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.

These people may not have known much about algebraic topology or the history of post-Impressionism, but they knew how to organise. They were not the objects of Beveridge’s benevolent paternalism but self-determining actors. They also knew about want and hardship, justice and solidarity. The truly ignorant were those highly-educated undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge who acted as strike-breakers, and who knew nothing of the conditions in which most of their fellow country people had to live. Ten years later, a new generation of the erudite and educated would boo the hunger marchers.

You don’t need a doctorate in maths to know that your wage packet is shrinking. People who are politically apathetic because they believe with some justice that Westminster politics will never do much for them can become knowledgeable overnight when you threaten their jobs or try to run a motorway through their back gardens. Few traditions are as admirable as that of self-taught working people, including the women mill workers in Victorian Lancashire who would rise an hour before work in order to read Shakespeare together. It was for these patronisingly named “autodidacts” — a category which sometimes included anyone who hadn’t been to Oxbridge — that Ruskin College, the Workers’ Educational Association and the so-called “Extra-Mural” departments of universities were to provide.

What, in any case, if knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? The literary education that the Shakespeare-reading mill workers would have received, had they by some miracle broken into academia, would have been pretty worthless. Literary studies at the time were a combination of bone-dry scholarship and extravagant waffle. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, a stone mason who tries to get into Oxford, is rebuffed by the dons, advised to stick to his lowly station in life, and, in a typical Hardyesque irony, goes back to repairing the very college walls which shut him out.

Yet Hardy makes it clear that Jude’s ambitions are wrong-headed as well as unrealistic. He is better off outside this citadel of antiquated learning, exercising the practical skills which his author so admired. Hardy himself was no country bumpkin but was trained as an architect, and had a deep respect for manual labour. When, as a grand literary celebrity, he unveiled a plaque to open a new building, he was seen to run his hand across the stone and smell it. He, too, was described as an autodidact, even though he received a better education than the vast majority of his compatriots. It was that Oxbridge thing again.

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There is another sense in which knowledge is overrated. Socrates taught that we only do wrong out of ignorance; if only we had the right understanding we would be virtuous. Hardly anyone has ever fallen for this vastly improbable doctrine, least of all St. Paul, who in his Epistle to the Romans claims that we don’t understand our own actions: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…” What Paul sees but Socrates doesn’t is that we are torn, self-divided creatures, whose knowledge is out of sync with our desires. There is nothing wrong with reason — in fact, without it we will perish — but it doesn’t go all the way down. If it is to prevail, it must sink its roots into our senses and affections and shape them from the inside, so that what we ought to do is also what we want to do. Duty and obligation alone simply won’t hack it. The alternative is for reason to repress the senses and affections; and if this happens too violently, we tend to fall ill. The sickness in question is what Freud calls neurosis.

Freud had a profound respect for reason, which he thought would win through in the end. That he did so comes as something of a surprise, given that he is generally seen as both a pessimist and an irrationalist. But reason will only flourish if it is aware of its limits. Beyond those frontiers lies what Donald Rumsfeld, in his sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom, would call a known unknown, and Freud called the unconscious. Because they are unaware of what goes on in this dark region, human beings are opaque to themselves.

This isn’t only Freud’s view, but one of the most typical beliefs of the modern age. There was a time when we thought that other people might be hard to decipher, but at least we were transparent to ourselves. From Nietzsche to Freud, however, there was a dawning recognition that this is the last thing we are. Not only don’t we know ourselves, but this ignorance is vital if we are to operate as individuals. Ignorance is good for you. Just as we couldn’t speak coherently if we were thinking about the rules of grammar which govern what we say, so we can’t act, feel and think without repressing a good deal that goes into our making.

So repression is good for you as well, though not too much of it. What makes us what we are must necessarily fall outside the scope of our knowledge. Trying to examine it would be like trying to jump on your shadow, or pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. There is a fissure in our being which runs right down the middle. Or as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan enigmatically puts it: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

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Throughout the ages, human beings have been labelled the rational animal, the laughing animal, the labouring animal and so on. Now it appears that we are the sick, ignorant, neurotic, self-oblivious one, which is not the most inspiring news. We can have knowledge, of course, but this knowledge is a kind of fiction. For Nietzsche and his post-modern progeny, it consists in carving up the world in ways which facilitate our interests and desires. Knowledge is an instrument of power — a tool for mastering and organising our environment. For this purpose, Nietzsche argues, a falsehood may be more effective than the truth. In any case, truths are simply fictions that have forgotten the fact.

It would be possible to draw a line all the way from this assault on truth to the US election-deniers of today. The difference is that whereas Nietzsche and Freud argue a sophisticated case for ignorance, the election-deniers are just ignorant. Truth for them is whatever it is most convenient to believe. This is a sterile, unproductive kind of ignorance, but there are superior forms of it as well. Nobody, for example, can know the future, in the sense of what is inevitably going to happen. Not even God can do this, because there’s no such thing as what is inevitably going to happen, and therefore nothing to know. Ignorance of the future is a cause of regret to the markets. In ancient times, rulers hired soothsayers and fortune-tellers to peer into the future and assure them that their power would endure down the generations. Wall Street has its equivalents, but they are just as fallible.

In the end, however, we are not forced to choose between absolute knowledge and abysmal ignorance. There are important ways of knowing which fall somewhere in between: so-called tacit knowledge, for example, which involves knowing more than we can tell. You may know how to hum one tune while whistling another simultaneously, but just try telling someone else how to do it. Or think of bodily knowledge — the fact that I know where my left foot is without the need to visit a library or conduct an experiment. Most of our knowledge is of this kind. There’s also knowledge of other people, which doesn’t conform to scientific models. You can know others only if they disclose themselves to you — if they are present to you in a way that the furniture isn’t. Volcanologists may be present at volcanic eruptions, but volcanic eruptions are not present to them.

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Practical knowledge, of the kind Thomas Hardy admires in Jude Fawley, is a question neither of ignorance nor of the disembodied intellect. Instead, it represents the point at which knowing and doing are bound indissolubly together. In fact, the word “know” is related to the word “can” (from the Old English cunnan). It is this unity of thought and action which the activists of the General Strike demonstrated. In doing so, they created such a bogeyman that TV journalists interviewing trade unionists today tend to ask, heart in mouth, whether this dreadful event is to be repeated, no doubt ignorant of the fact that it only lasted for nine days.

Yet one shouldn’t conclude from this that knowledge is purely instrumental. There are times when people need to know in order to be free, and other times when knowledge is an end in itself. There used to be places known as universities where this kind of study could flourish, but they have mostly been wiped out, even if the buildings have been left standing. Even so, there’s no reason to learn about Balzac or Beethoven or black holes other than the delight and fascination of it. The playwright Bertolt Brecht looked forward to a future civilisation in which, he remarked, “thinking could be a real sensuous pleasure”. We have a fair way to go.