My wife subscribes to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. As I was taking the discarded December 8 edition to our recycling bin, I noticed an essay in the Opinion section, which was on top of the pile, that looked interesting: "The Surprising Allure of Ignorance," by Mark Lilla.
(That's a gift link from my digital New York Times account, so it should be readable by everybody. But I've also copied in Lilla's essay in its entirety below, as it isn't all that long.)
Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book “Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know,” which I've gotten but haven't read much of yet.
I liked his entire essay.
My favorite part, though, because it rings so true with my own personal experience, which is decidedly not ego-less, is where he speaks about how we consider our opinions being extensions of ourselves. So when they're attacked by someone with a differing opinion, we take that personally, as if we were being accosted in a dark alley by a would-be thief of our money.
But it's just our beliefs being attacked. And no one can forcibly remove them from our brain. Well, not without a lot of work, such as torture and psychoactive drugs used by intelligence agencies (I enjoy reading spy novels). In everyday life, we have nothing to fear from our opinions and beliefs being interrogated to see if they hold up under skeptical questioning.
Yet it sure seems like we do.
This appears to be one of the benefits of meditation: not reacting so strongly to discomfort, whether it be physical or psychological. The June 2025 issue of National Geographic had an article, "An Antidote to Stress," about meditation. Here's an excerpt about an experiment that contrasted the pain felt by a group that had gotten mindfulness training and a control group that listened to a "pretty tame" book.
Volunteers who meditated reported feeling less pain. "We see a 33 percent drop in pain intensity and unpleasantness during meditation, while the pain levels in the control group actually go up," Zeidan says.
Why does meditation provide relief? Zeidan says analysis of the meditators' scans showed pain relief induced by meditation was associated with reduced activation in neural networks involved in self-awareness. The greatest decrease in activation is seen in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a neural hub that plays a prominent role in self-reflection and valuing oneself.
"During the meditation, the self-value is deactivating," Zeidan says. "And the more it goes down, the greater the analgesia, the greater the pain relief." Pain signals are still being received by the brain, but "they are not going into the brain networks that are saying, This is my pain," he explains. In essence, mindfulness appears to help detach the self from the suffering.
This is the essay by Mark Lilla. It's encouraging to think that mindfulness meditation may be able to reduce the discomfort we feel when our beliefs are being attacked, allowing us to be more open and welcoming to those who view those beliefs skeptically.
Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.
Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.
It is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these surges in the irrational — war, economic collapse, social change. But doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself.
The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.
We can all find reasons we and others avoid knowing particular things, and many of those reasons are perfectly rational. A trapeze artist about to climb the pole would be unwise to consult the actuarial table for those in her line of work. Even the question “Do you love me?” should pass through several mental checkpoints before being uttered.
But each of us also has a basic disposition toward knowing, a way of carrying ourselves in the world as experiences come our way. Some people just are naturally curious about how things got to be the way they are. They like puzzles, they like to search things out, they enjoy learning why. Others are indifferent to learning and see no particular advantage to asking questions that seem unnecessary for just carrying on.
And then there are people who, for whatever reason, have developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know. These attitudes are not limited to the uneducated: We have all also fallen into moods where they emerge in ourselves, however uncharacteristically.
Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit; it is also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that, a desire. And whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged.
Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn’t it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels? Why seek truth if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know? Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so, too, we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions, with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.
One source of this clash is that we consider our opinions to be an extension of our selves, a prosthetic device. When they are attacked or dismissed, we feel that something intimate has been touched. And when our opinions are shown to be wrong, we feel ashamed. Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it’s not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors.
No argument is disembodied. Behind every assertion there is an asserter, and it is he, not his assertion, who wounds our pride. Strange as it may seem, mathematicians and scientists debating matters at the furthest remove from their daily lives can be as dogmatic and touchy as any political partisan. A new elementary particle has been discovered: Is that one giant leap for mankind or one point for our side?
At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.
So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.
I recall reading years ago of a priest or clergyman who said that when his beliefs were questioned it felt like a physical attack. Indeed, our beliefs and opinions are an integral aspect of our identities and when threatened or questioned it does feel like a physical attack.
It seems that in the course of our brain’s evolution, and emanating from the sense of what was ‘me’ and ‘not me’, we would simply react to a physical threat, firstly to protect ourselves and later to include our families, our tribe, our territory and food sources. Just like many animals have set social norms and ways of behaving, we developed our own norms to become beliefs and principles, effectively including them as integral to our identities.
It all seems linked: from the mind’s contents of thought the impression of a ‘me’, a ‘self’ emerges imbued with the sense that all these contents are who I am. They become my identity and perhaps feeling more real and worthy of protection than my physical body.
The article "An Antidote to Stress," suggests meditation: - "During the meditation, the self-value is deactivating," Zeidan says. "And the more it goes down, the greater the analgesia, the greater the pain relief." Pain signals are still being received by the brain, but "they are not going into the brain networks that are saying, this is my pain," he explains. In essence, mindfulness appears to help detach the self from the suffering.
“Detach the self from the suffering.” Although there is no one who ‘does’ the detaching I’d reckon that meditation or self-inquiry that primarily recognises that basically the self is a thought-form, stands a reasonable chance of alleviating the suffering.
Posted by: Ron E. | December 31, 2024 at 07:29 AM
I heard a radio commercial today for some product or other. The commercial slogan was "If you don't LIVE it, you don't BELIEVE it"!
And so a sermon about being wrong should, I feel, come with examples from the author on how he's been wrong. The absence of such examples makes me feel the author was just looking for an excuse to slam the other side, in the usual way these people do, of being knuckle-dragging trogs while feining admirable open-mindedness.
"Oh yeah Sant64, well when have YOU ever admitted to being wrong"?? Fair question.
I admit that in my oh so very callow youth I believed almost anything that was written in "spiritual" book. Any report of miracle, any metaphysical claims, any claims for a guru's spiritual majesty. I was so gullible, so credulous! I don't even want to list the things I used to believe, it's just too embarrassing. But here's a few examples anyway: One of my "root" sant mat gurus (though I never met him) is Kirpal Singh. I used to read Kirpal books and believe everything he said. But over the years, and with a heavy dose of reading critical views of Kirpal online, I slowly came to see that this guru's views on a lot of things were absolute nonsense. Advice like never look other people in the eye, never take painkillers for any reason, even surgery. Then there were Kirpal's absurd claims to being the true successor of Sawan Singh. Lots of wild stories. And as it was for Kirpal, so it also largely was for other gurus, and other religions. The critical eye supplanted my veneration of the tisra til.
What about politics? Well, I used to be a liberal. That was before I moved to a liberal region of the US, and saw first hand how well coddling the weak links works. It doesn't. Coddling makes the weak links of society grow like a fungus, a fungus that eats away at everything and everyone. Don't take my word for it, look at the state of any liberal American city. Simply put, contemporary liberalism does not work to make society better. It does the very opposite. This was an undeniable fact to me, and hence, I am a liberal no more.
It's clear that the Columbia Professor is baffled that the troglodytes don't believe the irrefutable truths that he holds dear. But prof, to me and most of the country, these "truths" of yours are about as credible as what's written in any of the now out-of-print Kirpal Singh books. A few examples ot that:
1) Climate change is NOT the most pressing issue of humanity. The pumping of trillions of dollars into somehow fixing the weather is the greatest boondoggle of human history.
2) Gender is not made up of arbitrary social categories, and so we must give confused children surgery and drugs and retire girls' restrooms to a Museum of Intolerance exhibit.
3) DEI should determine who gets a job.
4) More drugs will be our salvation.
5) Social media was a wonderful Idea as it will, and has, thanks to St. Zuckerberg, "brought the world together." And social media is really good for kids! So good for their mental health.
Does all that make me a conservative? Depends on whom you ask. I'm certainly not the kind of conservative that's on the Ukraine Train. I ain't no neocon, never was. A pox on all those chickenhawks. They and Israel gave us the Iraq war. So many lives squandered for that pack of lies. (It seems that Lilla wasn't a proponent of the Iraq war; good for him, though he's written the typical drek about George Floyd (that the police are out murdering blacks) and Covid, the wonderful virus that hurts people who don't get it worse than those who do.
If I may put all this another way? Well, here goes: The angst and rage you liberal feel about Trump winning the election? I assure you, that feeling goes both ways.
As much as you deplore the other side, I assure you we deplore you every bit as much.
We saw the path you were taking the country. A path that could be encapsulated in one word: Despair.
Despair about the future. Despair if you're male. Depair of the past if you're female. Despair of the health of the planet. Despair of your racism. Despair of your bigotry against trannies having rights over those of your daughter. Despair that injustice is everywhere, an injustice so deep you, a white person, have no right to even comment upon it. Despair that you will ever have prosperity. Despair that you will ever live free in a world that's beset with viruses. Despair that you have to be very, very careful of what you say.
That despair has been the liberal message of the last 4 years. A sermon of despair, a message that everyone you know is wrong, everything you have you got by theft, and every hope you have for the future is illegitimate unless we your minders OK it.
Will any liberal reading this cop to any of it maybe being true? Oh course not. So liberals, go do your goddamn mindfulness meditation if it makes you feel any better. And Happy New Year, Trump won.
Posted by: sant64 | December 31, 2024 at 11:56 AM
@Sant64,….VERY well said! There are as many more of us thinking as you, than those Liberals thinking like “Them!” What’s depressing to me is,” Most University and College Professors are grooming our Youth to become Liberals. I mean, imagine a Conservative , well paid Male with Degrees earned in Engineering from Virginia Tech., or Cal Poly instead of a BS Degree in Liberal Arts from ANY of our Schools, Coast to Coast, paying , or borrowing, the exorbitant Tuition costs for a 4 year Degree from any of these Colleges, that are grooming young males to be afraid to even make eye contact with any the young scantly dressed females with painted faces and ruby red lips, with their focus of landing the best husband in the Class! But god forbid should any of those young males take the bait, and OMG, …possible plant a kiss on a cheek after a sudden grope at a party, if that Male ever enters Politics , or becomes successful in any business, and becomes another member attacked by the “Me Too” Feminatzis who have kept Trump in Litigation, as well as others in the MSM, the last Decade!
Now, at 82 with all my experience to look back on, if I again had to counsel a Son going in to College, I’d have to either warn him to take a Vow of Bramachara, or get castrated! Because if he exercised the natural urges that he was born with,…and became caught in any of the Honey Traps,…he would , or could, end up as Trump ended up in New York Courts for his supposed shenanigans to various Gold Digger females.
The way Liberals are grooming our Youth now, our Male Youths in 25 years from now should REVERSE what has happened to them, from the ME TOO Movement, and become the Victims of the female gold diggers who were passed over, after their failed seductions, or,….hooked up from their Internet Hook Ups, which ended in the proposed one night stands, never to be called back for 2nds by the Males, and see if they could get famous as Stormy has!
Its a Jungle OUT there! Sure glad I’m not a Liberal, …..but just a Rational old male hoping to never be sent back to this jungle to do it all over , starting from scratch, wondering how that thingy hanging down between my legs has made me any thing other than what I know I am, so I can check the proper box on my Medical Chart each time I visit my Doctor able to identify what Gender I was born as!
Jim Sutherland
Posted by: Jim Sutherland | December 31, 2024 at 02:19 PM
In his intro to Lilla’s essay Brian mentions: - “My favorite part, though, because it rings so true with my own personal experience, which is decidedly not ego-less, is where he speaks about how we consider our opinions being extensions of ourselves.”
This topic of identity has been an on-going project of mine over the decades through enquiring into all the facets of what appears to be who I am through self-examination and meditation or observation. I wrote about each one that I (and others) identify with as I explored them, to the extent that I have the equivalent of what would make three – four books. Basically, I sum up identity as: - “The feeling of a ‘self’ becomes an extension of the body and falls under its natural inclination of protection. As the ‘self’ is a fabrication, the only way it can continue is through ‘identification’. It identifies with beliefs, thoughts, people, objects, causes, nations and cultures – all to maintain its ‘structure’. Without such ‘identities’, what we perceive as our ‘self’ does not exist. All that remains is ‘Life’ happening, and through a multitude of forms.”
Mark Lilla’s approach states: - “It's encouraging to think that mindfulness meditation may be able to reduce the discomfort we feel when our beliefs are being attacked.” Which I see as most important, not only to reduce our own discomfort but in light of seeing that such attachments to what we perceive as my identity as being the result of cultural conditioning with its inevitable differences and separation from each other – the chief cause of much of personal and collective suffering.
Essentially, what ‘I’ identify with as being who I am is an extension of any number of the ad-hoc beliefs, opinions etc. etc. – merely thought forms that I have unwittingly absorbed since birth. The bigger problem though is that it is these very thought forms, these false identities, that not only separate us from our own natures but from each other – with all the ensuing issues that cause endless pain and misery.
We have the means to make the world a better place for ourselves and for everyone, but we lack the individual and collective will.
Posted by: Ron E. | January 01, 2025 at 03:08 AM
I am listening to a podcast of Shawn Ryan, the Atheist’s dark night of the soul’s hitting his final rock bottom. Ironically, his path of coming to Faith, included psychedelic supervised therapy. I don’t think ANY of us were in any where near the dark hole Shawn was in, when he finally just surrendered, and cried out for the God he did not believe in. Very interesting interview. He killed more people in combat, than 777 claims to have done in a past life!
Taking my self, as my best example, I know how the Psychology of becoming Born again by faith in Christ completely changes one’s life, as the Bible describes.
https://youtu.be/hQyX3qGcE_g
Jim Sutherland
Posted by: Jim Sutherland | January 01, 2025 at 07:07 AM
J. S. The subject of the psychology and faith of BA Christians is definitely to do with identity though not one I would want to engage with.
Posted by: Ron E. | January 01, 2025 at 07:46 AM
@Ron,…each of us do what we do, that is therapeutic for our own personal benefit.
I continue to do mine, as Brian does his, Sant64 does his, 777 does his, um does his, as you do yours.
Who is to determine the benefit that ANY Voyeur silent reader that stumbles in to this Churchless church gets out of any thing any of us say?
Jim Sutherland
Posted by: Jim Sutherland | January 01, 2025 at 09:20 AM
Nice blog over critical issues you bring forward so acutely. Thanks for that
i would like to put my own perspective on this.
IMHO, this issue of knowing and ignorance is quite a trigger in both cases.
as they say, "more you know,less you know" which essentially means ignorance is root of Knowledge.
In our own spiritual journeys, whether we do sant mat or other practices, "urge to know" is huge in beginning and that itself becomes impediment to journey. Desire to know creates mental models in our mind which should be mapped to mental models available at higher realms. But it doesn't happens so because of "urge to know". This urge will itself lead us to experiences which ain't worthy enough and rather confuses the mind.
when we simply surrender to ignorance at all levels of creation, we are opening the door to true knowledge. Until then our knowledge will remain subservient to experiences we have had in our life.
it also illustrates that ignorance lead to Bhakti which leads to Love. "Ignorance is bliss" as accepting it at our heart, bliss will enter our soul and then nothing is left for knowing.
anyway,
Posted by: October | January 01, 2025 at 09:20 PM