Blind Men and the Elephant (4)
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates is defending himself from charges of impiety and being a corrupter of youth before a court in Athens. He recounts how a friend visited the Oracle at Delphi and asked: "Who is the wisest of mortals?" and the reply: "Socrates is the most wise." Socrates was scandalized because he thought of himself as “the most ignorant.” So he went to the politicians and they told him how wise they were. Then he went to the poets and they too told him how wise they were. Finally, he went to the craftsmen and they too told him how wise they were. Then he realized what the Oracle meant, he was most wise because he understood his own ignorance. He was not ignorant of his own ignorance as the others were. So he walked the streets of Athens speaking the truth to people and became widely disliked. The jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. (1)
Socrates was wise because he understood the extent of his ignorance and the limitations of knowledge. He saw others who claimed they were wise as victims of their ignorance of ignorance, their meta ignorance. Socrates made it his job to point this out to people and they were very unhappy about it and he ended up being denounced, tried, and executed. This story shows the danger of ignorance and the awful power of an ignorant mob.
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain;
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise. (5)
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College was written by Thomas Gray in 1768. In it the speaker is returning to his school in old age is looking back at a life of failure and pain and wondering what it is all worth. To me, the last stanza quoted above says it all and can stand alone from the rest of the poem. Because decay and death come to everyone is it not better to know nothing at all than to gain wisdom only to decay and die. The fragment of this stanza, “ignorance is bliss,” is well known but the context of the poem isn’t. Gray is considered a pre-Romantic, eclipsed by the greater luminaries that came after and also a “Graveyard Poet,” one who wrote about death and suffering from their privileged position in the middle class or lesser nobility. Gray was also what my parents in the 1950’s would euphemistically call a “confirmed bachelor” in the closeted sense who wrote many poems about unrequited love. During his lifetime he was only famous for Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, yet this and the Ode contain lines that are part of modern English today. Whatever the background or intent of the author this stanza in Ode, like any great poetry, still works as a warning against the seductive power of ignorance.
In 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published the first paper about what is now called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. [6 ] People are measured in their performance of a complex task. They are also asked to rate how well they thought they did. People who did poorly consistently rated themselves much better while people who did well-rated themselves worse. This leads to this famous graph:
[2]
Incompetence in a task universally means people think of themselves better. They are meta-ignorant, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. This is what Plato may have been getting at, Socrates calling out the politicians, poets, and craftsmen about their perceived wisdom, their ignorance about ignorance, is what got him denounced and executed. In the last twenty years, the Dunning-Kruger Effect has been critiqued and successfully tested using all sorts of different tasks. It has been shown to have little gender or cultural differences, it is a human condition. [2] What this means from an evolutionary sense and a human learning sense is still an open question. One thing that can be said is that ignorance is ubiquitous.
“A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.” (3)
The story of the blind men and the elephant is very ancient and is found in the West Asian traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Most commentaries see this as a reflection of religious intolerance or ideology but I see it as more general. Alone, we can never understand all of reality. It is just too big for one person. Newton explained the mathematics of gravity but never explained what gravity actually is. Einstein expanded the concept of gravity into the geometry of space-time and now 100 years later we have found the predicted waves of gravity and have images of gravitational lens yet what is gravity? Each new technology or new mathematical concept is just another blind man feeling the elephant except these blind men talk to each other and write papers and conduct experiments. This is what we call science, but are these men and women wise? We are all ignorant of some aspect of reality.
So ignorance can be dangerous to those who are ignorant of their ignorance and especially to those who know their own and other’s ignorance. Ignorance is often a way around the pain of life and can be something to strive for. Ignorance is ubiquitous in human endeavor and a way to measure our incompetence. Finally, ignorance is a human endeavor as we try but can never fully comprehend our existence.
Plato. “Apology.” In Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy from Thales to Aristotle 2nd Edition, translated by GMA Grube, 112–30. Hackett Publishing, 2000.
Dunning, David. “The Dunning–Kruger Effect.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44:247–96. Elsevier, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385522-0.00005-6.
“Blind Men and an Elephant.” In Wikipedia, November 29, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blind_men_and_an_elephant&oldid=991292336.
“Blind Men and an Elephant” By Romana Klee from USA - sammati tarka prakarana, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59461928
Gray, Thomas. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Text/Html. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 1768. Https://www.poetryfoundation.org/. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44301/ode-on-a-distant-prospect-of-eton-college.
Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” n.d., 14.
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