Wisdom implies ignorance

One of the things that constitutes knowledge is the understanding of ignorance. We humans know not only what we do know, but we know what we do not know.* Metaknowledge. Is this a cognitive ability that is limited to our species? I don’t know. This ability drives curiosity. We want to know what we don’t know, but to do that, we have to be able to represent what we don’t know, to represent the space that needs to be explored. That is, of course, the essence of science, to represent parts of what we do not know and to have a plan for probing into it. Perhaps what distinguishes a good scientist from a bad scientist, an ego-driven one from a non-ego-driven one, is humility, knowing the extent of what one does not understand, vs. arrogance at “look how much I know.”

What of intuitive knowledge, non-explicitly-represented knowledge, that whispers to us in dreams and visions? That which we know, but we do not know that we know. That which we can remember, or become conscious of. I think that this is a kind of knowledge that indigenous cultures are experts at. They make good use of dreams and symbols and visions, not worrying about whether something makes literal, explicit sense, but only whether it is useful. Their understanding of biology, ecology and pharmacology is wonderfully sophisticated even if it is not scientific.

There are different kinds of ignorance, personal ignorance, species ignorance, cultural ignorance. Is something unknown to you because you don’t personally know it? In that case, you might know who does know. Knowing who to ask is a valuable thing. It makes it do-able to learn something unknown. But if something is unknown to you because humans don’t know it yet, then it’s much harder to learn it. That’s where science comes in. We’re an amazing species in that we reached out into outer space. We landed on another world and looked back at our own, and came to understand our world and our place in the universe in a new way. It really was for all humankind that those steps were taken. Now we’re sending out pieces of technology to know things further out in the solar system. This knowledge from beyond the planet, these are things that humans haven’t known before.

Or have they? Native Americans say they always knew what it was like to stand on the moon and look back on the earth. Their medicine men and women had traveled to the moon, not with their physical bodies, but with their spirit bodies, and so they already knew that view of the earth, a sphere floating in black space. A skeptical scientist can dismiss this as nonsense, but maybe in that ancient, indigenous way of knowing, there is more than just biological knowledge, or ecological knowledge. Maybe there is cosmic knowledge.

And that brings us to cultural ignorance. There are things that our culture, modern American industrial culture, does not know. Instead of assuming nobody knows, assuming that if science doesn’t know it, then humans don’t know it, why not just ask other cultures? We don’t because when we ask them “how” they know, we don’t like the answer. “We know because the spirits tell us” or “We know because the plants tell us.” We assume we know what this means, and dismiss it as superstition. But suppose it’s just a way of talking about intuitive knowledge? Suppose we did not assume we understand what their “methods” are, but just asked about the knowledge itself. (While respecting their intellectual property rights of course.) It doesn’t mean we can’t go back and check it with science. That’s what Vine Deloria was saying, “Just ask the question. Ask the people who know.” Ancient, ancient cultures may know things that we do not. At least they might point science in some interesting directions.

Sociality and survival

Apropos of my last post, I’m reminded of a Canadian film, “The Snow Walker,” about a pilot lost in the Arctic in a downed plane, and how he depends on human connections to survive. Back in “civilization”, where they think he’s been lost forever, Estelle (the barmaid) says to Shep (Walter Shepard, the pilot’s boss) “When you get right down to it, all of us are just alone in this world, and that’s just the way it is.” Not so! That is a culturally bound idea she has, not at all an indigenous idea, and I bet it’s not too common in traditional agricultural cultures either.

The movie shows so clearly that this is not true: the final moment is a perfect image of humans’ non-aloneness. Charlie, the downed pilot, has walked hundreds of miles through the Arctic, with Kanaalaq, the Inuit woman who died of tuberculosis in the last few days of their journey. Without her, he never would have survived, and he tried to save her life, dragging her on a sledge the last days. After she dies, he walks the last miles alone. The final moment of the film shows him as a tiny figure approaching an Inuit camp. Most of the screen is taken up with the vast whiteness of the Arctic, what seem to us as featureless snowfields stretching forever, the sky white with blowing snow, and he, a lone and tiny figure swamped by it all, approaching other people. He stops, and they come to him, and then he walks towards them. A clump of tiny human figures in the vastness of the Arctic, coming together, greeting, touching. People. Community. Survival. Life. A small knot of humans in the vastness of that environment, their community and togetherness what enables them to live there.

We cannot live alone and expect to survive.


The Snow Walker, 2003, Walk Well/ Snow Walker Productions, Inc.
Based on the book, The Snow Walker, by Farley Mowat, Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1975; Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003.

The cure for loneliness

The November 2005 issue of Yoga Journal had an article that really pissed me off. (I believe that being angered by an issue of a magazine devoted to yoga officially qualifies me for the 2005 World Championship of Ironic Non-Enlightenment.) The article was entitled “A Real Cure for Loneliness: Sweet Solitude.” Great! I thought. Disconnection and alienation are such problems for modern industrial cultures, maybe they’ll have some wisdom to offer. I certainly have struggled with loneliness and a lack of social connection, as an immigrant to a new culture. So I was mightily disappointed when the article was focused entirely on the individual. Here was the author’s startling insight: time spent alone doesn’t have to be lonely. You can use it for spiritual practice, and as an opportunity to focus on the spiritual essentials that really matter. I expect more from a yoga magazine than platitudes that were obvious to me in high school. I expect a bit more depth of analysis.

It’s all well and good to focus on time spent in the "inner world", but such an analysis of loneliness misses the underlying cause, i.e., a society that is out of balance, in which people are disconnected from each other. Instead, the implicit message is that if loneliness is a problem for someone, he or she just isn’t being spiritual enough. It points to the individual him- or herself as the cause of the problem. Modern industrial cultures are structured to alienate people from each other. Our culture focuses on people as consumers rather than as relate-ers, shunting people towards activities like watching TV and playing video games that involve not interacting with other people. Given our society’s profound inability to foster meaningful lasting social connections, writing an article like this one is like saying that the problem with people on the Titanic was that they just didn’t have a spiritual enough attitude towards drowning in freezing water.

We are social primates. We need social contact, a sense of belonging, a sense of community and being valued by other people. Hunter-gatherer cultures and traditional agricultural cultures have this. (See entry of May 25, click here.) Maybe if we worked on enriching the social connections in our culture rather than everyone staying alone and gazing at their navels, a.k.a., inner worlds, we could heal the underlying cause of disconnection. Then we could focus on the inner world fruitfully. The wisdom traditions of the world recognize the need for community. Yogis, or Buddhist monks and nuns don’t try to do their practice in isolation, but within a spiritual community, or sangha. Even a monk in a cave depends on food and water brought by members of his sangha, and will return to that sangha to share the wisdom from his practice in the cave. It’s only Americans, thinking they can shop for spiritual wisdom piecemeal, who cling to the idea of practicing in isolation. Individualism is a part of American culture that gets grafted onto Eastern practices when they come to America, but that doesn’t mean it’s part of the Eastern tradition.