Straight to the point

Are you the sort of person that likes interesting facts and quirky conclusions? If so, Rory Stewart has made a BBC radio series just for you. It’s called The Long History Of Ignorance, From Confucius To Q-Anon, and its accompanying Big Sexy Idea is that ignorance can sometimes be valuable, and knowledge harmful. Towards the series’ end, the former politician describes himself as having offered an argument for “strengthening ignorance and knowledge simultaneously”. Having listened to all six episodes, I am happy to report that at least one half of Stewart’s wish has definitely been achieved.

The opening of Episode One presents the listener with the implicit antagonist of the rest of the series, to be schooled by all that is to come: young Rory, a neurotic-sounding child who “grew up wanting to know everything and believing I could know everything”. He would take the newspaper to his bedroom and spend hours there, cataloguing the day’s stories on his computer: “I became worried about the fact there might be things I did not know, books I might not read before I died”. He assumed “this knowledge was vital for what it was to be a human”. Later, in his twenties, he set out to walk through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal as an extension of his quest to mentally devour the world and all its contents. But along the way — plot twist! — he began to realise that the village people whose hospitality he was freely receiving were no less human for being illiterate, entirely parochial, and never having heard of Alexander the Great.

This, like many other of the stunningly obvious points made in the course of the series, is delivered by Stewart with all the ponderous solemnity of someone addressing small boys at a prep school speech day. And did you also know that sometimes people who feel certain about some particular matter can get things badly wrong? That it is impossible for government ministers to know everything about their ministerial briefs? That no expert can possibly know the future with certainty? That “I should not listen in to my wife’s conversations with her therapist or read my wife’s letters, partly because I will hear things will be painful … but partly in order to respect her privacy?” One cannot help suspecting that the reason Stewart thinks such points will seem staggeringly revelatory to the listener is because at some point they have been staggeringly revelatory for him.

As for the edgy reversal that presumably first got the series commissioned — namely, that ignorance can be valuable, and knowledge harmful — though heavily trailed, it barely makes an appearance until late on in the series. Instead we get some obfuscatory fluff about the limits of knowledge which has nothing to do with the main point, and in fact tends to underline how devastating ignorance can be. And when the main theme does eventually appear, the arguments for it are either disappointingly anti-climactic or confused.

Ignorance can be valuable, it turns out, because it would be hellish to know what everyone really thought of you; or because watching horrible things on the internet can mess you up; or because in the context of double-blind refereeing, it is a way of filtering out prejudices; or because a teacher might usefully leave out some difficult details of a topic in order to concentrate on the main point. Philosopher John Rawls makes an appearance too, with his “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, encouraging us to abstract away from our own particular circumstances when deciding how to distribute goods fairly in society — not really a case of ignorance at all, strictly speaking, but rather a case of temporarily ignoring what you already know.

In other words — not that Stewart troubles himself to reflect on what these cases might have in common — “ignorance” about some matter X is valuable, wherever consciously reflecting upon X would work against some wider rational purpose you also have (e.g. functioning without crippling self-doubt; getting through life without distressing flashbacks; being fair to other people by eliminating bias; teaching students by layering up their knowledge slowly). Here again, there is very little counterintuitive bang for your buck, despite all the teasing and hinting earlier on.

And what about the corresponding claim that knowledge can be positively harmful? The central case offered concerns a familiar folk devil for BBC programme makers, the conspiracy theorist of the Q-Anon variety; and more precisely, someone who does lots of research and can cite encyclopaedic references for his crazy conclusions. Such people, Stewart says, do not “necessarily know less than the average person”. In fact, they are “much more knowledgeable, so much more wrong… their desire for and their accumulation of knowledge only strengthens their delusion”.

At best, this is another banality — namely, that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and especially in the mind of someone with an idée fixe, obsessively trying to justify some point for deep-seated emotional reasons he can barely discern. At worst, it confuses being a reliable knower with someone who has lots of disjointed facts at his disposal, yet who is unable to connect them into rational, evidence-responsive wholes. The man who insists that lizards run the White House, and who also has a lot of true beliefs up his sleeve about the mating habits of lizards, is still a much less reliable knower than the average person who knows nothing in particular about lizards and believes the White House is run by humans.

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In fact, quite ironically given how sneery the programme is about conspiratorial thinking — loftily described as “pursuing knowledge through narcissism and insecurity” — the state of mind represented by The Long History Of Ignorance seems to me to have a lot in common with that of someone from Q-Anon. As with the format of many a BBC factual offering these days, we don’t so much get the slow and deliberate prosecution of a joined-up argument as a dizzying succession of historically orphaned facts and gnomic pronouncements. A variety of talking heads appear alongside Stewart, alternating between snippets of information to be taken on trust, and warnings about the dangers of taking things on trust from experts purporting to inform you. The series races from subject to subject — from indigenous wisdom to terrible mistakes in history, to the role of creativity in theory-construction, to the value of citizen’s assemblies, to William James, to personal relationships, and on and on — without spending more than a minute or two on each. It is impossible to solder the whole thing together into a coherent framework without leaving a lot of huge gaps.

We could call this style of thinking QAnon-style thinking, but equally we could call it QI-style thinking, in honour of the insufferable TV panel show of the same name. And indeed the originator of QI, television producer John Lloyd, pops up in the last episode of The Long History of Ignorance to tell us about the midlife crisis which prompted his creation: a personally difficult time, when he realised that all his many Bafta awards on the wall meant nothing, and that he understood very little about life. He then went travelling, and realised that “the world is inherently interesting, but for some reason it’s concealed from us”.

Of course this is true, though the solution hardly seems to be to chop the world up into tiny jigsaw puzzle pieces, only ever considering one or two in isolation at a time. A bit like Stewart’s series, effectively QI treats the building of human knowledge as if it is exactly the same project as rote learning a list of dislocated facts or quasi-facts, to be regurgitated entertainingly at dinner parties later. The conceit of the show is that the information to which various smug luvvies draw our attention is “surprising” and “interesting”, though this only works at all because collectively most of us are such ignoramuses. And as with Stewart’s series, the clever-clever public profiles of the celebrity presenters and guests — Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig, etc. — tend to do most of the work in establishing putative intellectual credibility.

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That some piece of information is “interesting” in the QI sense, or indeed the Radio 4 sense — say, that monkeys don’t actually eat bananas, or that until 1858 all British passports were written in French — is only because it exposes a previously false or lazy assumption of ours that we hadn’t noticed before. If we had fewer false assumptions, because we were able to connect discrete pieces of information up with their intellectual hinterlands and explain to ourselves coherently why they are likely to be true, the world would become much less “interesting “in this sense — you can’t be surprised by what you already know — but it would become more fascinating in quite another.

But perhaps a would-be technocrat like Stewart doesn’t want you to do too much of that sort of thing — you might end up seeing through the soundbites. For all that he frequently says he wants a more intelligent kind of government, in practice he often seems uneasy with treating audiences as intellectual equals. Along with his combative co-host on The Rest is Politics podcast, too often he opts for lazily smearing or mocking political opponents, saving them both the bother of having to try to justify their criticisms in detail. But one can’t have it both ways: finding a more intelligent way to govern requires spelling out to would-be voters the detailed thinking behind particular political decisions, in a way that doesn’t presuppose prior agreement, and isn’t just flirting gratifyingly with a home crowd.

In any case, given the dominant format of BBC factual programming these days, there is little hope of the licence fee providing something with more depth along these lines. There are honourable exceptions — the astonishing In Our Time is one — but for the most part, even Radio 4 shows badged as “serious” and “important” as this one are ludicrously superficial. The independent podcast market is now streets ahead, in terms of the extended time, focus, and degree of detail it can offer to juicily cerebral topics. It seems that there is a real appetite out there for completing the jigsaw.

Indeed, at the end of The Long History Of Ignorance, Stewart gravely tells us that “the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is never static… we are always dealing with the limits of knowledge. But we must explore and respond to those limits in every conceivable way.” Who could disagree with such a thought? But if it’s real insight into the relationship between intellectual light and darkness you are after, you should probably look elsewhere. It’s one thing to be given a leg up, by standing on the shoulders of giants; quite another to be helicoptered to the summit, then left there with no map.

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