Sexy ignorance

I'm a big fan of humble ignorance, the practice of recognising and accepting the limitations of what you know. Humble ignorance allows you to learn, because you can approach a situation in the hope that it might take away some of those limitations. Without humble ignorance, you might avoid these opportunities because, well, you already know all of that anyway. Why bother? I would call humble ignorance the core philosophy at the heart of science, becuase humble ignorance tries to eliminate itself, leaving knowledge in its place.

But there's another kind of ignorance that, instead of eliminating itself, celebrates itself. Instead of eventually turning into knowledge, this kind of ignorance encourages you to recognise your limitations and then not do anything about them. Worse still, it encourages you to feel superior about your ignorance, as if those who aren't ignorant are missing out on something. I call this sexy ignorance.

Sexy ignorance can take a few forms, and one of the most common is mysticism. By mysticism I mean the celebration of mystery, in the sense of attempting to preserve it or hold it as a primary value. Fine for magic shows, but not great as a general philosophy. This can be obvious nonsense like saying "nobody really knows how the brain works" to sound smart at parties, or more subtle nonsense like quantom consciousness, whose main support seems to be that "consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe..." It's fine to say that there are still things we don't know, but it doesn't pay to get too attached to not knowing. There are lots of humble ignorants working on it, and it's not going to be true forever.

The other kind of sexy ignorance that seems to be fairly common is a kind of superior disaffection. Pokemon? I don't know anything about that! Hip hop? Never listened to it! Computers? I can't even use one! After all of these statements is a small space left for applause from whoever you're talking to. "Wow", they will say, "it's so impressive that you don't know anything about that!" In a sense, it's a kind of mutated modern puritanism, where the thing you need to prove your cleanliness of isn't impure sexual thoughts but impure enjoyment of things that are enjoyed by the wrong people. It creeps up on you, too, because the things it's cool to be ignorant of change from generation to generation.

This last one may seem superficially similar to arrogance, but there is a subtle difference. Arrogance says "I already know about that kind of thing, so I don't need to learn about it", sexy ignorance says "I don't know about that thing, but that's better than knowing about it". Both result in avoiding new knowledge and experiences, but only sexy ignorance attempts to profess that doing so makes you a better person.