In my last article, I described what I called ignorance to the third degree: ignorance that is proud of itself, that boasts of having discarded vast fields of human knowledge. Since any sane person will be a bit embarrassed when faced with what he knows nothing about, this ignorance to the third degree does not come by nature. You have to be schooled into it. That is the aim of much of our schooling: to produce the sort of aggressive ignorance that is happy to consign to the garbage heap almost all of the literary, artistic, philosophical, theological, and broadly cultural works of people who lived in that universal darkness called the day before yesterday. Such schools are efficient incinerators. Tennyson? Down the trap he goes.
But I said that there might be an ignorance to the fourth degree, an ignorance that traduces the very means whereby we acquire knowledge. It is one thing to climb down into a sheer pit. It is another to cut the rungs of the ladder as you go down. Ignorance to the fourth degree renders you incapable of being anything other than ignorant. This ignorance, as I see it, is also something that must be schooled into you, as unassisted nature cannot produce it; and it must be affirmed again and again, lest in some unguarded moment you do some simple and human thing and it revives the mind.
Among women, if feminist scholars themselves may testify, logic itself is to be rejected as “binary,” in favor of listening to people talk about themselves.
Ignorance to the fourth degree assumes three forms, which I will describe in order of increasing madness. The first is the assumption that people of the past have nothing to teach us, because all real knowledge is cumulative, such as in the physical sciences, or as in technological progress. From this perspective, to read Jane Austen to learn about men and women is as silly as hiring a horse and carriage to get from Boston to Hartford. You may do it as a quaint hobby, if you like, but it has no meaning or purpose otherwise. (READ MORE: The Modern Phenomenon of Ignorance to the Third Degree)
Aside from the inadequacy of this view of how the sciences proceed, it is simply not applicable to other fields of knowledge. Transfer the example from the past of our own culture to the present of some other culture. “Not — English!” said Dickens’ self-satisfied bigot, Mr. Podsnap, whenever he encountered something other than what fit nicely into his system of prejudices. Imagine someone saying it is moronic to go and live among the most traditional of the reindeer-herding Laplanders, to learn something about a tight community and a difficult yet surprisingly cheerful way of life; moronic, he says, because those Lapps still use reindeer hides to construct their temporary shelters, rather than our highly developed pine-sticks and sheets of chalk. And what can they watch on television, when they are out on the tundra?
That would be to hang a sign around your neck, reading, “I am a bigot,” but we can say exactly the same thing about your attitude toward other cultures far different from yours, cultures whose distance is temporal rather than latitudinal. If you can learn from the Lapps, you can learn from Jane Austen, and for at least one reason (there are more), which is that she and they are not like you.
A still more important reason is this. What the Lapps do, what the people of any culture do, is, until modern wealth has swept most of the power of sheer necessity aside, a function of the distilled wisdom of many generations of people whose most immediate aim was to survive another winter. The penalty for getting fundamental things wrong — such as the distinct characters of the sexes — was that you did not get another chance to get them right. This wisdom of the ages, preserved in proverbs, song, and folkways, is the collective counterpart of the wisdom of a single person who, fortified with traditional understanding, looks steadily upon human actions and thinks carefully and sensitively about them; a Jane Austen, a Walter Scott, a Charles Dickens. It is ignorance to the fourth degree to scoff at learning from them.
That brings me to the second form that this ignorance takes. It is to say or to imply that nothing worthy of being called knowledge can be had in any case from observation of human actions, unless it can be quantified as the result of some carefully controlled scientific experiment. In other words, physics gives us the form of all true knowledge. Everything else is a sloppy generalization or plain bunk.
The truth is almost the reverse. Suppose you want to get to know John. Do you measure his bones? Do you put his hair under a microscope? Do you analyze his blood? What does that give you, but data about parts of a physical body, and those parts too as abstracted from the body? To get to know John, the last thing you need to do is to quantify. You must talk to him, walk beside him, laugh with him, share a meal with him, listen to his stories; and you must do so not as a distant analyst desiccating fragments of his reality, but as another fully human being. To know John is not like knowing the gravitational pull of the moon. And, as old Aristotle instructed us, the means of knowing, and the means of demonstrating that you do know, depend upon the object of your knowledge. It is worse than silly to demand mathematical proof that John is a good man. It is like demanding that the moon tell us its dreams. It is not sane. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Let’s Clear the Junk Out From the Colleges)
This mad requirement renders us ineducable in human things. Whenever someone asks you for “the study” to show what is obvious to anyone with eyes, you should conclude that ignorance to the fourth degree is in play. As for those sociological studies, it has been a long time since Emile Durkheim and Auguste Comte, and the results of quasi-scientific sociological inquiry at best have but confirmed, at great expense and with much loss of acuity, what people of ordinary observation have known from time immemorial.
And this brings me to the third and most terrible form of ignorance to the fourth degree: the rejection of reason itself. This rejection, as I observe, takes forms characteristic of the sexes. Among men, it tends to restrict reason to logical deductions from empirically demonstrated premises; and that abandons to unreason almost everything in human life. Such people are reduced to saying that if you are independently wealthy and all you want to do is to play video games for twelve hours a day, every day, that is your choice, and reason, strictly speaking, can have nothing to say about it.
If two consenting adults wish to play Russian roulette, each one staking his entire living on the result, so long as neither one has any dependents or prior debts, reason cannot condemn them, no more than it can condemn a young person in the Netherlands from calling upon the death van to come and take away her life, merely because she does not feel like living it anymore.
Madness, then — what the Stoics, Confucius, the Japanese samurai, the Huron warrior, the old Roman farmer, and the Christian in prayer would all recognize as utterly unreasonable, a wastage of human power, dereliction of duty, numbness to the profundity and the beauty of life. Such numbness is predictable from masculine abstraction. Among women, if feminist scholars themselves may testify, logic itself is to be rejected as “binary,” in favor of listening to people talk about themselves; so that those narratives wherein the narrator is least to be trusted are to be privileged over demonstrable facts and rational deduction. (READ MORE: The University Is Now the Surveillance State)
In the event, these two prove to be much the same thing. The suicide in Rotterdam is to be tolerated, even celebrated, because, if we listen to the man, the statement that human life is sacred has no meaning and is unreasonable, and, if we listen to the woman, human life is sacred only if it is sacred to you, and “sacred” means what you choose it to mean, according to your feelings and the story of your life.
How to get clear of this mess? I will have some recommendations. Stay tuned.
