Rory Stewart (Leon Neal/Getty)

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.
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