Thursday 15 February 2024
The depths of divine ignorance
Oh! to believe, to believe with his whole soul, to plunge into faith for ever! Doubtless there was no other possible happiness. He longed for faith with all the joyousness of his youth, with all the love that he had felt for his mother, with all his burning desire to escape from the torment of understanding and knowing, and to slumber forever in the depths of divine ignorance.
Émile Zola – Lourdes (1894)
In Zola’s sense, we could say that when a climate scientist or a journalist makes an absurd claim about climate change, then for susceptible people it is an offer of escape. An escape from reality is an escape into the comfort zone of shared belief, an escape into what Zola described as the depths of divine ignorance. It may be frustrating for sceptics, but widely shared ignorance can be popular.
From another angle, it has been said by B.F. Skinner and others that fear is not what causes someone to run away. The running away is the fear - running away is one criterion of what fear is. A climate change analogy would be running away from the social consequences of scepticism - again towards Zola's depths of divine ignorance. There is fear in there too.
Conversely, a sceptic may well be trying to avoid that same ignorance, but is clearly not running away from anything. There is no fear either, except perhaps the fear of ignorance.
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3 comments:
For some people the comfort of the familiar (such as Climate Change worship) is much more welcome than the uncertainty of change.
Happier being unhappy rather than doing anything about it.
Scepticism might just be some inherited or acquired propensity to want intellectual excitement. Conformity is for the lazy ones who don't want to expend energy on thinking about stuff. Thinking is a lot harder than repeating ideas, and you can see that in evolutionary terms, it makes sense to have a nice settled opinion so that energy can be used for making things safe in another area of life.
Mind you, having recourse to evolution means that I am accepting the ideas thought through at great personal expense by Darwin and others. There's no escaping from the trap in the long term. Ultimately, we all run out of energy, and our ideas ossify.
DJ - yes people do seem happier being unhappy if it is officially approved unhappiness. Maybe this explains the whining in that it isn't genuine unhappiness.
Sam - I think it may be inherited and acquired in that we inherit a propensity which may or may not be developed in a particular direction. It is possible to be sceptical about sceptics for example and this seems to be what occurs when collectively our ideas ossify.
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