. According to La Rochefoucauld there are three types of ignorance: “Not knowing what one should know, knowing wrongly what one knows, and knowing what one should not know”.
The truth is an increasingly elusive concept in a world that moves better with fake than with reality. Even so, the keepers of memory unearth names obscured by inertia, like that of so many eminent women. Until the 19th century, the color chart we use today was not recognized; only the so-called primary ones were identified, and I can’t imagine what life would be like without water green or pearl gray.
Every day we attend banquets of unenlightened ignoramuses very comfortable in their own skin, those who shout a lot and never hesitate. Its forms, ignited with the gasoline of money, seduce. The model of an uneducated and demented world leader moves forward impassively, perhaps as a symptom of hopelessness, placing a false order ahead of defenestered well-being. Half-truths abound, which are nothing more than half-lies, while the thirst for knowledge pours into artificial intelligence. In Olga Ravn’s dystopian novel Los empleados (Anagrama), from a ship with no return they end up wondering if they are human or humanoid. It looks like a warning for the ignorant.
