A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why

By Renata Salecl

An original and provocative exploration of our capacity to ignore what is inconvenient or traumatic

Ignorance, whether passive or active, conscious or unconscious, has always been a part of the human condition, Renata Salecl argues. What has changed in our post-truth, postindustrial world is that we often feel overwhelmed by the constant flood of information and misinformation. It sometimes seems impossible to differentiate between truth and falsehood and, as a result, there has been a backlash against the idea of expertise, and a rise in the number of people actively choosing not to know. The dangers of this are obvious, but Salecl challenges our assumptions, arguing that there may also be a positive side to ignorance, and that by addressing the role of ignorance in society, we may also be able to reclaim the role of knowledge.

Drawing on philosophy, social and psychoanalytic theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Salecl explores how the passion for ignorance plays out in many different aspects of life today, from love, illness, trauma, and the fear of failure to genetics, forensic science, big data, and the incel movement—and she concludes that ignorance is a complex phenomenon that can, on occasion, benefit individuals and society as a whole.

The result is a fascinating investigation of how the knowledge economy became an ignorance economy, what it means for us, and what it tells us about the world today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691245713

Renata Salecl

Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She is visiting professor at BIOS centre at the London School of Economics. Her previous books include On Anxiety and have been translated into ten languages.

Book preview

A PASSION FOR IGNORANCE

A Passion for Ignorance

WHAT WE CHOOSE NOT TO KNOW AND WHY

RENATA SALECL

With a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2020 by Renata Salecl

Preface to the paperback edition, copyright © 2022 by Renata Salecl

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press

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99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

First published by Princeton University Press in 2020

New paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2022

Paperback ISBN 9780691240992

Cloth ISBN 9780691195605

ISBN (e-book) 9780691245713

LCCN: 2022938991

Version 1.1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Sarah Caro, Rob Tempio, Josh Drake, and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Natalie Baan

Jacket/Cover Design: Leslie Flis

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: Kate Farquhar-Thomson and Sara Henning-Stout

Copyeditor: Ashley Moore

Jacket/Cover images: Head in sand, Jan-Otto/iStock; Sky, Shutterstock

For Branko

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Editionix

Introduction1

1 The Many Faces of Ignorance10

2 Empty Graves: Ignorance, Forgetting, and Denial in War31

3 The Secret in the Body: Knowledge and Ignorance about Genes51

4 Denial of Illness75

5 Love Is Blind96

6 The Fear of Being Ignored: From Incel to Impostor113

7 The Delusion of Big Data128

Conclusion149

Acknowledgments155

Notes157

Bibliography175

Index189

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I don’t trust anything, says a Kazakh man to his cousin, the US-based journalist Mila Sanina, when they discussed images and news about the Russian attack on Ukraine in March 2022. Sanina responds to the cousin’s disbelief with resignation: My heart skips a beat, but then I wonder if that’s how it should be. Independent thinking and owning your mind seems hard work these days. Who has time for that?¹ For this journalist, it became impossible to discuss war atrocities with her family in Kazakhstan and with relatives who were living in the Donbas region of Ukraine since they have embraced the Russian propaganda that there was no war, just a military operation to rid Ukraine of Nazis,

At the height of the pandemic, some people were adamant that there is no virus and that everything related to COVID-19 has been fake. Many family members and friends stopped communicating because they could not agree on what was true. Some countries continuously lied about the number of people who died as a result of the disease, while others exaggerated the danger of the infection so that they could implement emergency laws that allowed them to strengthen authoritarian rule.

The way propaganda works in these times of the internet and social media has contributed significantly to the divisions about what is true and what are facts. Social media, the search engines’ secret algorithms that determine which information gets more visibility, and the intricate web of state propaganda have created a cacophony of voices where truth and facts are easily obscured and manipulated. Amid the information overload and rising distrust of the media, some people start closing their eyes and ears, while others propagate lies and conspiracy theories. We have seen protests against state propaganda; however, authoritarian states have often ruthlessly suppressed such dissent.

In our highly individualized societies, affects and passions have played an essential role in how people respond to information, react to each other’s beliefs, and deal with uncomfortable facts. While affects are often regarded as more short-lived eruptions of feelings that might temporarily influence a person’s behavior, passions are more potent and more long-lasting manifestations of emotions that might have profound impacts on people’s lives and sometimes undermine their capacity for rational thinking. Love and hate play the most prominent role among passions; however, feelings like joy, rage, sadness, and greed are no less important. Sometimes passions are related to complex emotions like grief, to strong desires or convictions, and at other times to feelings of devotion.

Today’s polarization has, on the one hand, provoked intense feelings of identification with one’s group, which often lives in an information bubble. On the other hand, there has been an increase in intolerance and hate of the people whose opinions differ from ours. However, the problem is not that people passionately support some ideas and try to persuade others to believe in them; the problem is that sharing beliefs, especially conspiracy theories or lies, has become a weapon that tries to wound or discredit others. And some who are sharing fake news or conspiracy theories do not necessarily even believe in what they are sharing; however, it brings them immense pleasure when they evoke angry responses from their opponents.

Some people are propelled to action by outrageous lies. At the start of the war in Ukraine, Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee at Russian state TV, interrupted the evening news by holding a large, handwritten poster declaring: No war. Stop the war! Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here. Ovsyannikova confided to a friend that, as a child of a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, she could no longer lie on public TV about the war. Anger and shame over having for years spread Kremlin propaganda finally led her to speak out against the war.²

After the protest, Ovsyannikova was detained but initially received a relatively mild punishment for organizing an unauthorized public event. Social media quickly speculated that the whole protest was staged. The idea was that the Russian regime wanted to show that dissent was still allowed and that people opposing the government got lenient sentences. Simultaneously, a counterargument started circulating on social media, which stated that the very claim that Ovsyannikova’s protest was fake was part of Russian propaganda. Among the people on social media debating whether the protest was staged or real, the very fact that the message on the poster was valid got somehow obfuscated—as if the performance overshadowed the facts.

At the time of the old Soviet regimes, the opposition believed that exposing the lies would undermine the state’s power. Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel, who later became the president of the Czech Republic, in the late 1970s envisioned such dissent in his book The Power of the Powerless. Havel writes about a greengrocer who privately did not believe in the Communist ideology but publicly every year on May 1 obeyed the Party and in the window of his shop displayed the required poster declaring Workers of the World—Unite! The greengrocer had complied with the regime’s demand out of fear and habit and would have been afraid to admit his cowardice and disbelief in the Communist ideology.

Havel imagined that one day the greengrocer would stop putting up the slogans in the shop’s window merely to ingratiate himself and that he would also stop voting in elections, since he knew that they were a farce. As Havel says, In this revolt, the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.³

For Havel, such gestures of disobedience would shatter the world of appearances and lies, which were a fundamental pillar of the system. And if more people would stage such dissent, that would threaten the very basis of the regime. Havel, however, could not have imagined that two decades after his death, it would be in the interest of power-seekers to make matters of what is truth and what is a lie so confused that people would be debating more passionately whether the protest against propaganda was real or fake than the lies propaganda itself was spreading.

In Soviet times, the system created a narrative about the progress of the workers’ power and the building of the new Communist society. Although regimes were trying to get people to internalize this ideology, with time, it became more critical that people obeyed the rituals and did not express public criticism of the Party. People might have privately expressed doubts about the regime; however, as long as they did not publicly show dissent, the power was not threatened.

In post-socialist authoritarian regimes like the one established in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this demand for a consistent narrative ceased to exist. As Peter Pomerantsev, a Kyiv-born writer and TV producer living in London, has pointed out, Russia became governed by political technologists at the start of the new millennium. The problem was not only that truth had been brutally censored but also that people no longer cared about the truth. Life became a reality show with Putin being the main star who, like a performance artist, changed from one role to another. Sometimes he looked like a businessman, other times like a soldier, then bare-chested hunter, spy, tsar, or a superman. In this Russian reality show, what is truth and what is lie became irrelevant.⁴ But the propaganda machine also worked hard to instill doubt and confusion in other regimes around the world, for example, with its meddling in the US elections.

In recent decades, ignorance about truth and facts was effectively encouraged by so-called merchants of doubt,⁵ who, with the help of intricate propaganda mechanisms, worked hard to undermine scientific discoveries about smoking, climate change, and COVID-19. Similarly, like the Russian government’s claims that it was not waging war in Ukraine, others worldwide denied that the coronavirus existed and claimed that everything related to the illness was fake.

Misinformation, lies, and conspiracy theories steer passions that make it hard for people to discern what is true and what is a fact. At the time of the war in Ukraine, passions were used in yet another way to obscure facts and legitimize aggression. Before sending tanks to Ukraine, Putin started propagating an obscure theory of passionarity, which Soviet ethnologist Lev Gumilyov had coined decades ago.⁶ Passionarity is supposed to be some living force made of biocosmic energy specific to each nation. This internal force is envisioned as something that helps countries to reach their full potential. The theory of passionarity also invokes genetics. In 2021, in one of his speeches, Putin observed that although Russians have an infinite genetic code … based on mixing of blood, they have not yet reached their peak, although they could achieve it in the future.⁷

Invoking some inner passions that drive nations to realize their greatness can blind those who engage in aggression and those who silently support it to violence and destruction. Some might even be tempted to see war crimes as crimes of passion. However, neither willful nor unconscious ignorance, which approximates what I call a passion for ignorance in this book, exonerates the guilty of responsibility for their crimes. Trauma from crimes committed or violence endured has the power to return no matter how much people try to repress and ignore it. Those who suffer from it are also generations to come.

Notes

1. I’m Terrified of Losing My Family to Putin’s Propaganda, Independent, March 4, 2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/putin-russian-propaganda-family-b2028809.html.

2. Pjotr Sauer and Andrew Roth, ‘Her Anger Had Been Building’: Russian TV Protester Told Friend of Plan, Guardian, March 15, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/15/russia-tv-protest-marina-ovsyannikova-ukraine-war.

3. Václav Havel, Power of the Powerless (1978), Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/vaclav-havel-power-of-the-powerless.

4. Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

5. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, reprint ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011).

6. Michel Eltchaninoff, Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin, updated ed. (London: Hurst, 2018).

7. The Intellectual Origins of Putin’s Invasion, UnHerd, March 16, 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-brains-behind-the-russian-invasion.

A PASSION FOR IGNORANCE

Introduction

IN MARCH 2020, as the coronavirus crisis started hitting the United States, the Financial Times published a cartoon by James Ferguson showing President Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office with a surgical mask over his eyes and his hands clamped firmly over his ears. On the floor, a picture shows Chinese president Xi Jinping wearing a surgical mask made from the Chinese flag. While one leader is closing his eyes and ears, the other’s mouth is covered by the symbols of country and ideology. The spreading of the virus has presented the world with its biggest challenge in dealing with the unknown in a century. Ignorance, denial, and negation all played their part at the start of the pandemic, as highlighted in extreme relief by the behavior of the US president. At first, Trump ignored the danger of the infection spreading in the United States. In January and February 2020, when coronavirus was propagating rapidly around the world, Trump claimed that there was no need for concern in the United States because there were only a few people infected, and they had all come from abroad. In denial of events as they unfolded, he assured the public that everything is under control, that the new virus is not more dangerous than the flu, and that he had a natural capacity to understand the infection. When it became impossible to continue ignoring the pandemic, Trump changed tack, and this time declared a war against the invisible enemy. The president did not recognize the severity of the situation because he was suddenly convinced by the experts, or because he had new information; rather, he told the public he had known all along how serious it was: I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. He then added, But we are going to defeat the invisible enemy. I think we are going to do it even faster than we thought, and it’ll be a complete victory. It’ll be a total victory.¹

A decade previously, the writers of The Simpsons had imagined a drug that induced a similar degree of blind optimism. In a well-known episode, Lisa has to give a presentation at school on what Springfield will look like in fifty years’ time. Diligent as ever, she immerses herself in climate change research and presents a grim outlook for her hometown. Her presentation is so frightening that her teachers urge her parents to have her assessed by a psychiatrist. After the examination, the doctor diagnoses Lisa with environment-related despair and prescribes her a drug called Ignorital. With the help of this drug, Lisa’s perception of the world changes; released from despair, she becomes overwhelmingly optimistic. Clouds appear to her as smiling teddy bears, and she continuously hears in her head the song What a Wonderful World. Lisa’s parents struggle to cope with this optimistic delirium and decide to take her off Ignorital. Marge and Homer realize that the old, pessimistic Lisa was easier to handle than the madly cheerful one.

The idea that a drug or some other form of treatment might help us ignore those parts of reality we find hard to bear is not confined to fiction. For decades, science has tried to find a way to subdue the traumatic memories of war veterans or victims of other violence. These studies sometimes suggest that a drug that allows someone to forget traumatic violence might be of special help to those who have been raped or suffered terrifying assault or sexual abuse. The ethical debates surrounding the use of drugs or other means to alleviate memories of violence often focus on whether it is possible or desirable to erase only selected parts of the memory and what would happen if the perpetrators of violent crimes or abuse could access such memory-eliminating drugs to escape being identified or persecuted. Yet even without such drugs, people find ways to ignore, deny, or negate knowledge that threatens their well-being.

Each epoch is marked by its own ignorance. The way people relate to knowledge is highly contextual; and what is considered to be knowledge is not only socially constructed but also highly individual. To complicate things further, people often embrace ignorance or denial (which, as we shall see later, are not the same thing) when they come close to knowledge that is somehow unbearable.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan borrowed the term a passion for ignorance, found in Buddhist studies, to describe how his patients did everything they could to avoid acknowledging the cause of their suffering, even though most of them came to him claiming that they wanted to understand it. Lacan also looked at ignorance on the side of the analyst and concluded that the analyst should not take the position of the one who knows the answers, but rather should embrace the position of nonknowledge and allow analysands to discover for themselves what underlay their symptoms.

This book will explore the nature of the passion for ignorance. On the one hand it will examine how we try to avoid dealing with traumatic knowledge, and on the other hand it will analyze how societies find ever new ways to deny information that might undermine the power structures or ideological mechanisms that maintain the existing order. In addition, I will try to explain how in postindustrial, knowledge-based societies, the power of ignorance has acquired a surprising new strength, even as people can now learn more about each other and themselves than ever before with the help of science and new technology. The way we relate to knowledge is never neutral, which is why the term passion, which Merriam-Webster defines as an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction,² can help us understand not only why people embrace what is perceived as truth but also why they ignore, deny, or negate it. Curiosity is for some a passion, and when people stop questioning established knowledge, the lack of this passion might very well open new doors to ignorance.³

The concept of ignorance needs to be reexamined because we are undergoing a revolutionary change in the nature of knowledge. The development of