Peter Burke, "Ignorance: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2024)
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babbel.com slash Spotify podcast spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Spotify podcast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel.

Today I'm here with a very special guest to talk about a really good book whose topic is also very timely to what's happening around the world today. The book I'm going to discuss today is called Ignorance, A Global History, which was published by Yale University Press in 2024.

Thank you.

And one of his most, among his most famous books are The Polymath and also What is the History of Knowledge? And today he's here to talk to us about his latest book, Ignorance, A Global History. Peter, welcome to New Books Network.

Thank you very much, Morteza. So, just to introduce myself, I'll say I'm a cultural historian. When I was teaching at the University of Cambridge until my retirement in 2004, I was a specialist on the history of Europe.

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but one of the great advantages of retirement is you can study whatever you like and i decided i would focus on problems rather than on periods and for most of the last twenty years i've been studying the history of knowledge i would call it a social history of knowledge actually i wanted to call the newentz book

ignorance, a social history, but Yale changed it without telling me to global history because they thought the word global sells more copies. Anyway, so

That is the background to the decision to write, to try to write a history of ignorance. And that is great. And I also have another question before we get to talk about the contents of the book. And I think it's a very great title, Global History. But I do understand, having read the book, I do understand why you decided originally to have social history. But previously, you wrote a book called Polymath, which is about all these great geniuses around the world.

And that's also kind of a history of knowledge. Would you say this is like a sequel to that book, but from a different perspective because you're focusing on ignorance?

Yes, in a way it's deceitful because the Polymath book was about people who knew a lot and the ignorance book is about how little so many of us, myself included, actually know but how what we don't know changes over time, over the centuries. But in another sense, this ignorance book is...

is a sequel to all the books I've written about the history of knowledge. I think that there are seven of them now, each of them trying to look at knowledge from a different aspect. And as you may imagine, if you work on a particular topic for a long time, you begin to be afraid that you don't have anything new to say about it. And I found in the past that

If you think that your approach is no longer as fresh as it used to be, a good strategy is to turn it upside down. For example, for some years I was working on the history of language, and then I decided at least to write an article about the history of silence. And in a similar way, some historians of memory, which is such a popular subject,

these days, discovered forgetting as the complementary opposite that would allow them to look at their problems in a new way. And so this was a conscious strategy on my part to temporarily stop writing about knowledge and to write about the absence of knowledge instead. Of course, that approach

raises serious problems of method, as you can imagine. Indeed, I wrote the book imagining an old-fashioned positivist historian looking over my shoulder and saying again and again, how can you write a history of knowledge? Where are the documents? What are the sources? And so, of course, I had to work out ways

a reply to this insistent voice which is that if there are no there can't be any direct sources for the history of an absence on the other hand there are many indirect sources which i was trying to exploit in different parts of the book yeah it's uh

You're right, because when I came across the title of the book, History of Ignorance, I was, I mean, Ignorance, a Global History, I was

I had those questions. How can you write a history of something that is absent? Ignorance. But I really enjoyed the way that you have in the book, you sort of define that knowledge. And it's not only, sorry, ignorance. And it's not only that definition, but also come up with different types of ignorance. And you categorize them according to different categories. You also talk about, and you bring them, I mean, you bring them into contemporary topics as well.

I guess it's a good point here to give a definition at least about ignorance in the context of your research, right?

How do you define that? What do you mean by ignorance in this context? Fine. So my definition of ignorance is the traditional one. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. And of course, it follows from employing that definition that it's impossible to construct ignorance. And the

This is where I take issue with some recent sociologists who've discovered ignorance just as the historians had. And I...

I think it's better to talk about keeping people ignorant, which is the traditional phrase, than the construction of an ignorance. And of course, there are many cases in history where one social group has tried to keep another social group

relatively ignorant by denying them access to schooling, for example. Already in 18th century England, there was a group of women who complained that men tried to keep them ignorant in order to dominate them, and that was why they would not allow women to go to school. Hmm.

I definitely stick to the idea of ignorance as an absence.

But you mentioned varieties of ignorance, and there are many, and I listed more than 50 of them in the book. But basically, I think it's useful to work with the distinction into three kinds of ignorance. There's simple ignorance. I don't know the distance between Cambridge and Melbourne.

I could look it up if I wanted, but I happen not to know it. But the second kind of variety, much more dangerous, is people not wanting to know something. Indeed, to put it more strongly, it's people wanting not to know something. And then a third variety is some people

people, some groups not wanting other people to know something. So that's the better known history of secrecy. But I think it is very important not to think of ignorance in a monolithic way, but to distinguish these varieties which have their own histories.

And I think it's an important categorization, especially the one that I guess is very relevant to what's happening around the world today, that people not wanting other groups of people to know. But we'll get to talk about that. I'm sure we'll get to talk about politics and all.

and, you know, post-truth, alternative truth and concepts like that. But when you're talking about ignorance, one thing that I was really, let's say, intrigued by, and I really love that discussion in the book about the epistemology of ignorance and also your discussion about feminism, you just mentioned even the rise of feminism and how they brought about a change in society

social turn, let's say, in regards to that epistemological knowledge that we have. They questioned the gender stereotypes, sometimes racial stereotypes, class-based stereotypes, and people who have that position of knowledge are usually blind or ignorant to those privileges that they have. But can you talk about epistemology of ignorance, what you mean by that, and how feminists brought about a change in the social turn, let's say, or a change in that regard? Yeah.

And long before the rise of organized feminism in the 1970s, already in the 18th century, you find some English women pointing out the paradox that men dismiss women as ignorant, but then they do their best not to allow women to study. Of course, this is a recurrent phenomenon.

accusation to this day in places where women are not allowed to go to school or university. And I studied literature myself. I do remember when I first came across feminist critique, criticism, literary criticism, feminist literary criticism. It was more or less the same way. Rereading works of literature to see how women have been kept out of that position of knowledge and

And earlier, again, you mentioned that ignorance is not necessarily monolithic. There are different types. It might sound like an oxymoron, but in your book, you have something called rational ignorance. And I'm asking if it's, first of all, what is it? And is it a positive kind of ignorance? Or in general, maybe the second part of my question is, does ignorance have...

Ignorance can have benefits as well, for example, in the realm of science.

I would answer that question with a yes, but I don't think there are many benefits, and I think those benefits are outweighed by the risks. But yes, definitely there are times when it's better to be ignorant. And I don't think any of us would like to know the date that we're going to die. And thinking now about groups...

I spent a lot of my working life as a professor marking students' exam papers. I was very glad not to know which student wrote which script. I might have been biased in favour or against that student if I had known, but it's just an anonymous script that I was trying, like other examiners, to judge as

as fairly as I can and still more important in society when there are trials by jury. I think it is an excellent example

idea to keep the members of the jury ignorant from any of the public comments in the different media about the trial. The newspapers, television, social media. The jurors need to be isolated from that and as a result they will make up their minds only on the information presented to them in court.

So in these cases, it's a very valuable form of ignorance, if you can describe an absence in that sort of way. But we need people to be ignorant of certain things at certain times. And of course, the whole business of secrecy. I think governments do have a right, indeed a duty, to keep

ordinary people ignorant, at least for a time, of confidential negotiations that are going on. Those negotiations would be impossible if the public was intervening all the time, telling their government what concession to make or what concession not to make. And I think governments hide much too much.

But still, there is a case for them temporarily concealing something. So, on the other hand, compared to those few examples I'm able to offer you, there are just so many, many examples where ignorance is dangerous, indeed, sometimes fatal. Mm-hmm.

And I guess in one area that you also talk is the realm of science where sometimes realization of that ignorance can help drive forth science. Am I right in that, that ignorance in this way can also be a positive thing scientifically? Yes, sorry, I didn't quite follow that. Could you just... Yeah, I was just asking, for example, ignorance, in your book you have a section on science,

And I think you make the point that sometimes ignorance in that realm could be positive in the sense that you realize you don't know something. You realize there's an absence. And then you go and try to discover that.

That's right. Originally, I was surprised when, in the course of my reading before writing the book, I discovered that some scientists who I thought would be completely against ignorance were claiming that ignorance drives science, that ignorance is, in the words of one

Nobel Prize winner in physics. He gave the acceptance speech in Stockholm and said that our biggest resource as scientists is ignorance.

But it doesn't mean that scientists are saying they should be totally ignorant. Yeah, yeah. But they should be aware of particular ignorances. And if they're sharply aware of something that scientists don't know, it makes it easier to develop a research strategy for filling that particular gap. And so when they say that ignorance

ignorance is a resource they don't mean it in quite the sense that the general public might think but of course it was a good idea to use a phrase like that in their speech because it draws attention to something it made people sit up in their seats and so as a piece of rhetoric I think very effective but

and shouldn't interpret those phases in the literal manner that one normally interprets either accusations or confessions of ignorance. Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. There

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Let's go back in history about the Greeks. Can we assume that the idea of skepticism or the Greeks' approach to ignorance was a skepticism? So to put things in question, is that a right assumption to say that skepticism was like a counterweight to ignorance according to the Greeks? Yes.

Ancient Greek skepticism was essentially an assertion of knowing that one does not know.

They're admitting the possibility of being deceived, being deceived by one's own senses, for example, like seeing a pole as bent when it wasn't bent because half of it was in the water. And the skeptics use examples like this to suggest that...

it was a good idea to think of all our beliefs as provisional. We know so little, we can so easily be wrong. We have to be constantly open to the idea of changing our minds. I think that's very different from the Christian admission of ignorance.

which means, let you say, I can't understand theology, but I believe in Christianity all the same. It implies that knowledge is dangerous. It illustrates human pride, and pride is a sin.

The one case where I think a group of Christians come closer to the ancient Greeks, it's the group of theologians who develop what they call learned ignorance.

And that is, they believed in God, but they also believed that it was impossible for mere humans to know about God. The only statements you could make about God would be negative ones. So, if you like, you could call that a Christian skepticism. But for the rest, I think...

of the ancient Greek skeptics and the later Christians as really they're almost opposites.

And I'm glad you mentioned religion because religion is usually accused of, especially by new atheists, is accused of breeding ignorance, deliberately making people believe in something that doesn't exist, having faith. Or they might say that faith is religions, let's say, escape from trying to understand religion.

They usually resort to science in that case. But do you agree with this statement that, I personally don't think it's accurate, but I'm interested to know your thoughts, that religion might breed ignorance? I'm not so sure I followed the question.

The question that I have is that sometimes new atheists accuse religious people of being ignorant and they say that religion is the cause because religion breeds, creates ignorance. I wonder if you agree with this statement. Not as a generalization. In the past, some religious people have been very suspicious of certain kinds of knowledge and they...

They have opposed scientific research, but that's not all religious people. There have been many religious people who have also been scientists who believe that they could reconcile, for example, a Christian faith with Christianity.

free research on the nature of the universe. Galileo is a good example because Galileo was not an irreligious man. He was an extremely good practicing Catholic, but he thought that the church was wrong to make Christians believe

that the Earth was in the center of the universe. He believed he had evidence that the Earth went round the sun and he tried very hard to make the Catholic Church officially change its mind. In

In other words, he didn't get into trouble with the Inquisition because he was doing the scientific research. He got into trouble because he was telling the church that they had to change their ideas in certain respects. So it's not religion versus science, but it is some religious people in different periods of the past being against religion.

research into the natural world. That's a famous example and I'm glad you brought it up. You're absolutely right in this case, yeah, that it's not really religion versus science.

Because I remember even some of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, he uses the Latin word for science, which is askantia in his writings, and trying to understand the secrets of the world is actually a virtue in his writings. But anyway, let's move to conspiracy theorists. There are, and I guess in the past few years, especially with COVID, there were a lot of

There was a lot of conspiracy theories. There were a lot of anti-vaxxers. And I think, again, those people believe in flat earths. They have their own platforms on social media or Internet. What kind of—and their ideas are rejected by the majority of scientific communities. But what kind of ignorance is it? What do you think is the cause of all these conspiracy theories who believe in things that are obviously false, scientifically speaking?

I would describe that kind of ignorance as voluntary. That is, these people, these groups, do not want to know certain things that make them feel uncomfortable. And what I find amazing as a historian is the long life of particular conspiracy theories.

lasting for many centuries and modified only in very small ways, despite the lack of evidence for them. And the idea that Jews kill babies and maybe also eat them, or the idea that the Jews poison wells, these ideas...

have been circulating for literally thousands of years. So it's a strange experience for a historian to pick up the newspaper. I'm still old-fashioned enough to read paper newspapers and to read in the United States in the last two or three years.

plenty of evidence of people believing for example that Hillary Clinton participated in killing babies exactly the same accusation that was put forward for example in the middle ages by Christians accusing Jews of the same thing and it's

It's extraordinary that ideas for which there are no evidence should have such an extraordinarily long shelf life. But I think one has to call in psychologists to explain this and say that people have a need to believe something for which there is no evidence. Hmm.

Yeah, you're right. And that story of Clinton that he mentioned, I was just myself amazed at how a medieval basis accusation has come up again in the 21st century. We usually tend to think of scientists or academics as being those people who have or possess knowledge. But even academics or even scientists cannot be immune from ignorance or

In your book, I came across this term that I hadn't heard before, citation amnesia. Can you talk about that? What do you mean by citation amnesia? And what kind of ignorance is that one that even those who are scholars or researchers are not immune from?

No one is immune from ignorance, and certainly the group of academics is not immune. My guide is a famous remark by the American humorist Mark Twain. We are all ignorant just of different things. So what is it that academics are ignorant of? Or what is it that academics...

and one to be ignorant of. Well, I think that's where that phrase "citation amnesia" is useful. Academics whose identity is bound up with discovering new things, original research, original conclusions,

That means they don't want to know that something that they thought they were the first to discover had actually been discovered by somebody else earlier. And it's something that very often happens. You carry out your research, you didn't know that other people in the world, either at the same time or were still decades before you, had already reached certain conclusions.

So, what happens is that the academics fail to give the credit.

They don't put the names of people in footnotes, even when they have discovered that they had these predecessors. So, whether deliberately or unconsciously, it's very often difficult to say. But they forget in inverted commas because this is something they don't want to know. And to go a little bit further,

In my more cynical moments, I've thought that academics, even the most honest ones, they will fight everybody, give credit to everybody, except the individual from whom they've learned most. Because it's too much to admit that you've learned...

that so much of your work was already the work of some previous academic. And it's the hardest thing in our world, I think, to accept. You're right. Yeah, I guess that I really like the comment that you acknowledge everyone except those who have you learned a lot from.

And the last thing I expected to see in the book was a chapter on war and also some on American policies as well. But I do remember a few years ago I was speaking with a friend of mine who said that if you want to check the meaning of stupidity in a dictionary, I think a synonym for that should be American foreign policy. And all the series of wars they have waged around the world past, let's say, 50 years after the Second World War.

without really achieving its objectives. And you have a chapter on war and ignorance. Can you talk about that, why you decided to...

include a chapter about war there and there are examples from American, some American disastrous wars there. Can you talk about that? What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95, including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

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I had to confess at the start that I'd never previously studied military history. But in the course of writing a book about ignorance, I realized that war is a very good area for a case study or a series of case studies because in war, ignorance is...

revealed and punished much more visibly and much more rapidly than in other fields. So if especially in old fashioned war, the pitched battle, the forces on two sides and if one general knows a bit more than the other general then there's a very good chance that the

person with the greater amount of knowledge and knowledge of the numbers of the enemy, knowledge of their equipment, knowledge of their position, that the one with more knowledge is likely to win the battle. And war does offer so many dramatic examples of ignorance.

and a particularly dangerous kind is a combination of ignorance with arrogance. And this occurs again and again when professional soldiers are engaged in a war with amateur soldiers, which, in other words, guerrillas. These cases where a professional army has been ordered to invade a particular country

and resistance comes from many ordinary people who had never put on a uniform before, maybe don't put on a uniform, but they learn how to resist. So the professionals despise the amateurs and they don't realize that intelligent people can think of good tactics and good strategies without having gone to the staff college

They forget that the people resisting them are much more motivated to fight and win than the

professional army or particularly if the professional army has increased its numbers with compulsory recruitment, national service and things like that. So a certain scenario has been enacted again and again. So I thought the most vivid scenario

set of examples I ever came across, because this is three examples situated in the main place, concerns the three invasions of Afghanistan, most recently by the Americans, that was disastrous, but before then by the Soviet Russians, that was disastrous.

And further back in time, in the 1839 to 1840, it was the British, that is the East India Company army, that had invaded Afghanistan. And in each case, they faced the same problem. The Afghans were well trained in fighting because the different groups of Afghans

and were constantly fighting one another. And they were well trained. They were well armed. They had firearms with a longer range than the firearms issued to the East India Company's army. And in the British case, as later in the Russian and American cases, there was the same geographical problem that

The armies had to march through narrow mountain passes, and in each of the three cases, the invaders did not realize in time that it was fatal to march through these passes without previously commanding the heights. So the Afghans in the heights of the mountains

could fire down on the enemy, marching sometimes slowly or driving slowly through these difficult conditions. In other words, the invaders became sitting ducks that the Afghan soldiers could finish off at their leisure.

I'm not saying that soldiers are more ignorant than other kinds of people, only that the ignorance is exposed much more rapidly and fatally often than other kinds of ignorance, which is why I decided to devote a whole chapter to this particular variety of ignorance.

This was a great recap of history, let's say, one small part of history and how ignorance persists and the fact that we don't learn anything from history. Earlier, we talked about conspiracy theorists and that you said they choose voluntary ignorance. I'm interested to know your thoughts about

Current states of affairs with the recent election of Donald Trump, there is this billionaire class that owns and controls social media. A lot of people are getting their information from social media, unfortunately, and they're just glued to their digital screens.

And there is a huge, huge amount of manufactured ignorance, huge amounts of misinformation, whatever it is called, alternative truth, post-truth and conspiracy theories. How do you think we can combat this rising trend? How we can equip ourselves with this critical knowledge?

thinking abilities to combat ignorance. So I think this is an old problem that it is taking new forms. I don't believe in the manufacture of ignorance, but I do believe in the manufacture of lies. Lies are probably as old as human language. On the other hand, it was only late in the 20th century that the term disinformation was coined.

by the Russians to describe the deliberate public spreading of lies for political reasons. So I think we have to distinguish misinformation when you say something and it's not true, but you think it's true, and you distinguish that from disinformation,

When you say something is true, but you know that it's not true, you better use it to manipulate people.

So, public lies are not new. But what has changed rather rapidly in the 21st century is the speed of their spread, the range of their spread, as a result of changes in the media of communication when radio and television have been supplemented or if not replaced

by social media. And so what can we do about it? And I think essentially there are

three useful ways to respond. The first is to fight disinformation by legislation which will oblige broadcasters to verify information before they pass it on. The second means is to spread public knowledge of websites that will allow individuals to check facts by

connecting up with people whose job is verification. But the third and most important way of fighting back, because it involves even more of the world population than the others do, is to encourage a critical awareness of the need to verify statements.

rather than believing everything that one sees or hears. This awareness, I think, can and should be taught in schools, I think, probably from quite an early age, maybe seven years old. And indeed, there are places in Britain and the United States, I know, maybe in

in Australia too, where this kind of awareness is already taught in schools. So it's a critical attitude that has long been cultivated by professional groups, including my own, the historians.

This is what we call source criticism. However, in the world of the 21st century, this critical attitude is necessary to everybody and the schools would be the best way to start spreading it.

Dr. Peter Berg, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about your book. The book we just discussed was called Ignorance, A Global History, published by Yale University Press in 2024. Dr. Peter Berg, thank you very much for your time. It was my pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting me.