The drive to pursue wisdom is engrained in every human being, right? So many have believed. But in his new book, Ignorance and Bliss, Mark Lilla argues that a certain “will to ignorance” is also part of the human experience. Like Plato’s Thrasymachus, many in the modern world want to throw up their hands in resignation rather than commit themselves to the pursuit of truth. Lilla offers an explanation for this phenomenon, drawing on philosophy, religion, psychology, and history. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book.

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Ignorance and Bliss by Mark Lilla

Transcript

James M. Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Our guest today is Professor Mark Lilla. He’s professor of humanities at Columbia University. Today, we’ll be talking about his book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. Many of our listeners may be familiar with other works by Professor Lilla, including The Stillborn God and The Reactionary Mind. He has been prolific and influential in many of his works, and I don’t doubt that today, our discussion will show that his most recent work deserves as much attention as his previous. So Professor Lilla, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Mark Lilla:

Very good to be here. Thank you.

James M. Patterson:

So, Professor Lilla, the book has a very provocative subtitle, “On Wanting Not to Know.” What is it about knowledge that poses a threat to human beings and why is it that sometimes we misunderstand that, especially those of us who are in what we might call the knowledge business?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, well, as I try to suggest in the book that the struggle between wanting to know, curiosity, and wanting not to know, which is a resistance to knowledge, that those two forces are present in our minds all the time. And we go through life on the one hand, pushing on the accelerator, on the other pushing on the brake. And there are some good reasons for that that seem to be embedded just in the nature of human life and social life.

But there are also ways in which it becomes pathological and it becomes pathological if we are resisting knowledge that’s important to know to make public decisions, for example. And it also can be threatening if it leads us to entertain various fantasies of finding an alternative to reason and also the fantasy of going back to an older utopia or a forward utopia rather than to confront the present. So it begins with us and it begins with our struggle over recognizing what we ourselves as individuals are.

James M. Patterson:

On page 14 of the book, you have a great typology of these sorts of figures. You say that one such illusion is a secret, esoteric way of being in the world that gives access to previous truths. Another is the vain hope of preserving our original innocence. And a third is the scape of the historical present to an imagined past bucolic simplicity. So let’s start with this secret, esoteric way of being. In what sense is this ignorance? Isn’t it supposed to be that there’s some sort of exclusive knowledge?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, no, that’s the right question. And I see it as, in fact, a way of avoiding the hard work of sorting through our experience and coming to our own conclusions and also being skeptical of our own hypotheses and testing them. And so the mystical idea, and it takes on many forms, but the mystical idea is that reason is the problem and that the knowledge you think you have up to now is all error.

And the reason is you, as a simple human with weak reason, are incapable of understanding fundamental things about human existence, about the cosmos, about ethics, or anything. And therefore you have to go through a process of emptying yourself of the false opinions that you have, shutting off the reason machine and then opening yourself to a revelation which can only enter if everything else is off. It’s like a hydraulic system. You can’t have both.

And so on the one hand, the draw of the mystical experience is that it will give you truth once and for all, but truth-seeking is not a … You can’t retire from it. That to seek knowledge is also to test it and to keep trying to see if what you think is the case actually matches your experience and evidence and so on, whether it makes any logical sense. And so it’s a way of declaring victory and walking home. And that is not the way that you live a life in the light of truth, which requires a skeptical pursuit of it.

James M. Patterson:

One of the passages in the book that really got to me was this discussion. Now, make sure I get this right. Is it misologues? Is that how you wanted to?

Mark Lilla:

Mm-hmm.

James M. Patterson:

Yeah, whose sort of expression you give to Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, saying about him, Thrasymachus has snapped in his conversation with Socrates and the Republic, and he says that like many people, misologues are like many people in Thrasymachus, they like telling their own conversion stories. I once was naive about the world, but after X, the last election, the recent war, the endless scandals, the world’s indifference [to] fake news, I got wise. What’s so bad about this in terms of doing philosophy, these misologues, what do they do that’s so harmful?

Mark Lilla:

Well, the term misologues was actually coined by Plato in these dialogues to describe a certain sort of person. He makes a likeness with misanthropy and he says that the reason we become misanthropic is that we have various bad experiences with people and we put our hopes in them and they’re disappointed. And at a certain point we crack and we give up on the human race. And he said the same thing can happen with the exercise of reason. That if we try to understand something in the world and think that we do, only to discover that it’s false or some argument someone convinced us of also turns out to be false, we begin to think or we might start to begin to think that the enterprise itself is pointless, that all of this arguing and reason-giving and examination of evidence really is just undergone or it takes place because people want to occlude what is actually happening in the world.

And so this character Thrasymachus is hearing arguments about justice and whether justice is worth choosing for its own sake. And Thrasymachus throws up his hands and he says, “This is a ridiculous conversation. We all know that justice is the advantage of the stronger.” And so then they go and have an argument about that and then Thrasymachus sort of pouts and shuts up until later on in the book.

And so it’s when we lose faith in our quest for knowledge that we become susceptible to just any sorts of falsehoods and simply standing our ground, shutting the doors and windows of our little cabin, putting a barking dog outside the door so no new information can come in. And what connects these two things in Socrates’ view is what we lack is an art of judging the things that we’re engaged in. So for example, the reason we did get disappointed with people is not that people are somehow presenting themselves differently from the way they are, but rather that we lack the art of choosing and seeing which people are worth putting our trust in, even our love in, and won’t be disappointed. So there’s an art of an investing our emotions.

Similarly, when it comes to arguments, people who engage in a little philosophy and throw up their hands and say it’s just a crock, don’t have the art of shaping arguments and understanding what they can and can’t do. And for Socrates, the most we can do is set out a hypothesis, put our chips on that to keep questioning it, keep looking for evidence that disconfirms it. And when we discover that it’s wrong and that there’s a superior argument or way of looking at the world, we should rejoice. But something in us doesn’t want to rejoice. We get attached to our arguments. And so it was very difficult to follow through in practice that philosophical art in the way that Socrates described it.

James M. Patterson:

That’s very true. When it comes to our attachments, there’s a sort of honor that comes with defending the position even to your own sort of intellectual death. There is also this great discussion here of veil snatching. I’m not sure how much this relates to the idea of a misologue, that’d be actually an interesting thing for you to talk about, but veil snatching is this story about being bound up in a desire to rip the veil off the statue of Isis in order to learn the truth. What happens when you rip that veil off?

Mark Lilla:

Well, the story is quite extraordinary, and it was fictionalized in a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the German poet, eighteenth century poet, and he imagines that a young man from Europe goes to Africa to Egypt and he wants to go to Sais, which is where apparently there’s a statue of the goddess Isis, who’s the holder of wisdom, but there’s a veil over her eyes because to see the truth, the whole truth, it had nothing but the truth all at once would be paralyzing and we’re not prepared for it.

And therefore you have to go through, in the cult of Isis, you had to go through all sorts of training and learning different practices. You had to pay money to learn secret things. It was sort of a devotion in your life to this cult, hoping to be introduced slowly to wisdom. Well, this young man comes down and fired up by the ideas of the enlightenment, decides he wants truth with a capital T. That is, he thinks there is such a thing and he wants all of it all at once.

And so he goes to this temple and the guardian there lets him in. And the young man says, “Have you never been tempted to pull the veil off?” And he was told by this shocked guardian that, “Oh, no one has never done that. The goddess has forbidden it, and terrible things will happen.” So that night, the young man goes to bed and can’t stand it anymore, runs to the temple, climbs over the wall, goes in, pulls up a ladder, goes up and pulls off the veil of Isis.

And in the next morning, the guardian finds him on the floor unconscious and he’s finally able to wake up and he just babbles from then on. And he was never able to live a happy day thereafter and could not talk about the experience. And so it’s a fantastic story about taboos, how we in our cultures, establish them, both establish them and then try to tear them down at the same time. What’s going on there psychologically in relation to obtaining truth? So that’s another one of those examples like the mystic one of wanting everything all at once, but not wanting to conduct a philosophical life, which is a way of life and it’s a way of intellectual behavior. It’s not a single epiphanic experience.

James M. Patterson:

In these moments, our will to knowledge undergoes a subtle change no longer aimed at some practical end or inspired by wonder, no longer about the knowing. It is now entirely about the willing, the right to assert ourselves. That’s what you say about the veil snatcher, it has a rush of liberation. Is this what you mean when you talk about the people who wish to find a way to escape to our original innocence or feel free from tragic knowledge?

Mark Lilla:

Well, those things are all linked in those last chapters that when I talk about the myth of one-stop shopping for knowledge and obtaining it all at once, that’s one myth that tempts us to escape the hard work of coming to know. The second one is to idealize innocence and to somehow persuade ourselves that it is when we as individuals, were in our youngest state, that not only were we better because of it because we had no knowledge of good and evil, but also we were somehow also knowing more. We somehow lose something by growing up is the myth, I think.

And so there’s a lot of projection onto children historically in ancient cults that use young children’s in their rites because they were thought to be a perfect medium between the gods and the believers. And it shows up in the story of Heidi, for example, and the way she is treated as a font of wisdom and changes a nasty old man’s life. And he starts smiling and singing and it’s a Hollywood ending.

James M. Patterson:

That was a surprising addition, I was going through all of this grand literature and Schiller and the Bible and suddenly Heidi shows up. That was a good moment for me.

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, well, it’s a good example. And then the last myth is that by returning to our social or cultural innocence, before the rise of the enlightenment, before the rise of modern technology and so on, we can make a leap back and restore everything to what it was, and life will be simpler and easier for us to understand. So these are escape hatches really out of the cave, but the image of the cave and the person who is being pulled up out into the sunlight to see in Plato’s Myth of the Cave, you can imagine there might be side doors on that path going up that seemed like an easy access, but they aren’t. They aren’t.

James M. Patterson:

One of the details in this, I should have actually opened with this now I think about it, there’s this very compelling retelling of the Plato’s Myth of the Cave at the beginning of the book, talking about someone escaping the cave and bringing someone with them. In this case you choose it’s a boy and the boy wants to go back. Did you choose the child for this reason that there’s these mythologies around children?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, yeah, in part. And also, yeah, no, for that reason and also because he was less experienced. So for your listeners, the way I retell the story is that in the classic story, these people are in a cave looking at a wall. They see shadows, they think it’s reality, they’re shackled in a way that they can’t see anything else. And I update it by saying that they all have sort of virtual reality glasses around them. And someone comes in and taps them on the shoulder, pulls off the glasses, and they suddenly see where they are and realize in a flash that what they took to be reality is not reality and find themselves in this humiliating position.

And so this person is invited to make the climb up into the sunlight where the forms are and so on. And in my version, he decides, he sees a little boy next to him and out of pity brings the little boy along too, saying that he should be able to see the light and they go up and they spend their time doing whatever one does out in the sunlight. Plato doesn’t tell us what happens up there, part contemplation and looking at the sun and some divided line and it’s all very mystical and obscure, but at a certain point the man is asked to go back down and bring someone up just as he had been brought up.

And then the whole drama of that part is his eyes are used to the sun, he has to stumble down into the darkness. He doesn’t understand the darkness, he can’t see, people think he’s a fool. So that’s a picture of the philosopher when he goes back among the ignorant. And so knowing it was going to be difficult, the man told a little boy, well, he could stay up in the sunlight and the man would be back with someone soon. And the young boy immediately begins to cry and he falls on his knees and pulls at the cloak of the man and says, “I don’t want to leave. I can’t leave. I hate it up here.”

And he proceeds to recount what he misses. “It’s sunny all the time. There’s never any shade. The forms are what they are.” He now understands reality and he knows that nothing else will ever be different. There’s no reason to play or imagine something else. There’s no reason to think you have something to discover in meeting someone else, establishing a friendship, or falling in love because you know everything. And so he misses, the little boy does, he misses dreaming of adventures. He misses his pixelated friends that he saw on his little screen. And so he begs to stay and he does.

James M. Patterson:

A very, very tough thing to read, especially at the opening of a book, but in a way that’s really depicting sort of the single human soul, right, the desire to know, but the desire not to know that launches the discussion and the varieties we have here. We have this desire to liberation we mentioned before, is the idea behind liberation, this willing that you described, is this what informs a lot of radical politics that we see historically, both on the left and the right, that there’s some sort of truth in the willing itself?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah. Well, the part that you were mentioning earlier where I talk about willing is where a conversation in which we are trying to discuss something, seeking the truth with someone somehow turns bad and we get invested in it and suddenly it’s about victory or death. And so that’s one way in which it plays the role. But maybe you have something else in mind.

James M. Patterson:

Yeah, I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear. I was thinking still in the same chapter, Veils, where you talk about the narrative about the progressive triumph of human curiosity developing out this fascination, enlightenment optimism. Are these related ideas, this desire for innocence that one can secure through some kind of willing of the truth found in the enlightenment into history?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah. Well, again, I think in that chapter where the will comes in is that somehow as human beings, we put veils over things and someone nails a do not enter sign on a door, and there’s something in us that not just wants to know out of curiosity, but suddenly wants to break through the door because we feel that someone, a person has put a barrier before us. And rather than respecting that, rather than thinking, “Well, there probably is a good idea,” at least some of us, at least some of the time want to rattle the door and we want to get in. And it’s no longer about finding the truth, it’s about asserting your will to dominance against someone who’s dominating you by telling you not to go in.

James M. Patterson:

Oh, okay. I think I get that now. Honestly, I probably should have saved that for the end when I was trying to sort out some of my own questions. Another archetype to bring up is the prophet and the prophet especially as the empty vessel, the person who sort of achieves a kind of divine stature, not by being divine himself or herself, but by being the proper vessel for the divine to communicate somehow. What is this kind of knowledge? Is this a kind of knowledge that a person has directly given to them or is the person securing this knowledge instead listening to the divine that’s inhabited?

Mark Lilla:

Well, yeah, that’s always the question. Every society that makes room for a prophet in its religion finds himself in a dilemma. So if a prophet goes up a mountain, says he has a revelation and comes down with a tablet of laws, what are we supposed to do with that? Well, one thing we can ask ourselves is has the prophet got the message right? And one way of finding that out is to test the laws and to see whether they’re good laws or not. And if they’re good laws, then it would seem to be a genuine revelation. If not, well then it may be that we have a faulty prophet here.

The next step though is where it becomes complicated because if we can reason about prophecy and test it, it sounds like that means we don’t need prophecy at all. We just need to reason and test things for ourselves all the time. So that leads us to think that, well, what makes it prophecy and what makes the prophet a genuine one is that what he says is unquestionable and that perhaps its very irrationality to us shows that it’s an important hidden truth that we in our limitations either have to accept or learn something about.

And so in the traditions of Judaism and Islam in particular, there are big debates over whether the prophet is someone who is unknowing and simply becomes a conduit for a divine message, in which case that would just have to be accepted or whether the prophet has to be the smartest guy on the block. And that’s why God chose him to give the message. And this prophet will have reasons for the prophecy he makes, and you will then be able to reason about it. And so there’s this tension with divine revelation between having to think about it and reason and perhaps be independent of prophecy on the other hand, or to just accept it.

A next reason why this problem of prophecy is so important is that each of them, these two models, give us a different picture of what it is like to live not only a holy life but an intellectual life as such. And on the one model, we accept the prophecy and simply apply it to life. So what we’re reasoning about is how to apply it. The other is that we also are meant to understand it in some deep sense or to understand why it’s good. We have to understand that God not only made the world, he said it was good. So that invites us, you would think, to look at the things that God delivers to us and ask and think about whether they are good.

And so on the first model, there’s a simple-minded way of applying the law, which is to take it literally, a la lettre. And if it says, “You don’t do this on a Saturday,” you don’t do this on a Saturday, but the other wants to think about how to apply the law in a larger sense. So let’s say that the commandment says to honor our fathers and mothers. Well, what does that mean? What do our parents think honor means? What would be meaningful to them as honor? And honoring them, one would think would mean trying to keep them healthy. And if you want to keep them healthy, you have to know something about health and therefore something about medicine. If that’s the case, you want to live in a world where there are doctors and doctors would need to be trained. Therefore, you would need schools that teach medicine and that also do research on their own in order to understand nature by itself.

So it turns out that this very simple commandment requires a whole way of life for the society in order to fulfill it. And so honoring our fathers and mothers might require living in a world in which there’s modern medical technology if we can develop it. And we have scientists doing basic research and we have philosophers thinking about scientific method.

James M. Patterson:

Are these sorts of prophetic imaginaries what help inspire some people to will to the past or to retreat to some period when things were better understood, a period when people were more faithful to the law? Is that what inspires that or is there more to that story?

Mark Lilla:

No, no, you’re absolutely right because one way in which someone can agitate politically is to treat him or herself as a kind of historical prophet. And we can see how that works in revolutionary terms. So a prophet who writes something or declares something that sets people out to undo the current order in order to move into some glorious future. You can imagine in the other direction too, that you could look through scripture for example, and find elements in the prophetic books that, put together, might give us a sense that we have a duty to move back to a certain kind of society that we left.

And so when we’re discussing these things, what’s interesting and important to note is we’re not discussing what is good and bad to do. The question of good and bad has somehow become transferred into a question of forward or backwards. And so you end up with political movements that really want to capture history and master history rather than simply understand human nature and how we might structure society in order that human beings might flourish.

James M. Patterson:

You describe in the chapter called Legion how obsessions with demons tend to appear in moments of historical or religious crisis setting off panics and then fading away. The modern enlightenment and the scientific revolution took their toll on these superstitions, and by the nineteenth century demon panics became rarer. Is this something that you anticipate reversing as people become more skeptical of scientific reason or the progress of the enlightenment? Do we expect to see, as you described, an unexpected wave of occult spiritualism sweeping through?

Mark Lilla:

We’re in the middle of one. I mean, if you look at the numbers of people who hold beliefs like this, they keep growing. And it’s in part what you say that there’s a distrust of authority and there’s skepticism, but behind that also lies something else. And that is the difficulty of mastering anything in the world right now, that we live in a world where things are changing constantly, not only our economy, but our values, our families, views about sexuality, all of these things. And we’re getting bombarded with arguments now that we have the internet. We’re bombarded with arguments on all sides about this.

And so it’s very easy to get yourself into a kind of misological position and to just want to either accept one position as true and refuse to think about it anymore. We see a lot of that politically now or to think there’s got to be a better way to figure this out or figure out what I should be doing in my life because the world has become illegible. There’s so much change, so fast that we never feel like we’re standing on ground anymore. We feel like we’re on surfboards and just trying to meet the next wave, and it’s hard to order our values and plan our lives if that’s the feeling. And so it would be understandable in such a situation that people going through a rough spot or simply wanting to understand would turn to some of these occult sources, thinking that since it’s impossible to make sense of things by ourselves, we need to get help from another realm.

James M. Patterson:

There’s a real sense, I get a very dread-filled sort of sensation when reading this book in places because on the one hand, there’s reason to suspect some of the people who claim to possess this scientific authority, they’re kind of advancing their own agendas sometimes. But if the alternative is to embrace this weird occultism, then really what’s happening is the people are becoming marks. They’re becoming subjects of scams. They’re the ones who are driving past on the freeway, they see the psychic reader and they’re like, “That’s the person with the answers. That person clearly is not scamming me.” How is it that in a public life where there’s skepticism about legitimate authorities and instead only option is to essentially allow yourself to be scammed? What rescue is there for such a population?

Mark Lilla:

Boy, I wish I had a good answer to that. It’s so much the question of our time. You put it very, very well. The first thing is in our educational system, it’s important that we teach our children, one, how the scientific method works, and two, how the institutions of government work. Given the need to address multiple issues in real time with limited information, with conflicting interests, and also conflicting goods, being in government is hard.

Being a scientist is even harder because essentially you’re in the position, especially if you are a scientist who then is giving advice to a government, you as a scientist know that everything you say is tentative. That, “The best research we have tells us X, but I wish we had better research.” And if we get better research, we may come along and tell you, “Well, now the research says not X.” And the reaction of the public now as one saw during the pandemic was to say, “Well, how can we trust these people? They tell us to do one thing one day, they tell us to do something else another day. We got to wash our hands. No, it’s our masks. Our kids have to stay home from school. Now they don’t.”

Well, that’s a scientific life, baby. I mean, it’s just the way it works. And our public has become really ignorant about this, and it makes them very, very susceptible to demagogues who want to exploit their ignorance. And the same thing happens in dealing with public authorities. The drop in trust in public institutions is not, in my view, that these institutions have become extremely less trustworthy, but that there’s been a rise in expectations because we feel we know everything about government because we could turn on a podcast and hear about it, that we don’t put ourselves in the shoes of real people who have to make real decisions under all the constraints I mentioned earlier.

So when it comes to this question, I’m in a scolding mood.

James M. Patterson:

Now you’re the prophet, right? But the story that I had in mind as you were describing the fate of the American people comes towards the end of the book and a chapter or a sort of unit called Lambs, and that’s the very rich hours of Samuel Pickwick in which Pickwick has to learn about how little he knows and how it requires him being constantly the victim of all kinds of exploitation for him to finally discern what’s actually in the world rather than as he believes it should be.

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, it’s a beautiful Dickens novel that I read every few years. If you’re ever feeling blue, pick it up. That’s what I do, because it’s a description. It was Dickens’s attempt to do an English version of Don Quixote. And what you have is a very simple-minded, good gentleman. He’s been in business, doesn’t know much about the world, is not psychologically complex. He’s just basically a very good and trusting person, and he never makes moral mistakes, but he does make lots of mistakes. And that’s because he doesn’t realize the degree to which other people in the world are not as good and innocent as himself, or they’re more psychologically complex and can be moved to do irrational things. Like an old spinster sister who runs off with some actor who passes through town. Pickwick doesn’t understand any of this.

And eventually because of that, he finds himself in a lawsuit and for idiotic reasons, and he finds himself in this terrible jail, the Fleet, the worst jail in England, where Dickens himself spent some years when he was a child with his family, and suddenly he’s with all these criminals and he’s having a kind of epiphany about these other people and his servant who’s very wise to the world, not innocent at all, gets himself arrested to get into the prison and to get poor Mr. Pickwick out.

And so the end of the story is that Pickwick now is a little more cognizant of the possibility of mixed motives or evil in the world, but he hasn’t taken it so much to heart that he’s lost his happiness, his generosity and those things. And his servant who was very cynical about everything, has encountered this beautiful innocent creature and has learned something himself that you can have a kind of moral beauty in the world. And so it’s a story where a kind of innocence and a knowingness come together and rather than come into conflict, they kind of teach each other something.

James M. Patterson:

And to me, the reason why I thought to bring that up is that it parallels the discussion you had about the way educators are supposed to explain to the American people the more complicated nature of these things. It’s not either a story of rank exploitation or full understanding, rank exploitation by bad actors or full understanding by scientific experts, that there’s mistakes, that people make mistakes. There’s imperfection in all these outcomes. You can’t always attribute a uniform motive to everyone to acts in government.

And it’s a peculiar feature because you don’t suspect that ordinary people when speaking to them that they will go out onto the basketball court and try to play against LeBron James or run track against Usain Bolt. But when it comes to doing this sort of stuff, when it comes to doing intellectual or political work, there’s this presumed equality that maybe they shouldn’t have. Maybe there should be a certain degree of deference, but then the trust gets broken because of either perceived or real sort of violation of the informer, the educator. How does one navigate all of these pitfalls?

Mark Lilla:

Yeah. Well, one of them is to, in my view, be skeptical at the outset of stories that somehow a scientist who spent all these years learning very complex science, has experience in dealing with diseases around the world, has somehow waited for this moment to somehow diddle you. It makes no sense whatsoever. So to begin with, I would not give in and just say, “Well, if you perceive it, you perceive it.” If you perceive it, it’s not there, you’re wrong.

But on the other hand, it is a problem because you point to something that Tocqueville is very, very deep on, and it ends up being connected to the tyranny of the majority. Because he says, if you remember sort of in the first half of the book, that Americans believe that we’re all equal on the one hand in the first sentence, and therefore we are all equally endowed with reason, and we can figure things out ourselves.

On the other hand, they run into problems that they don’t know how to solve and they become ashamed. And it’s shame that plays an important emotional role in this rejection of experts because you know that you don’t know and you want to assert that you do know, but you don’t. But then what happens is, and here, there’s a nice twist in Tocqueville where he says, so let’s say you wanted to look for an expert, and you look to your neighbor and you discover he’s just like you. And in fact, if you’re all equal, there can’t be experts. And to be an expert is to kind of violate the social contract by putting yourself above other people. So the principle of equality and the principle of being able to know things yourself come into conflict, and Tocqueville sees that as a deep tension in democracy. There’s not an easy way of solving this.

Certainly making, teaching the scientific method. Sometimes it means either more transparency or less. I think decisions were easier in the past because government prior to the sixties or the seventies actually, when there were all these sunshine laws and so on, a lot of decisions were made behind closed doors. And so that goes back to the chapter about veils and a disadvantage, which we learn is that people are talking to themselves in a bubble and make very bad decisions, as in Vietnam.

The other danger though is that by not being able to go to a closed room and work this out with people who understand what things have to be weighed in order to make a good decision, then you’re protected against political grandstanding and people trying to benefit politically by treating the whole thing demagogically. And so that too is a tension. Some things we may need to make more public, so it’s clear to people what went into the decision-making and they feel may be involved. And in other things, it may be that we just need a closed door to make these decisions.

James M. Patterson:

That’s right. After all the basketball court does now allow the audience. And the same way you could say that we don’t necessarily need cameras in every session of Congress and in every committee meeting, or frankly, thankfully, we don’t have this too often in the classrooms where now we would conceivably surveil professors who have to sometimes ask provocative questions that might get them in trouble just so that the students might learn something. This has been one of the frustrations I have when people take out of context course titles and say, “Can you believe they’re teaching this?”

Mark Lilla:

Yeah, no, exactly. Well, I used an example early in the book where in the beginning of the book I’m talking about how all the time with ourselves, we’re playing with the will to know and the will not to know. If you’re getting bald and getting heavy, you sort of avoid mirrors or you turn in a certain way and suck in your stomach. You want people to flatter you so you have more courage to do something else. There are all sorts of ways in which we keep knowledge from ourselves in ways that are good for us.

And one of the examples I use is to imagine a world in which everyone had an LED screen embedded in their foreheads. And just imagine what it would be like living like that. You go out into the street, someone looks at you and you immediately see what they think. You then think a thought, “Oh my gosh, she thinks I’m hideous.” And then she sees that. And so you would end up simply paying attention to what other people are thinking while they’re doing the same thing. And it would be impossible to become a self, a self that’s autonomous, that is not so in constants, heteronomous, driven by society. So even the philosophical demand that we know ourselves depends on not knowing what people think of us all the time.

James M. Patterson:

Just as we kind of come to an end here, there are some heroes in this book. I think one of them very clearly to me was Socrates, but also the status of Freud. You sort of come to his defense. We’d actually just did a podcast on Philip Rieff, so Freud didn’t come off great in that one. So maybe you can do some Freud defense.

Mark Lilla:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m very sympathetic to a lot in Rieff, and I guess Rieff’s concerns are downstream from Freud’s basic insights and so downstream in the sense of how Freud then ended up elaborating them, and then how they were applied in social life and how we ended up with a therapeutic culture and the rest.

For me, the reason I brought Freud in was simply to talk about his discovery of how transference could be used therapeutically. Imagine a situation where someone goes in to a shrink, to Dr. Freud and says, “I’m feeling fine, but my wife demanded that I come here.” And the doctor says, “Well, tell me about yourself.” And the person tells him about himself, and happens to not mention work. And so the doctor asks them, “Well, and what is it like with your work life?”

And suddenly the guy gets a little annoyed and clearly there’s something going on there. And then they start talking some more. And the man happened to say that, “I just find I’m washing my hands a lot all the time now.” And so the doctor has something to probe with and not a cure, but to try to get the patient to step outside of himself, to see him behaving in the therapeutic setting in a way that points to some psychological, dark places. And that the art of therapy is to slowly make the patient feel comfortable enough not to have to lie to himself in front of you.

And that’s by transferring onto you a kind of trust and acting out the struggle in yourself with this other person in the room and discovering that the world doesn’t fall apart. And when that happens, you can start to talk about things that you are unable to look at straight in your head. And slowly, the hope is, that the neurotic behaviors or self-destructive behaviors that arise from that will get better.

So that was the original insight because I think Freud saw that neurotic people are the kind of people. A neurosis is a cage, and you go into a cage and convince yourself you can’t come out because it’s not safe, and it’s the job of the therapist to gain your trust, and to help you to walk out. And so that part of the book is on how safely we might think about moving from toxic ignorance about ourselves to non-toxic knowledge of ourselves without harming ourselves.

James M. Patterson:

So there is hope, despite the book sometimes filling me with dread. The book is Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. Professor Lilla, it’s been a real pleasure.

Mark Lilla:

This was great fun. Thanks for having me on.

James M. Patterson:

Of course. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.