Category: unknowing

Unknowing is commitment to moderation

Martin Vogel12 Comments

Unknowing is inescapably an exercise in moderation. I’m talking here about political moderation. In other respects, unknowing encourages us towards an immoderate lifestyle. One which embraces mischief and counters convention. In an age of populism and polarisation, though, an inclination to political moderation is unknowing’s contribution.

But moderation is a term that is fraught with ambiguity. What I’m referring to in invoking moderation is a disciplined eschewal of the easy certainties of extremism. What I’m not advocating is a lazy gravitation to the centre of wherever mainstream political debate is located.

As the last decades have demonstrated, the Overton window can be re-situated at the extremes, and positions previously recognised as moderate recast as outside the mainstream or even treacherous. In my lifetime, this has happened to the advocacy of, for example, social democracy, the maintenance of friendly relations with our European neighbours and solidarity with the Jews as an oppressed people. The years of Conservative rule have overseen a dismantling of the social contract behind the welfare state and a return to conditions of employment which evoke the Victorian era or the 1930s. Centrist opinion has colluded in the normalisation of such policies. A disciplined moderation might have named the assault on hard-won rights as an extremist aberration.

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The pluralist path to unknowing

Martin Vogel3 Comments

Who doesn’t support pluralism? Who would deny themselves the right to live peaceably in their own way with their own views, without interference or coercion to be other than they are?

Nobody that I can think of. Yet, we live at a time when pluralism is under threat and the pressure to conform to somebody’s view of right thinking is never far away.

Pluralism is an onerous discipline that makes demands of tolerance that are not always recognised by those who insist on its privileges.

Unknowing is necessarily an orientation that embraces pluralism. It is not possible to hold one’s knowing lightly unless one admits – even cultivates – alternative points of view. I’m referring not just to the pluralism that recognises diversity of perspective beyond oneself. Unknowing also implies a commitment to pluralism in one’s own worldview(s) and a recognition of a plurality of selves within one individual.

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Unknowing is the sanest approach to the climate crisis

Martin VogelLeave a comment

If you read one thing during COP26, make it Valerie Iles’ paper, We’re Only Human. Her brief overview of the climate crisis offers useful frameworks for assessing the confusing proposals and counter-proposals to reduce humans’ heating up of the planet. So it provides a timely lodestone for making sense of whatever emerges from the UN conference on saving the world.

But it’s also a masterly exploration of how the way humans know the world is a poor foundation for comprehending how quickly and comprehensively we’re ruining it. How we understand the world is shaped by what it was like when we were born into it. Iles argues that it is changing at such an exponential rate that our thought constructs are scarcely able to conceptualise the speed at which reality is changing. 68 per cent of all carbon emissions have occurred in just my lifetime (60 years). In just the last seven decades, the population of humans in the world has tripled. In the context of the millennia of the planet’s existence, the impacts of these changes are unfathomable. In order to think ourselves out of the crisis we’ve created, we could try to unknow many of the things we hold to be true. Iles suggests a few ways to start.Read More »

Not knowing is a defining condition of life

Martin Vogel4 Comments

A premise of unknowing is that, while not knowing is a defining condition of life, we mostly behave as if we know.

At its most basic level, our not knowing is a truism. While each of us functions from our own individual base of knowledge, an inescapable facet of existence is that we do not know what the future holds. Perhaps not even the next moment. Much of our knowing is nothing more than pattern recognition. We hold a rough model in our heads of what reality is like and this is good enough to enable us to function efficiently most of the time.

But this pattern recognition can blind us to the novelty we navigate every day of our lives. Even when we encounter situations that seem similar to ones we have seen before, we tend to forget that each unfolding of a familiar event is unique in its own right. Our knowing forms amid a broader canvas of not knowing.

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The etymology of unknowing

Martin Vogel6 Comments

The word “unknowing” does not generally have positive connotations. It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as an adjective (though also used as a barely distinguishable present participle) meaning:

Not knowing; not possessing knowledge or understanding; ignorant; ill-informed; naive.

The sense in which I’m using it is almost the opposite of this. I’m talking about a letting go of the knowing that paradoxically makes us unaware and unwitting – that is to say, the knowing in which we reside most of the time. The words “unaware” and “unwitting” that I used in that last sentence to describe “knowing” are taken from Chambers’ definition of “unknowing”. What we’re dealing with is not a binary between ignorance and knowledge but an ebbing and flowing between knowing and unknowing, the boundaries between them hard to discern.

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The age of ignorance

Martin Vogel6 Comments

We are, says Tim Harford, living in an age of ignorance. He refers to the work of Robert Proctor, a historian of science, who coined the term “agnotology” to describe the study of ignorance. Proctor’s insight, arising from his analysis of the tobacco industry’s efforts to create doubt about the adverse impact of smoking, was that ignorance is often culturally induced. “Ignorance is not just the not-yet-known,” he says, ”It’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you ‘not to know’.”

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Nobody knows anything

Martin Vogel7 Comments

I’ve been trying to write something about the crisis for some time now. But every time I gather my thoughts, I realise that the sense I have made of things is lagging behind the pace of change. I am trying to figure out how to be useful while confined at home. But much of my energy is curiously consumed with the busyness of simply sustaining life. I could fill my calendar with well-intentioned Zoom calls from dawn until bedtime. But to do so feels like displacement. So I’ve spent the past couple of days deleting all such invitations the better simply to be with what is.

I’ve noticed that the day ends badly when I allow the evening to be consumed with news. Monday’s announcement that the Prime Minister was in intensive care followed this pattern. There were complex feelings. Much as I hold no brief for Boris Johnson, I wish him well as a human being, as the father of an unborn child and as the leader of the nation’s response to Covid. Beyond that, as Dominic Raab steps blinking into the pitiless spotlight, I reflect on the misfortune that the virus strikes at the time when the UK Government is in the hands of the most mediocre bunch of ideologues to inhabit Whitehall in living memory. Nonetheless, I have sympathy for these people who rose to power encouraging a belief (and perhaps believing themselves) that complex challenges could be met by vacuous slogans. You can see the fear in their eyes and the fatigue on their faces as they do their best to respond to destiny’s call. Who would want to be in their shoes? I have confidence in their intentions. But I wish Britain weren’t starting from here.

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Check your privilege

Martin Vogel2 Comments

One thing that worries me about our attachment to knowing is that our knowing is outpaced by its impacts.

The systemic complexity of our world seems to be slipping beyond the wit of Homo sapiens to manage. This was evident in the financial crash of 2007, when it was revealed that those in charge of the banks had no understanding of the complex derivatives for which they were responsible. Google and Facebook have no real means to manage the uses of their networks by bad actors. In fact, their incentive to keep enabling malevolent uses of their networks pushes Google and Facebook themselves into the category of bad actors. And in Brexit, the UK Government is managing a process the consequences of which it seems unable to understand, still less contain. We shall see.

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The man who knows

Martin VogelLeave a comment

We shouldn’t underestimate how counter-intuitive it is to pursue unknowing. Knowing is at the core of what we understand being human to be. We call ourselves the man who knows, for heaven’s sake: Homo sapiens.We chose this name in distinction to other species of human that once existed such as Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), Homo floresiensis (the Man of Flores, in Indonesia) and Homo ergaster (the somewhat dismissively named Working Man).

We define ourselves as the clever species. But the earlier humans were not without knowledge. What kind of knowing enabled Homo ergaster to organise socially and employ tools without the level of language and cognition that Homo sapiens was to acquire?

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First post

Martin Vogel3 Comments

I’m fed up with knowing. There’s too much certainty in our world. I’m not thinking here of the knowing of experts. I respect expertise. I’m thinking of the knowing that solidifies too readily into identity. The knowing on which polarisation feeds.

I’m susceptible to it myself. Over the past years, as the Government pursued an extreme version of Brexit with no effort to secure losers’ consent, I turned from grudgingly accepting Brexit to opposing it. And the more the left proved incapable of addressing its antisemitism, the more I detached from my lifelong affiliation with Labour.

But, broadly speaking, I prefer to wear my certainties lightly.

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