IN DEFENSE OF IGNORANCE

EXPANDING IGNORANCE! 

I had a lecture/story for my IntroPsy class that opened with a statement that to rapidly expand my ignorance was a major objective in my life. And, that by the end of the course they would be more ignorant than they were today and their ignorance would be rapidly expanding.

Ignorance redefined: IGNORANCE is the knowing OF what I don't yet know or comprehend and what I can't yet do or appreciate. IGNORANCE is knowing your potentials.

At a college curriculum planning session I proposed IGNORANCE as the core of a basic curriculum.

QUESTIONS, QUERIES & QUESTS
Decades ago I invented a useful distinction between the 3Qs: Questions, Queries, and Quests.

Questions are finite statements seeking finite answers - which seek & bring closure. Queries may look like questions but they call for unlimited discourse. Too often queries are confused as questions, especially by the media and education. A microphone is thrust into your face with a question demanding a short answer.

Queries also generate positive IGNORANCE.  Many people are habituated to Questions and avoid Queries. Too narrow an attachment to questions lead into our view of human knowledge as but a set of answers to questions; which is unfortunately the model used in most education.  A cousin of Questions/Answers is Problems/Solutions, with many of the same difficulties. The Club of Rome's proposal for Problemateques attempted to transcend the trap of the Problem/Solution paradigm.

Quests are practices intended to increase positive ignorance: rapidly generate as many Questions and Queries as possible and grok the experience. Stopping at one shelf in a university library and explore the depth of knowledge in just those few books is a frequent questing practice of mine.  Where ever you are, like sitting at a table in a restaurant, as a group start generating as many questions and queries, rapidly and without concern for answers. Where did the cow that my hamburger came from live, and for how long? Who are the primary friends of our waiter? What are the material and energy flows and is the restaurant making it? What is the ecological footprint of this restaurant? It is easy to generate hundreds of Qs at any setting. Without beginning to answer any of these questions the quest-er gains new intuitive insight into the nature of complex systems.