May 15, 2023
Is Knowledge Always Desired?
“Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was”, the creature in Frankenstein utters, summarizing one of the core themes in Mary Shelley’s novel. The meaning is inescapable for the hapless being: Knowledge is not always desired. The question is whether that could apply to us all and why.
Let me confess it right away: Knowledge is something I am nearly obsessed about. That is, I feel very stressed if I don’t know something, and much calmer if I do, even if it’s knowledge of something unpleasant. If someone asked me “There’s good news and bad news, do you prefer…” I’d interrupt them with “Oh, spit it out all together already!”
However, I also have enough life experience (a milder way of saying I’m becoming a grumpy old man) to know that this approach doesn’t necessarily apply to others. People like self-deception.
The truth is, we intuitively might think knowledge is always desired, we might even affirm so if asked, but things are more complex than that.
“Knowledge Is Always Desired” Is a Philosophical Position
What could be a reason we might profess knowledge is always desired yet our actions don’t follow suit?
To say that knowledge is always desired is a philosophical statement, largely separate from social and psychological factors. In other words, if you asked person A whether, generally speaking, it’s good to know about thing X, they’d likely say “yes”, unless it affects them personally, directly (a psychological factor) or indirectly (a social factor).
I can give you a real-life example to see how far people can go denying knowledge (literally, apognosis) in order to avoid facing inconvenience: Once, seeing the contents of my mother’s shopping cart, I told her: “If I tell you what’s in that processed food you bought, you won’t eat it again”. Her response? “No, no! Don’t tell me, or I won’t be able to eat it again!”
Knowledge not Always Desired: Psychological Factors
The example above shows when knowledge becomes undesired as a result of psychological factors. In other words, my mother was so unwilling to change her habits that she preferred to hide her head in the sand and pretend nothing was wrong just because she didn’t know anything was wrong.
The results of knowledge here are direct, having to do with one’s ability to handle the truth. As such, knowledge is undesirable because it has an effect that is entirely psychological in nature.
I mean, anyone could clearly understand that not knowing that food X contains this much saturated fat doesn’t change their accumulation in one’s body. Denying the knowledge is nothing more than pretending you don’t have to act on it – in this example, going through the inconvenient process of finding a substitute, exercising, or overall opting for a different lifestyle.
But how about if one can’t change something? Is there merit in still knowing?
Legitimate Reasons to Withholding Knowledge
Recently, while reading about various Apollo missions, I discovered there were times when information, knowledge about something, wasn’t given to the crew. Besides occasions where information was withheld simply to limit their workload, there were some “special cases”, like Apollo 13, where pessimistic assessments for things the crew couldn’t do anything about were withheld.
I’m (obviously) not an astronaut, nor do I have any kind of expertise useful in the context. I only represent myself, an average layperson, when I say that I would prefer to know, even if it were pessimistic news.
Nonetheless, I can also clearly understand the merit of not being told. When there are thousands of actions to undertake in a hostile, unpredictable environment, in a situation far from the usual scenarios trained for, any piece of knowledge that doesn’t serve the mission shouldn’t be allowed to negative impact functions for psychological reasons.
Knowledge not Always Desired: Social Factors
Sometimes – perhaps often – we question whether knowledge is always desired as a result of social factors. That is, knowing something won’t affect us directly, but it can either affect us indirectly or affect others; society at large.
The most typical example for this category is the advent of nuclear weapons.
The regrets and overall ethical problems surrounding the development of the atomic bomb are well documented. Essentially, this is a Frankenstein problem: Is there knowledge that, though accessible, should be left alone because it might have catastrophic consequences – whether directly or indirectly?
The atomic bomb is a clear example of direct consequences: There was the intention to acquire knowledge to make a powerful weapon. An example of indirect consequences – indeed, one we currently grapple with – is that of artificial intelligence.
There are people who fear – not entirely in jest – that developing a very powerful AI can turn out to be an extinction event. Should we ignore knowledge just to be on the safe side? I’ll offer my views in the next, concluding section.
Knowledge Is Often not a Matter of Choice
In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt warning him that the Nazis are working on a mega-weapon, the atomic bomb, essentially paving the way for the Manhattan project. Fast forward 6 years later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Einstein said “Woe is me”, later adding: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing”.
Hindsight is a bitch – if I may be a bit blunt and informal.
That’s the problem with knowledge and technology: You can’t ethically assess something new and ground-breaking before it exists. Not fully, at least.
Ultimately, knowledge is not a matter of choice, especially when it comes to “serious” knowledge, that has far-reaching consequences. Technological advancement cannot be stopped. At best, it can be regulated and assessed carefully.
As for knowledge on the individual level, working in a psychological framework? I’d say its conscious acceptance can be postponed: You can certainly pretend drinking heavily, eating processed foods, or smoking isn’t bad for you. You can even convince your conscious self that it really is so, by refusing to accept knowledge of all the evidence. Yet your subconscious will know and, sooner or later, your body will inevitably become privy to this postponed knowledge, by paying the price.
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There are billions of data bits coming at you per second. You can’t be aware of them all.
But you can be aware of many of them, see the details in a flower or a butterfly, and want to know more – and read about it/hear about it/study it. You can ask yourself what you DON’T know, and whether what you’re told as a child makes sense. School has become a shoveling of ‘facts’ – and that’s a secular one.
I guess I was lucky. I understand things like Fibonacci sequences, folding algorithms for paper or proteins or cranes, how a rainbow happens – plus the manufactured/discovered ones like calculus and differential equations which can come close to predicting real physical events/patterns you can measure.
I know how ignorant I am (in some major areas), and how competent I am and up to what level. And how hard I would have had to want to study to get higher. Except for the planned end of things, I am content – and always discovering something fascinating. And I still have an outlet for some of my creativity, a reason to keep exploring and trying new things – even in my current state – which might even include making that better. I’ll take it.
I think volition is the key concept here. There indeed are a multitude of details all around us, which we could learn more about, but the depressing majority of us simply don’t.
I mean, what if you traveled back in time and met, say, Aristotle and told him, I come from a time where in the warmth and comfort of your soft bed, you can hold a device the size of a slice of bread, and using it you can read (entirely for free) every single piece of the cumulative human knowledge – and then added, But most people mostly use it to watch dogs farting, leave mean comments for each other, or send unsolicited photos of their anatomy to strangers… What would Aristotle say to that?
People like you and me have indeed been lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to acquire some knowledge (in our respective fields); many people (indeed most, when we’re talking globally) don’t have anywhere near this opportunity. But there are also vast numbers of people who would’ve had the opportunity but simply don’t care about it. And this goes beyond formal education or anything of the sort. I’m talking about basic, everyday curiosity.
Ultimately, I think most people are like my mother, as I described in the post: They don’t want to know because they don’t want to be inconvenienced. So they choose some authority figure and outsource their responsibilities to it. Cornelius Castoriadis has put it much more eloquently than I ever could:
https://youtu.be/vf00I2mpeYc
It depends. Knowledge is essential for a surgeon performing an operation. It might be detrimental for someone questioning their own behaviour as it might trigger a subjective opinion.
I would argue these are two separate discussions: one is on knowledge, the other on behavior (i.e. what to do with that knowledge). But, to be sure, you are right; this is the whole point. Knowledge can modify our behavior and, as a result, potentially throw us I to an unfavorable situation.
Oh…so many ways of looking at this question! Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden because they learned forbidden knowledge. The Devil used the lure of knowledge to corrupt them. ‘Ignorance is bliss’, which leads to the deliberate withholding of knowledge because… knowledge is power, which leads to the dissemination of false ‘knowledge’ because that equates to even more power. Goebbels: ‘Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.’….
Knowledge has always been the key to power in man’s history, which says more about the human race than it does about knowledge. I believe knowledge is the only form of true freedom.
I like your association between knowledge and freedom. It includes the element of being unpleasant, of disrupting one’s life, as Castoriadis (see my comment above) argued. Ultimately, we can be peaceful, ignorant, and enslaved, or we can be troubled, knowledgeable, and free. Obviously, there are in-between states, too, passages from one condition to the other.