Mark Lilla on the Power of Ignorance
57:43 Share

From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, feeling philosophical as we enter a new year? We sure are on the Forum team given all the geopolitical turmoil, economic uncertainty and climate change ahead in 2025. It's a lot to take in the news day after day and a growing number of people just can't. At least that's what they're telling our pollsters and hairdressers.

What accounts for this desire not to know what's really going on? Columbia Humanities professor Mark Lilla explores this very question in his new book, Ignorance and Bliss. We'll dig into it with him right after this news. This is Forum. I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim.

From time immemorial, humans have struggled with a basic internal split. On the one hand, we have a natural curiosity about what's going on in the world and our place in it. On the other hand, many of us feel a compulsive desire to hide from it all. The complexity, the fear for our personal safety, the dread of the moral and ethical implications of knowing too much.

For instance, how am I complicit in the daily degradation of this precious planet we live on? That question alone, for me, it's a lot.

Columbia professor Mark Lilla has a passion for taking on the big questions. In his books, The Reckless Mind, The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Once and Future Liberal, and now Ignorance and Bliss, Lilla interrogates how we think about ourselves and others. Such a pleasure, Professor. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks so much for having me on.

You know, not to make this hour a personal therapy session, but oh, why not? I worry about a lot of things related to the 24-7 news cycle, but one in particular I think may resonate for you and our listeners, the steady stream of mass slaughter. I worry, I worry, Professor, that I'm becoming numb to it because I feel so exhausted and powerless.

You know, my finger hesitates over each awful headline. Do I want to know the details? Do I need to know the details? Oh, yeah. That's a very, very human reaction that even Plato once wrote about that something to do with our eyes, right? We want to look.

Part of us wants to look at—this is how we get rubbernecking, right? We want to look at the car crash on the freeway going the other way, and we don't want to. And so in that moment where we're struggling on both sides, we have something to learn, not just about the horrors that we encounter,

but also the kind of internal game that's going on that we're mainly not aware of. We're mainly not aware of the fact that, you know, there are things in the room, there are corners of the room we don't look into, you know, our inner rooms. And then there are moments that expose that to us. And when that happens, the question is, how do we react to that? And so much of the book

is about what I call the will to ignorance, actually makes us do in relation to knowing ourselves, making claims about the world, and also about dealing with history and change.

How much of the modern impulse to tune out, do you think, is related to the erosion of trust many of us feel for institutions, not just news, but schools, the health care system, government at all levels?

Well, I think it's not, well, I think the question of trust comes in after. We live with just an information overload. I mean, we know things about parts of the world in real time that we couldn't have known for most of, well, up until day before yesterday, historically speaking.

And so we feel flooded with these things and it becomes very hard for us to get our bearings and I guess to change the metaphor to sort of take the static and the noise out so we can focus on things that are truly important and not other things. I think that's the bigger challenge is in an age of information overload

It's holding on to what matters and being able to think about what matters in general or with regard to ourselves. So I think that's the struggle that we're in.

Your book pulls from ancient Greek mythology and from the Bible to provide all sorts of vivid examples of ancient people wrestling with willful ignorance or even hypocrisy. Why do you think we seem so prone these days to forget the horrors of the past or to presume that they were simpler times?

Well, there are very good reasons why we don't think about the horrors of the past. You know, again, it's the question of being overloaded with these sorts of things. And especially if we feel we have to have a moral position towards all these things, it gets just morally exhausting. But there's also... So one way we deal with that is, I think...

to, as you point out, to sort of pristinize the past. And what happens, the mechanism, I think, is that as we deal with so much information and as things change so quickly, and it's not just technological things, it's also our moral sensibilities, our relationships, our institutions,

that there is this desire to say stop, or if we become aware of all sorts of problems simply because we're overloaded with information, there's a tendency either, or rather both, to on the one hand think that we live in terrible, terrible times. And one of the things that studying history cures you of is thinking that we're living in any worse time than any other.

But when that happens, when we feel that things have gone terribly wrong, there seems to be some kind of instinct to want to look for two things. One is a simpler past where we can imagine that the choices were clearer and people were less complex, more straightforward and all the rest. And we want an explanation. So what happened? How do we lose that world?

in the past and find ourselves now in the mess we're in. And when that happens, it becomes a breeding ground really for political reaction of the right, but even of the left. There's a look for or a search for the perpetrators.

And on the right, those perpetrators can be journalists, academics, Jews, and so on, who have somehow taken us away from our moral simplicity and purity. And everything since that break can be explained in relation to that break, right?

And the version on the left is that it all has to do with capitalism, and once you have capitalism, everything bad happens as a result of capitalism. That's a simple-minded view of what can happen. But when we're in a situation where we're dealing with so much a sense, an overwhelming sense that things are terrible,

It just seems to be human nature to look for those who are responsible and then to try to think about how we might escape this. And a conservative way of doing that, one way is to imagine you can go back to the past. I'm going to start wearing the clothes of the 50s and I'm going to have a traditional marriage and things like that. The other is to try to skip ahead to a kind of utopian situation

where some of the basic elements of the pure past are somehow reborn in a new sort of world. So it's an instinct to escape the present by either going to the past or skipping forward to some radiant future. That's a very interesting point. I

I thought along those lines we might dig into Matthew 5:14 in the New Testament where Jesus tells his followers, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden." Obviously in its biblical context, the city on the hill symbolizes a standard to aspire to for Christians, a standard to inspire other people.

But I think today many Americans really, really, really want this country to be a beacon of democracy and opportunity. But we've got different interpretations of what that should be. And I think this desire often comes paired with sort of an angry unwillingness to acknowledge our failings as a country, especially in the past, but also in the present.

Yeah, I think I may have a slightly different take on this. And that is that, you know, if you're unhappy, if you're not meeting your expectations, there are two things you can do. Work harder to meet your expectations or lower your expectations. And I think that there's a tendency to expect too much from ourselves, that other countries don't feel burdened by this sense to be sitting on any kind of hill.

And we put a kind of moral expectation on ourselves that is ahistorical, you know, and we expect too much from democracy. Let me take the example of democracy.

You know, in ancient times, democracy was considered the worst possible political regime. And the reason was, it was thought that, well, it would just be the rule of the mob. And when you have the rule of the mob, then tyrants arise, populist tyrants, so to speak, claiming that they can solve all the problems if everyone will just submit to him, him in the past.

And only progressively did we start having more optimistic views of democracy, which was good. But at the same time, in this country in particular, there was a increase also in the expectations of democracy. And, you know, democracy is just one kind of political arrangement. And there are things that democracy is good at, and there are things that democracy is not good at.

And I think that has to be our base in judging ourselves.

We're talking about the power of ignorance, about whether that's about a political reality or an uncomfortable family secret, and where this impulse towards ignorance comes from, how it serves us. We're talking about all of this with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, who's just come out with a new book called Ignorance and Bliss on wanting not to know. What

What things do you, dear listener, remain willfully ignorant about? Perhaps where your meat comes from, the growth of child labor in the U.S., the obvious fact your parents shouldn't live alone anymore. Email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, even Discord, or Twitter.

Go OG and give us a call right now at 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim. And I am talking today with Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla about his new book called Ignorance and Bliss on wanting not to know. Well, we want to hear from you as well. We want you to join the conversation. Give us a call at 866-733-6786.

Thank you.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Discord, you name it. One more time with that phone number, 866-733-6786. We've already got a couple of comments coming in. I'll start with Courtney in San Francisco. Ignorance is definitely bliss. Shut off both CNN and MSNBC.

and forced the family to watch the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's special. Hasn't changed since 1973, but it's better than all the yucky stuff. Ross writes, semi-ignorance here, no TV or social media.

Only Forum, thank you very much, is radio. Plus, the New York Times Online. Oh, and YouTube for selected deeper dives will be 82 years old next month. My sainted wife is gone and my quiet chair at home is soothing. Writing poetry is my most helpful relationship with the world. Me too, Ross, me too. The rest is excited chatter, which I am empowered to ignore, if not entirely blissfully.

And I guess, Professor, we do hear from a lot of people who are a little longer in the tooth, like myself included, you know, wondering if it's all just the same thing every day. So why pay attention to the details? Yeah, I'm wondering if that's the deepest feeling, you know. I would think that the deepest feeling is that there's so much out there that the world is quite uncertain. Yeah.

And because of that, we need to somehow withdraw and close our windows, shut the drapes and look out from behind the drapes to see if anyone's approaching. If we're going to be responsible in the world and just be able to reach our own ends, we have to be out there. But what has increased is a sense of uncertainty.

And people deal very badly with uncertainty. I remember a book I read once asking whether a skeptic can live his skepticism.

And if you're skeptical all the time, to begin with, is that psychologically sustainable? But is that the best disposition really to have towards your experience? And so part of the book is about how we deal with uncertainty. And one way is to just shut the doors. But another way is

is to imagine that we can have a special access to truth that nobody else has. And so we find, let's say, one news source, and we just rely on that person. We bore all our friends by telling them what this one person has been able to reveal. And

So we have other ways of dealing with it as well. So for example, historically the most obvious way to escape uncertainty is to imagine that you can be filled with something divine or spiritual that gives you the true perspective on everything. And if you look at mystical literature,

One thing that often, in fact, I would say most of the time is required for the mystical experience is that you empty yourself of all you know and as if, you know, there's only a tank inside of you and it can only be filled with certain things. And so you need to empty yourself of what you think you know. You need to disable your ordinary reason and reliance on empirical evidence. And you need to open yourself

to some sort of experience that will fill you with a kind of truth and put you in a position to then either live more in accordance with the truth privately, that's one thing. The other is that you now have information that makes you a kind of

deputized part of a posse to serve the good out in the world. And that then becomes very dangerous.

Tara writes, Donald Trump became a fixation for me during his first term, but knowledge of his actions served me no purpose. I read major headlines now, but remind myself of what Mary Oliver wrote, never ever hold someone else responsible for your happiness. So I check the news once per day, but focus on what I control in my daily life. I think a lot of people share her feelings on this.

But I wonder to some extent, you know, and also drawing on what you said earlier about lowering our expectations of democracy and our leaders, if there isn't a way in which the danger in that is that we're disavowing our responsibility as citizens in a democracy to participate, to hold our leaders to account. Right.

Oh, that's certainly true. And that sense of information overload can lead people

to do that. And what happens after they do that? Well, if no information is coming in, they rely on their settled opinions. And it's possible then to build up defenses against alternative views. And so it's hard to, you know, I hate this word curate, but what you need is someone to kind of curate the things that are important and get rid of all

the noise. But there's another problem, and this comes along with democracy in an information age, and that is we feel we need an opinion on everything. And the fact is, very few of us are able to make an informed decision or come to an opinion about something, let's say, scientific and technological.

I mean, do we each really know what the effects of fracking are? Do we really know what the science is on COVID? And on and on. And so we rely on other people's opinions and hearsay about these things. And rather than saying the honest thing, which is, I have no idea.

But I'm interested in putting into office people who will look at the evidence and treat it seriously. And so one reason people are disappointed with their leaders is that in the information age, they start forming opinions about things that in an earlier age they wouldn't have even known about because the news wasn't as present as it is now.

And so everyone seems to be failing based on our outside selective view. You know, it's very instructive just to put yourself inside the minds of those people who have to make decisions. I think, you know, the first political responsibility of anyone is to put yourself in the position of the people who have to make decisions. Given the information that they can have,

and given all the constraints that they're under. And that's the standard for judging them. But if we are developing all these views, and in fact just expressing our ignorance, we're not performing a kind of, I don't know, cleanse on ourselves and not depending on the things we can know, which have to do with reason and the evidence that we know how to read.

Well, the calls are flooding in now, so let's go to the lines and start talking with Noah in Oakland. Hello, Noah. Hi.

Hi. So my comment is about someone else mentioned the difficulty of dealing with like major news organizations like MSNBC, CNN, whatever else. And I don't watch TV news that much myself because I also don't like these outlets. But I remember during this tsunami warning that happened recently, you know, thankfully there wasn't a whole lot of damage or injury, but some homes had come off their foundations up in like Humboldt.

Eureka area. And I remember the news every like 90 seconds, they would come in and say, and

Remember, those homes have come off their foundations. We have those homes off their foundations. And there's just this common refrain from TV news to not only present you news that is stressful, but to focus on the details that are as gripping and stressful as possible in order to keep your attention, to keep you worried. And I think that just, you know, give me the facts. That's fine. But it's presented in such a way that makes it harder to listen to and makes me want to be less informed.

particularly from those sources. Thank you so much for sharing that, Noah. The information is important. Exactly, right? The information is important. I do feel like even as a reporter myself, I try to maintain a diversified blend of like the hard stuff, the serious stuff I have to share with our audiences. But also if I don't do the happy stories like the ones for Bay Curious, then

I start to get a little sick inside. And I think, Professor, to some ways, in some ways, the news business is responsible for the overwhelm people feel because we feel we're constantly competing with each other. We've got to give you the most alarming, difficult news all the time.

Yeah, no, I think Noah puts his finger on something important. The interesting question is why he doesn't just shut off the TV. And the reason is, and he put his finger on that too, is that these things are presented in a way that make you feel that if you don't keep up with what's going to happen, let's say 15 minutes from now, you're going to miss something. And in fact, you don't.

A couple years ago, I spent a sabbatical year in Italy and stopped reading American newspapers and just read European newspapers. And I know my blood pressure went down and I just felt I had more perspective on things. And one way to get perspective is to rely on monthly magazines and things that take a longer view.

But we also should take the lesson that I was stressing earlier, and that is we don't know much. And in fact, the more information we get should convince us that we don't know much and therefore need to be more tentative in our opinions. But the psychology is such that it makes us more assertive.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to take another phone call here since we have so many, but also to encourage you, dear listener, if you're thinking, I'd like to get in on this, give us a call at 866-733-6786. And now that you've picked up your phone, 866-733-6786. And with that, let's go to Michael in Castro Valley. Hello, Michael. Hello.

Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my call. I come at this from the point of view that we are responsible for

for being happy. I think we've, and I have my motto that keeps me, keeps me in perspective, which is celebrate locally, empathize globally. We're bombarded by so much bad news. There's so much suffering in the world, as we know, that we, that in order to get a handle on it,

I placed happiness kind of first because this is, you know, this allows us to be empowered and doesn't mean that you go and stick your head in the sand and say, you know, ignorance is bliss because I can listen to anything, any point of view,

And I have immunity because at the bottom of it, it's like I'm going to try to maintain my happiness. And when I talk about happiness, I'm not talking about, you know, lifelong bliss. I'm talking about snatch a moment. It's a muscle that we've gotten so used to not using. So even if I can get one second, 30 seconds of just being

feeling, you know, the happiness. And that opens me up more to experience global empathy because I can't, I don't have control over all the bad things in the world. I love that idea, Michael. Celebrate locally, empathize globally. If you don't mind, I'm going to steal that as a motto from you.

Yes, definitely. And on another note, I tell my friends, I go, you know, I'm trying to build a happiness machine. I go, let's, technology is so far advanced. Why don't we depend on, and it's tongue in cheek, why don't we depend on

Happiness. Well, what is happiness? Well, actually, it's functioning right now as we speak because we're talking about this. It brings levity to life. You talk about happiness and it opens up the possibility that actually happiness

You can have happiness as a priority. It's empowering. It's a small, simple...

Andrea writes, I want to be informed, but I want information that makes a difference or is interesting. Why would I hear a long litany of what terrible things might come if I can't do anything? I started listening to foreign stations. They have reports from all over the world and a wider breadth of subjects. So, Mark, you're hearing that now.

advice being offered again by others. Susan writes, I'm a writer and did an essay on charity and why people give or don't give. One factor is that people don't want to be overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility. If they are aware of inequities in the world, intentional ignorance is self-protective. Yeah, well...

It's interesting as I'm hearing these questions, the sense of being overwhelmed and the desire to kind of close the doors on things. And what's missing is a middle possibility. You know, if you imagine at one end believing that the more information you get, the more rational decisions you can make, the more moral decisions you can make, and the happier you and the world will be.

And if that doesn't work out for you, then it seems like the alternative is to simply become willfully ignorant about certain things in order to maintain your balance and so on. But what's missing is the middle position, which is to have a modest estimation of your own capacities.

Your capacity for taking in information, your capacity for sorting through it, your capacity for questioning the world, your capacity for questioning yourself. Much of the book is about the struggle over self-knowledge. It's not just knowledge of the world, but we also try to escape knowledge of ourselves in all sorts of ways, some of which are rational and others that are not.

And so the move that Michael made in his question was to turn within. And I think that's a very healthy move. It's something that one of my favorite writers, Montaigne, emphasized over and over again, that it's not that we know absolutely nothing, and it's not that we can know everything, but we can live by making hypotheses about the world being tentative in the world. And at the same time,

tend our own garden. But tending our own gardens requires a level of self-knowledge to know if we want to be happy, well, we need to know not only what makes us happy, but if there's anything else that might make us happy. We have to ask ourselves, well, what is happiness? And pretty soon we find ourselves thinking about all sorts of deep, important philosophical questions.

And that's the turn.

Join the conversation. We'll be taking your calls at 866-733-6786. But whatever you do, don't touch that dial. We'll be right back. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim. And we're talking with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, where he focuses on Western political and religious thought about his new book, Ignorance and Bliss on Wanting Not to Know.

We want you to join the conversation wherever you come down on this. Email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Discord, you name it. Or just give us a call, 866-733-6786. I thought, Professor, that we might round out the hour by talking about how we...

do better for our children, collectively speaking, for the generations coming up. How do we approach this quandary in a way that leaves, if not a better planet, at least a better ability on their part to address all of the problems? Yeah, well, there's a chapter in the book that's all about children. It's a chapter about innocence.

And it's meant to take us through our assumptions about children and how the idea or ideal of innocence actually causes us to harm them or can. You know, we all have stuck in our heads no matter what our

religious faith is or lack of faith, the picture of baby Jesus in the manger and even the little lamb, the innocent lamb is looking at this child, looking at the competition, you know. And so we have a picture of the divine really being a child

And there are two different ways of – families of ways of thinking about the innocence of children. One is that, well, what they're innocent of is the world.

And what our responsibility is, is to slowly make them aware of the world in such a way that they remain happy, that they remain as spontaneous as possible, and then move up to be responsible adults. And so the idea is you begin innocent, and then you climb up to being responsible.

But there's this other idea of childhood innocence that haunts Christian civilization, and that's the notion that children are born with a white sheet, let's say, and that life is just about getting stained. Or to change the metaphor, an old writer wrote that for a child, every day it's a step lower from God on the ladder of life.

And so if we think that there's something precious in child innocence, we'll want to protect them and keep them from knowledge of the world. And to the extent that we admire children, we might want to do that with ourselves. But that strategy always backfires, whether it's keeping children forever ignorant of sexual things. I mean, that has to be a slow process.

People have to know how to operate in a world in which there are a lot of not good people out there.

And so all these attempts to sequester children, I talk about one case in a Mormon sect of a young girl who was sort of captured by those in her community and what it was like for her adjusting to coming out. There were stories about nuns and them leaving the convents and not knowing how to do anything and being exploited and so forth.

Today we have madrasas and we have other sorts of religious education in closed communities that keep children from knowing about the ways of the world. And so if we are going to make them responsible in the way you were asking, we cannot be charmed by this idea of childhood innocence.

So we want to experience wonder in the world, and there are wonders there. And one of them is children, because they're spontaneous, because they're not bearing the weight of the knowledge of the world that we have or the experience.

But, you know, there are a lot of wonders in the world and we can't expect the child to play a role for us as the wonderful innocent. You know, children aren't there for us at all. Children are here just for themselves. Yeah.

It makes me think of the Sweet Honey in the Rock lyric, you know, our children are not our children, their life's living out itself. I want to grab, you know, at least one more phone call. I think we've got room for a few more. Why don't we talk to Ria in Novato? Sure.

Hello, everybody, and I hope you have a great learning experience through the beginning of 2025, all of you. My query here is, what are we to do when book banning has already begun?

Religiosity is at the highest levels with the theocratic government seeming to be coming in. And we worry about the Taliban. My worry beyond everything is losing scientific American knowledge.

National Geographic, New Scientist, and Discover Magazine, just to mention a few. And the culling of the American searching, learning, knowledge, wisdom, mindset, the humanities, philosophy, and science. Wonderful.

We're being drained and we're being dumbed down. What to do is my question. What to do, Professor? What do you have to say to that? Well, there are two things to do. I love the question. And they point in different directions. One is to become as informed about the sciences as we can. And, you know, the kind of magazines that were just mentioned are crucial for that kind of evolution.

as a kind of connective tissue between the scientific community and the wider public. But the other thing to learn is the extent of our ignorance about these things and to not assert things about them that we don't know, right? And to have a kind of respect, enough respect for the truth to doubt yourself.

There's a physicist at Columbia, I forget his name now, but he wrote a book that was kind of an introduction to science and the title of it was Ignorance. And his argument was that it's our ignorance that compels us in the sciences, that a scientific result is only tentative.

And if we discover it's wrong, we celebrate that because now we know that we're going to be a little step closer to the truth. And now that we're not entertaining a false hypothesis. So we need to, in a sense, adopt within ourselves that kind of scientific method or more human, you know, individual version of that.

You know, I love the idea in science that, you know, whatever the current understanding of any particular topic is, it's a theory. Yeah, people say, well, the science is settled on this. And, you know, there are certain things, it's hard to imagine things changing much. But, you know, scientists don't talk that way about the science being settled.

Yeah, they say, you know, as close to zero as we're comfortable going. And I do think there is something about age where, you know, if you go around the earth a few times, you get to see this quote unquote settled science on a wide variety of topics, you know, upended or expanded and

And, you know, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is, yeah, it behooves all of us to try and pay attention to the various fields of science to remind ourselves that, you know, information is constantly being updated. Right.

But that's not an easy thing, you know, just going back to our sense of uncertainty. And the more uncertain we feel, there's a tendency not to push ahead with that, but rather to withdraw and to get fixed in our opinions.

Sadie writes, I welcome this perspective, but would like to hear your comment about the younger generation posting every single little thing, every change opinion on Instagram and how damaging this can be for some. We all know there's been rising anxiety levels since COVID and I happen to have a young adult child who has a terrible time navigating her friends' experiences.

expectations about choosing a position, especially in relation to the Gaza conflict. How can we help all the people that are constantly connected find inner peace and balance in their lives? Yeah, well, great question. I think the stakes are even larger, and that is how do we protect our young people enough so they can know themselves?

Right? If you're online all the time, essentially, you're looking for approval and you're picking up habits of other people, ways of speaking, ways of putting on makeup, all these sorts of things.

And you need to turn within in order to orient yourself in the world. You need to know what's important, what matters generally for human beings, what are high things, what are low things, and what our capabilities are. And so that whole exercise of searching in order to know ourselves, which can happen through books and things like that,

It does not happen when one is online, just the opposite of that, because you're thinking of yourself as one of these players and adapting yourself to what is out there.

And the only way to free ourselves from the opinions of others in order to, you know, make our minds up for ourselves is to shut all that off and to turn within and figure out how we're going to set out in the world in a way that's meaningful for us. You're listening to Forum. I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim.

You know, I think, Professor, it was from a review of your book, Ignorance and Bliss, that I read something that caught my eye. I wanted to get your further take on it. Self-awareness is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, but unadulterated self-knowledge can lead to paralysis. Yes.

ethical action, you write, requires a false belief that I am fully and solely the author of my actions. What did you mean by that? Yeah, no, that's a real psychological puzzle, isn't it? We've learned how if we look at ourselves from a certain direction,

and our actions as the result of previous experience.

One can reach the conclusion, as certain modern philosophers have done for a long time, that our behavior is fully determined by what has happened before. And when we feel that we're acting, it's just that these experiences are acting for us or through us. And I mean, we need to understand the degree to which we may be

somehow limited or blinded by, let's say, past traumas and things like that, and we need awareness of them if we're to make sure that our thinking and our decisions, including moral ones, are free from some kind of deep thing that makes us less rational and less open.

And so, but if we know too much, if, you know, I'm sure listeners have had this experience when someone gives you a truth dump, right? And you're in some kind of relationship and all of a sudden it just comes out. And it's, you know, there's a lot of truth in it, but it's indigestible.

And so you need a sense that your action is meaningful if you're going to make meaningful actions. And so that is a kind of paradox, but it's a good thing that we aren't too, too aware of the ways in which we're determined by other sorts of things.

I think we've got time for at least one more phone call. Why don't we talk to Mary in San Rafael? Hi, Mary. Hi.

Hi. My question for your guest is that I heard him say that we should, well, paraphrasing, that we should work harder or adjust our expectations and that that's kind of the key. And I get that, you know, but I also feel like I've observed that

that society keeps upping the ante and what it takes to just live, you know, within our means, say we can't live within our means. We have to keep increasing our means. And so that seems like out of our individual control. So I wonder what your guest would, how would he would respond to that? Yeah, I think we're certainly all subject to that. The difficult thing to do is to sort out

the things we have to do to, I assume she's speaking about maintaining a kind of standard of living or being able to participate in society, and what things are false needs. And the only way to distinguish between real needs and false needs for yourself is to begin with knowledge of yourself. And when you have that, then you know what really matters to yourself. But if you're a mystery to yourself,

you're going to end up developing all sorts of false needs and trying to satisfy them and then not being able to satisfy them and getting yourself caught up. So one of the things I want the book, I hope the book does, is to give people an experience

such that at the end of it, they understand more the importance of self-knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, the limited provisional nature of the knowledge we can have of the outside world.

You say that, but I don't know. I think back to my own teens and 20s, and I did not know myself despite a lot of querying. I think many young people feel that way. It's a life task. It's a life task. Yeah, and I suppose it's one that's never really done because as you get older, you realize I need to re-interrogate that.

Yeah, there's a lot of reckoning that goes on at our ages. And some of it, you know, is quite difficult. But without that, we don't know how to use the time we have left. Well, speaking of time we have left, any last thought, one thought to take us out of this hour with?

I guess it would be, you know, the two lessons I just drew were kind of moderating ones. But one thing the book, I hope, does to people is by making the world seem less knowable, fully knowable to ourselves, we're more open to the wondrous aspects of it.

You know, the example that came to mind when I was writing this book was I was sitting outside somewhere in New York and a kid was going through traffic. You know, he had earbuds in on a skateboard with the grace of a gazelle and moving in traffic, not getting hurt. And I looked at that and I thought, you know, I don't want him to be an innocent, but that

insouciance, that sense of

Just being able to live life without a burden, you know, it was kind of a wonder in front of me. And so wonder is a good thing. Ignorance is not. Well, Professor Mark Lilla, author of the new book, Ignorance and Bliss on Wanting Not to Know, may you move forward with the grace of a gazelle into your day. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

Here on Forum, you've been listening to Forum. I'm Rachel Miro in for Mina Kim, and I thank you for listening. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.