Modern life means information is a click away, but often it feels better to keep our heads in the sand. Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the age-old impulse to shield ourselves from information, why that might save our sanity, and what that means for our deep-seated ideas of innocence. His book is “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] When we have the sense that information is being withheld from us by big corporations or the government or by people with whom we have our closest relationships, we usually can’t just let it go. Maybe because we understand knowledge as a form of power, the perception that we are out of the loop can trigger an insatiable curiosity. And yet it’s not like we want to know everything. Not only do we sometimes steer clear of unpleasant facts, we even manage to hide certain truths from ourselves. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. My guest, Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University, and he has long been interested in what he calls the will to ignorance, because it’s just as much a part of us as the will to know. But often hiding in plain sight so that we don’t even acknowledge it. His new book is called “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.” Mark, welcome to Think.
Mark Lilla [00:00:55] Thanks, Krys. Good to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:00:57] You opened the book by giving us a little twist on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Will you summarize your version here?
Mark Lilla [00:01:05] Well, in my version, it’s about a man who is stuck in a cave. In fact, there are a number of people in a cave and their heads are all pointed forward, looking at a wall and they see shadows on the wall because there’s a fire behind them. And between them in the fire are some puppet dolls that are manipulated by someone else. So imagine your worst nightmare, the media there producing images that are not reality. And so Plato’s story is that is that this man goes up into the sunlight. He climbs out with the help of someone else who turns him around. And then after a while in the sunlight where he sees things as they are, he’s asked to go back down and help someone else back up. And then the story gets even more interesting because while he’s down there, he can’t see well in the dark anymore. He trips over things. Everyone thinks he’s laughable. And when he talks about the world out there, no one believes him. So for Plato, that was kind of an allegory of the way we live in my version of the story. He also brings a young boy on this whole journey. And when he’s told to go back, the little boy starts to cry, begs the men to be able to go back down and not to have to stay in the sunlight. And the reason he gives is that he can’t stand living in the light all the time. He can’t pretend he doesn’t dream anymore. The fact that he knows everything that is means there’s no drama in life. There is no play, there’s no adventure. And it’s even impossible to love because you know everything about everyone else. And so he successfully begs the man to go back down to the cave and stays there. A very happy creature.
Krys Boyd [00:03:13] So sometimes we display like this boy, what you call the will to ignorance. What are some reasons outside of having a comfortable cave to inhabit that we might deliberately close ourselves off to knowledge even when it’s available?
Mark Lilla [00:03:29] Yeah, well, there are a set of things that are simply, I think, rather rational to either not to know or to regulate our knowledge of. So one example I use in the book is a hypothetical situation where everyone on earth has an LED screen that’s embedded into their foreheads, and every thought that crosses their minds is displayed on this screen. And so not only are none of our thoughts private, but also the thoughts of everyone else about us are not private. And I think that human life would just grind to a halt because we can’t even develop ourselves or develop with relationships with people. If we begin every encounter with what psychologists sometimes call a truth dump where everything is just dumped on top of us all at once. In order to negotiate the world, even if we want to know other things about the world, we can only stand so much knowledge about ourselves and about other people. Even if we want to go and discover things about the natural world. So there are all sorts of things like that. We all do things like wrap presents and not unwrap them. This is the holiday season and we do that because people like surprises. Some people don’t want to know the sex of their children. Other people don’t want to hear the plot of the movie that they were planning on seeing. And all of us, I think, at some point walk by a mirror and look away or try to suck in our stomachs or turn our heads in a way that looks attractive. Because now people do that with selfies where we want to edit the way we look even to ourselves. Because otherwise it would be too hard to bear. But we actually look like. So this is for all rational reasons why we might do that. And then there are the irrational reasons. And the irrational reasons are, I think, rooted in a fear people have of the truth that, you know, you may have your listeners may have relatives, some of whom are just very curious people. They like to look things up on the Internet. They watch videos late, late into the night about science or about history. They get books in the mail. They tell you everything they see and kind of bore you to death. Sometimes they’re just basically curious people. And then there are people who think that, well, I really don’t have to be so curious just to get by with my life. I mean, I want to know certain things that might help me, but otherwise, I don’t need to know exactly how. You know, how bears rear their young. And then there are people, I think, who have a basic disposition towards incoming knowledge that is basically self protective. They have the fear that new information, new experiences will shatter a sense, a set of beliefs that they have. And you might ask yourself and Plato asked this question, Well, why wouldn’t we want to know things that are true that we get wrong? I mean, if I’m trying to fix my car and I’m doing something wrong, I want somebody to come by and tell me, don’t do it that way. You’re using the wrong wrench. But we sometimes get invested in our opinions irrationally because they feel like they’re an extension of ourselves. That if someone questions your politics or questions whether you know something about a country far away or things like that, there are people who are just defensive. And they develop a kind of disposition and a kind of armor, and they learn ways to push knowledge away from themselves. And there might be all sorts of reasons why that happens. You can think of individual traumas, let’s say, or people who just have always lived with a certain view about religion, about the existence of God or the nonexistence of God. Both people would be surprised to learn that they’re wrong. And and so there’s there is a muscle there that resists. And the extraordinary thing about Plato’s philosophical works, which are very accessible. They’re just stories of conversations. Is that the biggest thing the main character Socrates has to deal with is the resistances of people, even when knowledge would help themselves. I think that this impulse not to know this will not to know, is sort of an only knowledge in the way we talk about the human mind. It is always curious. And it helps to explain a lot of things that go on in the way we think about children. I have a chapter about that, the way we think about the past, the way we think about whether or not there are different kinds of knowledge, different ways of knowing. And so these are all manifestations, I think of this will not to know.
Krys Boyd [00:09:12] Socrates thought hatred of argument and hatred of human beings come about through similar processes. What what is what does that mean exactly?
Mark Lilla [00:09:22] Well, yes, he’s talking about this entropy, which is a word he invented. And what he meant was that and I think everyone who thinks about it knows they’ve had this experience. Let’s say that, you know, you’re in your 20s and you’re dating, and every time you go out on a date, someone disappoints you. And after a while you just think, I give up. I just give up on the kind of people that I was dating. I’m just going to live by myself. People are hopeless. People are liars. And you sort of withdraw from the human race. And what never occurs to you is that the problem might be in you and not in them. That your way of looking for people might be wrong. And that in order to find companions, friends, lovers, that you might need to learn the art of making attachments. And Socrates says, and the people he’s talking to in this dialog all nod as if, Yes, I know I’ve done that before. And then he says, Well, the same thing happens with the seeking of knowledge. There are people who seek out knowledge and attach beliefs to things only to discover they’re untrue. And then it happens to them again and again. And the inference that they draw from this that’s similar to misanthropy is they think that, you know, philosophy, science is all a crock. It’s just people who are imposing their beliefs on us. Everything is about power. All truth is relative. So I’m just going to wrap myself and my cocoon and sort of howl at the outside world from the dog house of my discontent. That’s from an old Latin poem. And you’re just not taking in new information. And the reason is not that there’s no truth out there, not that we can’t know things, is that you don’t know how to look for it. And so Socrates wants to teach this person how to look for truth without becoming too attached to your hypotheses. So you keep learning and don’t take it personally.
Krys Boyd [00:11:44] So, Mark, does Socrates ultimately want to help us learn how to deal with our disappointment at discovering that truth is not always on our side?
Mark Lilla [00:11:53] Yes. Yes. We have to believe and we can question this belief. I also question it that the truth is always good for us, but which is not true. I mean, there are things that you may it may be appropriate to know when you’re in your 50s. It’s not appropriate to know when you’re four years old. Obviously, we can think about sexual matters, but also think about death and things like that. But even more, he wants to encourage a kind of thinking where we go. We open our arms to the experiences that come at us and data about the world, and we develop a hypothesis about what might be the case about it. And we want to keep improving that hypothesis. And if it’s wrong, we want to abandon it and take on another one. And if we take that attitude towards learning, then we don’t take personally when we’re wrong. We’re actually excited when someone shows us we’re wrong because now we have a chance of learning what’s true. And also it’s possible, possible to build human relations at a very special sort of kind of philosophical relationship with other people, where together you’re questioning each other and having these philosophical conversations, hoping to get it right. But, you know, this is a very hard thing to do. And every time there’s a scientific discovery that or someone gets a Nobel Prize, how many times have we read about there’s someone else who thought they got there first and they want half of the prize or they deny what the other person did. None of these things or all of these things just get in the way of our learning the truth about the world and then being better able to navigate it.
Krys Boyd [00:13:56] Mark, I think the greatest irony in all this is that we don’t necessarily recognize our own will to ignorance when it shows up in our lives. But then it occurs to me that maybe we need a certain amount of self-delusion just to make it through the day and do things without suffering a crisis of confidence with every single little interaction.
Mark Lilla [00:14:16] No, that’s a very good point. It’s a very actually subtle philosophical point that some contemporary philosophers have thought about. Imagine you have let’s say you’re sitting at the screen in an air control tower and your job is to look at it and figure out where the planes are going. Right. And a lot of it is science and some of it is just guesswork or hypotheses. As you see the planes coming in. Well, let’s say you develop a hypothesis and you tell two planes what they’re supposed to do. And then you see a little blip off the screen that might make you think that you don’t have it right. And you immediately tell the two other planes to back up or to take another course. You need a kind of stickiness with your opinions. Otherwise, every time you had a new experience, you’d be changing your views and you’d always be in turmoil and would find it difficult to act. So you do, as you said, need a kind of willful ignorance about new experience or a resistance to it long enough that enough new information piles up for you to change it. And so, yes, we have a rational interest in being partially blind as we go forward so as not to get distracted and also to build human relations. Right? I mean, a child can’t grow up thinking that, well, the moment they do something wrong, their parents are going to feel completely different about them. Imagine, you know, you break something and your parents sort of toss. You have the door drawing the wrong inference from what was a mistake or something stupid you did. And so we need a kind of stickiness with our opinions. But what happens, I think, is that people hold on to their opinions and get invested in not being shown to be wrong. And so it’s no longer about finding I need to hold on to what I believe for a while to make sure I’m right in changing my views. It’s another when you get testy. And then your instinct might be to attack the other person. It might be to clam up. It might be to develop all sorts of strange theories that seem to or bizarre information you pull in or fake news or whatever it is to bolster what turns out to be a false opinion. And one thing that makes this whole business much harder for human beings right now is that there are two things. One is that we’re constantly being bombarded with new information. The fact that we’re connected all the time, that a lot of people, maybe most people are online for hours of the day means that there are things coming at us and we need filters just to be able to know what to click on, right? And so we have to do some kind of filtering there. But it also means that if you hold a view and all of a sudden you click on something that leads you to a website, it’s full of information that contradicts what you say. That’s very disturbing. And so what you end up doing is looking for, let’s say, news sources or sets of videos about how to do things around the house that seem to give you information that is reinforcing what you already believe. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is that the world has simply become more complex. People are asked to have opinions about a virus. Now, I’m only a very, very small class of Americans to begin with know what a virus is and then knows how they behave, how they grow, how they multiply, how they die out. That’s all. A lot of information is very complicated and above the head of most most people, me included. And then you need to know something about the way science operates. And the biggest problem I felt that we all face during Covid is that people were jumping to conclusions or getting angry at public officials when they changed their minds. Now, as myself, I want some someone that can be Dr. Fauci or someone else who is looking to change his or her mind when new evidence comes in. But what people want to know is you wear the masks. You don’t wear the masks. You wash your hands. You don’t wash your hands. They want steady, stable information about how to take care of themselves and their families. And given the increase and the rapid increase in scientific information we live with, we’re just not up to the task. Certainly, the average voter is not up to the task. And the sensible thing would be to say, I don’t know about this. I want to make sure we have a way of selecting specialists so they’re the kind of people who change their minds when they need to. But that’s not our attitude. And, you know, I’m sure, again, your listeners, you’ve had this experience where you go to the doctor and what he told you you couldn’t eat a year ago or drank and what pills you had to take. He now says that’s all wrong and you have to eat something else and you can indulge in what you had before and you have new pills. And when that happens a lot, rather than thinking, wow, science is the science and medicine is improving, people are thinking, I don’t trust this person. He’s always changing his advice. And so they become distrustful of elites, scientific elites and so on, and then become susceptible to any crazy theory that they find somewhere on the Internet.
Krys Boyd [00:21:01] Well, to go back to that kind of firehose of information from all kinds of sources that almost no one can avoid living in the 21st Century, you write that our will to ignorance might also be tied up in our desire to discover the one great truth that answers all our questions. Right. This kind of ideological theory of everything. Is that why we are so drawn to conspiracy narratives? Because right or wrong, they do seem to tie everything up with a pretty neat bow.
Mark Lilla [00:21:29] Exactly. You know, one very telltale thing phrase that people use who traffic in these sorts of things, who are susceptible to these, you know, big truths, is that they’ll say there’s no other way to explain it. Right. And it may be that we don’t have a way to explain it. And sometimes you have to look at what what you’re seeing and what you’re going through and say that. I’m not in a position now to say there’s one big truth that makes these things hang together. And what I want to keep very sharp is my mind so that I don’t take on things that seem to be incorrect. But there are people who very hastily want to be done with the conversation. They want matters to be settled. And so not only do they become susceptible to people who market conspiracy theories, but they also become susceptible to a very pernicious idea, which I devote a chapter to in the book, and that is the idea that there is an alternative way to get truths rather than reasoning and gathering evidence and making hypotheses, and even a more radical idea that in order to be filled with truth from outside, from some mystical experience or something like that, we first have to empty ourselves of our rational faculties so that in a sense, truth can be poured into us as if our minds or souls were just bottles. And in fact, in the early centuries of Christianity, this was a very popular view among some mystics who wrote that, you know, there’s a phrase in the gospel of John where Jesus say, I think is Jesus who says maybe someone else who says he must increase it, I must decrease. And so when people say there are alternative knowledges, alternative ways of knowing, we have to turn away from the hard sciences that don’t don’t take into account emotion and a wider view of things eventually. Essentially, they’re saying, just take apart all your rational faculties and open up the top of your bottle. And then what? Well, they say, I’ve had the revelation. You can have the revelation too, and they can pour it into you, or you can simply leave the top off your bottle for the rest of your life, constantly being filled and emptying it with different views about what makes everything hang together. You know, it’s a kind of true cliche about California that people there go into these things that, you know, they think if they follow a certain doctor or a certain guru or something like that or a kind of meditation, that they’ll get a revelation. And, you know, even Saint Paul was susceptible to this kind of thinking because of the experience of Pentecost and the idea of the instilling of the Holy Spirit. But, you know, even with the Christian life, you can be filled with the Holy Spirit, but from that point on, you’ve still got to reason about your life and your experiences, and you have to reason about scripture and make sense. If you’d given just a command, let’s say honor your mother, mother and father, your thinking’s has to start there. You got to think about, well, what do these two people, as my parents, actually need? Is it different for men and women say I need to know something about the diseases they might be suffering from. I may need to take them to a doctor. I’ll have to figure out what a good doctor is to know what a good doctor is. I need to know that they went to school where they teach serious medicine. For that to go on, you need a university where people search for the truth about the physical world. And on and on and on. Just to fulfill one commandment, you need the whole scientific enterprise there just to do what you need to do right for your parents. And so you cannot give up your rational faculties and with the excuse that you’ve had some mystical insight.
Krys Boyd [00:26:16] Mark to take just the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, Christianity. I mean, they each have robust traditions of scholarship and inquiry, and they each have taboos against curiosity. I mean, the Garden of Eden story is a perfect example of this. What do you think the point of that story is?
Mark Lilla [00:26:36] Well, the point of the story for me, I mean, there are, you know, the classic interpretations that it’s because knowledge of first, we have to remember that the tree is the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not the tree of knowledge of everything. So there’s something about moral knowledge that can be or knowledge of the distinction that ideally human beings should not have had in the story, because that means they become aware that they can do wrong things. And that’s why after they eat the apple that, you know, they have to cover themselves because they’re aware of their, you know, their genitals. So one way of looking at this story is that it’s actually impious to want to know. Things that God has put out of bounds. And when we do, that’s what we break. That’s when we bring on our sufferings. So the fact that the whole world is in the Garden of Eden, that we have to farm the ground, that we have to water, that there are sometimes things wrong with the crops we don’t eat that year. So our fall into the difficulties of life came from curiosity. The alternate view, which is the one I just articulated, is no, the story is not about that. It’s really a story about human beings aren’t falling to begin with. Rather, it’s an allegory about the human condition that as human beings, we are somehow aware of the distinction between good and evil, and that that knowledge can both make us rise closer to the angels or turn in the worst cases towards the demonic. And it’s just a picture of our human condition. And the Muslim and the Jewish thinkers tried very hard to maintain this view that you can’t have just mystics walking around saying that, well, I’m the new Prophet Mohammed, which just the penultimate prophet, I’m the real prophet. And people around giving prophecies about particular things that lead people into sin. So you need somehow to have a class of people who are properly trained, who are pious with respect to the laws, but also know as the example I used, it reflected that without your rational faculties you cannot do what God wants you to do because God does not give you. Instructions down to the very, very last thing. The commandments are general, and to know which ones apply in which cases, we need to be able to think. Now, there’s a problem in the Christian tradition, and I’ve already alluded to it, and that is that. Well, there are a couple. One is that while Moses and Muhammad were prophets and didn’t claim to be God, Jesus was the incarnation of the Trinity into flesh. And so the divine enters into our temporal existence, which means that everything in history changes. From that point on, everything looks different. And Jesus’s gospel did not emphasize the need for reasoning at all. It was, you know, his message was moral and it was apocalyptic, which is why early Christians believe that he was returning very soon. And so there weren’t developed doctrines about how to lead an adult life, for example, and make all these choices. And so there’s always a struggle within Christianity and try and say between a kind of orthodox view of reason’s place and a well-ordered life, and this more radical view that we are all hearing God’s voice all the time.
Krys Boyd [00:31:01] Many people, Mark, believe there are certain things children should not learn about until they’re old enough. Where does our belief in the innocence of children originate? Not not like not old enough to comprehend things, but that children are somehow able to be kept innocent by not learning certain truths.
Mark Lilla [00:31:19] Yeah, well, I’m sorry to be pointing the finger to Christianity throughout this interview, but I think the source of our problem in our Christian and post-Christian societies comes from there. If you look at ancient archaic religions, they generally have a view of history that is cyclical, that the universe somehow gets born or the cosmos gets born. It goes through a cycle of improving and then it starts to decline until it disappears and is reborn. To relate to that, there’s a picture of the human life as cyclical as well, That is, that you’re born up to a certain age. You have, you know, certain things you can and can’t do and are responsible for. And then there’s a rite of passage. And that rite of passag, after that rite of passage, you have new responsibilities, new things that you can do and other things that you can’t. And so the picture is that at every stage of life, there are different rules that apply that are connected to your capacities for all sorts of things, your capacity for reason, your capacity for trust, your capacity for distrust and knowing when people are lying to you. All sorts of things come at certain ages in our development. So what these rites of passage do is that they mark those moments publicly and we still have versions of those like, well, we have baptism, we have other Christian, you have the bar mitzvah and mitzvah in Judaism, and you got the confirmation in Catholicism. But those are things we choose to do. This archaic view is that life just is a cycle. You know, you’re going to start off very young and happy with the sense of possibility. As time goes on, you have responsibilities and so on. And it’s not that any one perspective is right. It’s that each one is appropriate for your age. Now, what happens, though, in Christianity is that first in the Gospels, Jesus treats young children as morally superior to many adults because they have not been introduced to sinful things yet. And so we’re meant to take, in a sense, hold up children as a kind of moral ideal, but that moral ideal is also tied to them not knowing things about the world, also things they will need to know. And then St. Paul Corinthians, this is First Corinthians talks about the wisdom of ignorance. And how the wise are not truly wise because they don’t understand their own sinfulness and they don’t understand that they’re ignorant of the gospel. And so there are some verses in First Corinthians where Paul, in a very sort of elegant way that gets us all into trouble, says, well, no, the only way to become wise is to first become ignorant. And that it’s in not knowing a kind of holy ignorance that we’re closest to God. Now, in the rest of his epistles, he writes very differently about, well, somewhat differently about our need for learning and things like that. But the combination of the gospels with Paul’s depreciating of knowledge and praise of ignorance led to, I think, two different views of of children that we struggle with or live with. One view is that children are born morally pure. Yes, they have original sin that won’t manifest itself till later, but essentially they’re at the perfect spiritual state for humankind. And therefore, the more experience they have with the fallen world, the lower rung on the ladder between the human and the divine, they descend. And if that’s the case. Then we have a strong imperative to preserve not only children’s innocence, but the childlike in ourselves.
Krys Boyd [00:36:17] I mean, we’re so accustomed to this idea about children and their innocence and their purity and their perfection that it strikes us as benevolent and right. But it’s also pretty tragic, right, that every day we live and gain experience and understanding is the day we presumably move further away from perfection.
Mark Lilla [00:36:37] It is. And there’s this other competing Christian view that you know. Well. Yes, children are haven’t sinned yet, But what we look forward to in them is that they will develop into adults who are good adults. That being good and pure is age specific. Right. So there’s a way of being good as a two year old that is different from being good at as a 55 year old. But if you think that it’s just innocence, protection from experience that makes goodness is a very tragic situation. It’s very tragic for children because, in fact, we know that children also have a streak of bad and sometimes evil. A 15 year old in Madison, Wisconsin, killed a few people in their school. Now, we can’t blame them on the fact that, well, let’s say her family wasn’t a nourishing one and she was somehow harmed and therefore it’s adults fault. Well, those adults also had parents and they were children once. And so we have this infinite regress that, you know, where would it begin that someone was evil, that had to be a child somewhere who was evil. And so this idea, the evil child and kind of haunts the Western Christian imagination is this other thing. And so we make movies about evil children. You know, we make ones about innocent children who kind of heal us. And we make other movies that are about these evil children who have something demonic in them. And we have trouble coming to a view of children as a childhood is simply a stage on the way to adulthood. And that at every stage we have good and bad impulses. Saint Augustine, in his autobiography, which is called The Confessions. Wrote himself a wrote about himself saying after recounting some story of him being selfish when he was a very young child. I am so young, a sinner now, so young, and yet already a sinner. So he had a very pessimistic view about that within ourselves. But at least he recognized that there is no age of perfect innocence, that the fall is the fall. And it means that we all have impulses that can harm ourselves and harm others. Freud would say the same thing, though He would leave God out. But essentially this idea that from the very beginning we have warring instincts and that it’s as we mature, that we learn how to control them and society helps us in that. But the innocence ideal had as well a terrible effect on women. And because the notion of virginal purity was such that it was not just a question of whether a woman had sexual relations before, it was also a question whether her mind was pure. And in order to keep it pure, parents would often put their daughters into convents and other places, in part to keep them away from young men, from getting thoughts about them, but also to keep them blessedly ignorance about the ways of the world so they would become either nuns or good house housewives.
Krys Boyd [00:40:28] Mark, how does our collective will to ignorance play into our embrace of nostalgia? This belief that if we could only go back decades or centuries, or to some other time in the past, how things once were, we could recapture our collective blameless ness innocence?
Mark Lilla [00:40:49] Yeah, well, nostalgia, to my mind, is the most significant manifestation of our collective willed ignorance, as you said. And something that we’re coping with, trying to cope with right now. Nostalgia is not, to my mind, simply the view that, wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t know the Beatles were still together or something like that? Right. There’s one thing from the past that you wish had still been preserved. By nostalgia, what I mean is this view that’s up until a certain point in the past. Things went along swimmingly without much change, and then some catastrophic thing happened. And after that moment, it’s been declined ever since. And there were all sorts of apocalyptic sects that believe this. I’ve always believed this. Some are called Gnostic. There are other sorts of ones that believe it’s like a big fall right now. One way this can play out is, for example, the reactions to the French Revolution. And at the end of the 18th century, after the French Revolution, other revolutions were inspired. And but within 30 or 40 years or so, in fact, much more conservative governments came in and the revolutions were put out. Nonetheless, the revolution left this idea of modern freedom in people’s minds. For those who are attracted to it, for those who weren’t. Everything that happened after the revolution they blamed on the revolution. This is a deep fallacy in in philosophy and logic to say that it’s something if it becomes after a must have caused the right. This nostalgic view is that someone was to blame for a break in history and that everything afterwards can be explained because of that. In order to turn the world right side up, it’s not just a question of behaving better or having better institutions. It means somehow reversing course. It means undoing all the damage and somehow undoing whatever this original thing was, this event that led to decline. And this can lead to very reactionary politics. And by reactionary, I don’t necessarily mean just on the right. I mean, there are reactionary politics on the left kind of, I don’t know, radical ecologists who somehow want to put the world back in the state before Homo sapiens somehow developed. This idea that there was a fall. Gives you immediately enemies list. And rather than seeing the problems of the present as being just the problems of the present. And every present has its own problems. You start looking for those who are responsible for this. And historically, certainly since the French Revolution, but also on right wing parties, fascism, the list is there are people always show up on this. And so their professors, journalists sometimes now you supposed entertainers, lawyers, Jews. And so all the conspiracy theories about in the 19th and 20th centuries that were about somehow this fall from perfection involves some mix of these people. And certainly in our present day politics, we can see people blaming the same sorts of people. Psychologically, it makes sense for people to think that, okay, the only thing I need to know about the world right now is that it was a product of people who took a wrong turn. And that’s the only knowledge I need. And all I need is an enemies list. And those are the people that have to be fought politically. And I do not need to be taking in new information and any information that doesn’t confirm my belief in who the good guys and bad guys are is going to be ignored or pushed to the side.
Krys Boyd [00:45:40] Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. His new book is called “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.” Mark, this has been really interesting. Thank you for making time for the conversation.
Mark Lilla [00:45:53] I really enjoyed it.
Krys Boyd [00:45:54] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. Listen to our podcast wherever you get podcasts. Just search for KERA Think. The website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
