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Ignorance
A Global History
Peter Burke
Yale University Press 2023
Hb, 256pp, £20, ISBN 9780300265958
With Ignorance: A Global History, Peter Burke, professor emeritus at Cambridge University and author of The Polymath (2020), a study of 500 Western polymaths, turns his attention from those with exceptional interdisciplinary knowledge to those lacking in what philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon describes as an “inquisitive appetite”. Burke’s Ignorance adds to an ever-increasing body of scholarship devoted to what is called “ignorance studies”, of which the recent second edition of the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies is a representative text. This handbook, Burke notes, suffers from a curious lack of contributions from historians, specifically with regard to how ignorance has impacted the course of history. This is an over-sight that he means to correct.
Burke acknowledges that there are countless instances where ignorance is beneficial; for example, Socrates’s dictum that true wisdom is in knowing that one knows nothing, or, as Burke quotes 19th-century British physicist James Clerk Maxwell: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” The person who is convinced of total knowledge – itself an impossibility – risks overlooking something crucial. Acknowledgment of your limitations – the known unknowns, to quote former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – is often a necessary predisposition to eventual awareness of unknown unknowns (Rumsfeld again).
Such unknowns have roots in the ancient Greek Sceptics, of which there were two types: dogmatic Sceptics, who were convinced that nothing could be known, and reflexive Sceptics, who were convinced that not even knowing that nothing could be known could be known. While specialised knowledge has gradually accumulated, Burke argues, it has done little to alleviate ignorance in general; the greater one’s concentration, the greater one’s potential blind spots. “The
