The Fact of My Ignorance

Socrates - humble intellectual extraordinaire

Well after years of talk I’ve decided to finally start a blog.  Not the public diary kind mind you (we have one of those here) but the kind where I can discuss politics, philosophy, religion and other of life’s more weighty matters.  Even those who know me well are probably unaware of the enormous percentage of my daily free time that’s devoted to researching these subjects.  It’s far more than I’d care to admit frankly.  But I’ve long been without a significant outlet for the information and ideas that are constantly swirling around in my head and I’m hoping that this blog will rectify that situation.  But more than just an online sounding board, I’m hoping that this blog can become a place for similarly-interested individuals to discuss these complex issues with dispassionate rationality and constructive debate.  Which brings me to my next topic.

So why the stupid name?  After much thought I’ve decided to name my blog for one of the principles that I hold most dear: Intellectual Humility.  This is a perspective, born of knowledge and honest self-reflection, that recognizes that what we know about the world and life pales in comparison to what we still have yet to understand.  Its a principle that Einstein talked about frequently, and Lao Tzu touched on, but which Socrates said most succinctly when he said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance”.

Interestingly, this kind of intellectual humility tends to grow with increasing knowledge.  This principle has been clearly demonstrated to me since starting medical school, as I’ve already learned far more about many subjects than I knew there was to learn.  The subject of immunology is an instructive example…  On the surface its simply a subset of human physiology, which is a subset of biology.  Couldn’t be too complex right?  Well I’ve got an entire class on it right now and my mind is regularly blown by the complexity of the human immune response.  But even more mind-blowing is the knowledge that there are probably a hundred PhD’s out there who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the details of each of the bullet points on each of our slides.  Those people could probably give an entire class on the content of one of our slides.  We think we’re getting the in-depth treatment but more and more I realize that we are just blowing through summaries of what is an almost unimaginably huge topic.  The end result of this experience is that while I objectively now know more about the immune system than I did before, the net effect is that I feel somewhat stupider, because I thought I knew a fair amount about the immune response before I started, and now I realize that I know 2% of what there is to know, max.

So we see that the acquisition of knowledge is fatal to unrealistic pride.  And an intensely impassioned, uncompromising, or unequivocal opinion about any given subject is almost always a sign of ignorance to the complexities of the topic.  The lesson learned is to be wary of those who seem sure of themselves when discussing complex issues, because its likely that the only reason for their confidence is that they don’t even know what they don’t know.

With that said you’ll likely read a fair amount of passion in my posts on this blog.  And I’ll likely express some strong opinions.  And part of that is because I, as an imperfect human being, am not always aware of what I don’t know.  But its also because including qualifiers before every single phrase is frankly cumbersome.  I’ve always thought that the short-hand for verbally expressed intellectual humility is an unspoken understanding that we are all uninformed human beings with limited understanding.

So while we may debate vigorously we must be able to divorce our own egos from our fallible ideas and tear apart and rebuild arguments without fear of personal offense.  We should always understand that our stances on issues are our stances “so far” and we must be willing to alter them when presented with new truths.  If we can debate serious issues with that unspoken understanding then there will be no contention, there will be no anger, we will be practicing intellectual humility, and we will grow that much closer to understanding the truth.

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