What is the Cost of Ignorance?

Want to venture some opinions?

I could understand your reserve: the question sounds as if it falls suspiciously close to the category of ‘nonsense questions:’ questions that are easy enough to ask but meaningless or (at best) foolish to try answering, like “what is the colour of jealousy?”, Lewis Caroll’s “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” or … “What is the meaning of life?”

For the next few minutes (trust me, I could carry on much longer) I’m going to try asking this question I kicked off with. I trust you, comrades, will guage any foolishness yourselves.

However, I can not wade forth without first apologising for the leading nature of the question. Should ignorance after all always put you in its debt? I hear it sometimes induces bliss. Until universities introduce happiness calculus in to their accountancy courses, I will just direct my blame to a former President of Harvard, Derek Bok, who quipped “You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.”

Ignorance does not behave like a regular currency. It too has a variable exchange rate; the problem is that it varies not just in time but also in space: in the uncharted territory of ignorance people’s opinions matter as much as their actions, because while economies can effortlessly exert their might to marginalise the actions of many, opinions are less malleable; they resist coercion. Ignorance, among other things, is the freedom to think.

Behind ignorance - to put it differently - are fundamental questions of human rights. I would go further and say that ignorance is one of the foundations of human rights. Combine ignorance with another human quality, the desire for recognition, and out of the vacuum of ignorance you get a well of imagination and creativity. Some things are constantly arising from nothing.

And this is where I must tread lightly, not because of the delicious religious innuendo I perhaps just snuck past you, but because talking about ignorance is an imaginary walk in an imaginary park compared to talking about nothing. By walking in the realm of nothing, many important terms like ‘agnostic’ and ‘atheist’ have become confused. So to quickly clear things up:

An atheist lacks a belief in any god or gods.
An agnostic believes that any claims about the existence of a god or gods are uncertain.

The question “do you believe in god?” resolves whether you are a theist/deist or an atheist/adeist.
Answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to “do you think the truth of such belief is either unknown or unknowable?” deems you either agnostic or gnostic.

In other words, these two questions reveal four possibile personas:

• Agnostic atheist/adeist
• Agnostic theist/deist, or, put simply, an agnostic believer
• Gnostic atheist/adeist, or, the stance that there is definitely no god
• Gnostic theist/deist

Gnostics on both sides of the faith fence are prone to narcissism: that what they (or worse, their group) hold true trumps outside perspectives. Now, with any clash there are three possibilities:

1. One side triumphs at the others’ expense
2. They avoid the clash somehow, or
3. They reach a compromise

Clashes of ideas show one extra possibility: both sides believe they have triumphed and everyone is happy, for a while.

Without doubt in your mind compromise is impossible, and pride fed by certainty is a volatile cocktail: under its influence cheating loses the veneer of hypocrisy. Shooting the messenger or dehumanising the other suddenly become strategic weapons. Under its influence, all becomes fair in love and war.

Questions of neither love nor war admit simple answers, yet if you think war is an essence of human nature, you are forced to admit that love is too, as love is the lifeblood of war. Whether it be “love of country” or “love of ideology,” allies are the children of shared passions, and enemies those of minor differences. The less romantic reality dawns when you see such a desire for something larger than ourselves coopted by the powerful as a facade for the sufferings of the weak, when something "larger than oneself" is tomorrow's meal and a friendly face offers a silver bullet.

As many of you will know better than me, shared passions can produce - and thrive on - as much happiness as any war can suffering: becoming educated is also an act of love; its opposite - despite what Harvard’s ex-President said - is not ignorance but indifference. Regardless of how “educated” you are, curiosity opens you to beauty. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a thing of beauty. It is all the things a declaration (particularly a universal one) should be: short, clear, and grounded in historical experience. All 30 of its articles have a subtext of hope, which I hope to have convinced you depends on us acknowledging human limits. It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate. I think it’s a lack of hope.