I think it's incredibly bold to admit that you don't know.
I worry about a society which seems to promote knowledge as a sort of competition where if you don't know something it considered a sort of weakness. I believe it leads to an unhealthy aggressiveness in discussions, and in particular politics, and is ultimately counterproductive. After all, the purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge and one can only acquire it with the admission that their knowledge is incomplete. Once there is an disposition that even partial ignorance is 'bad' then people stop learning.
And that's beside the even more general theological question of reaching the ability to admit that there are some things that perhaps cannot be known by our species.
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Date: 2008-08-13 03:37 am (UTC)I worry about a society which seems to promote knowledge as a sort of competition where if you don't know something it considered a sort of weakness. I believe it leads to an unhealthy aggressiveness in discussions, and in particular politics, and is ultimately counterproductive. After all, the purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge and one can only acquire it with the admission that their knowledge is incomplete. Once there is an disposition that even partial ignorance is 'bad' then people stop learning.
And that's beside the even more general theological question of reaching the ability to admit that there are some things that perhaps cannot be known by our species.