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It is a very great pleasure for me to speak to you this afternoon. I admire what each of you has accomplished in obtaining a graduate degree, and I know everyone in this auditorium today shares that feeling. You must feel a special sense of pride and satisfaction, and justifiably so. After so much labor in the academic vineyard, the taste of this moment must be especially sweet. And I know that your pleasure is matched by that of the family and friends who have, in so many ways, supported you throughout this academic journey. They are entitled to share in your triumph today. So, on behalf of your faculty and the administration, and your family and friends who join us this afternoon, it is my honor to extend to you our warmest congratulations on having arrived at this summit, as it were, of the academic world.
Before telling you what my central message is for you today, a message that will, I am sure, strike you as just a little odd (the title of my remarks is "In Praise of Ignorance"), I want to say just a few more words about how special we think you are for having completed a graduate degree. There are two things in particular I want to say to you. The first is that we feel a very strong sense of kinship with you, because virtually all of us on the faculty at this great University have done in one form or another what you have just done, namely pursued our education beyond the undergraduate degree. To us our collective celebration of your achievements also signifies a love of learning, a sense of the importance of pursuing knowledge and understanding, and an inner desire to push to the margins of what we can know. Not everyone has that kind of inner compulsion to the same degree, and it's very fortunate that most do not. For, after all, it takes many people working very hard and very creatively to apply and make use of what we know already. And while expertise or deep knowledge is highly valuable to a society, so too is general knowledge. (Interestingly, we give graduate degrees in specific areas of knowledge, but not in University-wide knowledge.) And, finally, it is important that we acknowledge that even what I am calling deep knowledge can be acquired in ways other than pursuing a graduate degree. Still, all that said and recognized, it remains a fact that you have done something that is both socially highly important and--and this is the point I began with--with which your faculty strongly identifies, feels the same underlying yearnings and for which we have the very highest respect.
I should also emphasize that in order to do what you have done you generally need to have not only an appetite for this special kind of labor but also a gift for it, a talent. And that is something for which you should feel very lucky. To have a talent and to have the desire to develop the talent is a combination of traits that, unfortunately, is not a universal in human affairs. It is also something that is, for most of us, a critical component of a good life.
So congratulations to you for all these reasons.
Now, I would like to turn to my principal theme for this afternoon, a theme it will not take me long to develop but one I hope will stimulate you to continue doing what, as graduate students, you have already been doing so well--namely, to ask why we believe what we do or to ask why not believe what we have ignored. My point, to get right to it, is this: We like to think about what we know more than about what we do not know. We admire ourselves for all the knowledge we have acquired and, on an occasion such as this, we accordingly do what I began by doing which is to praise our expertise. I want, in contrast, to praise our ignorance, and to maintain that ignorance, or becoming comfortable with our ignorance, often has as much of a role in real human creativity, in new discovery, as knowledge or being proud about our degree of knowledge. Expertise, indeed, can become a barrier to understanding. It is one of the paradoxes of life that sometimes knowing something can keep us from learning something new.
Now, my idea today is not the theme of Western thought that envisions the acquisition of rational knowledge as a burden on or an impediment to the natural wisdom that exists in the simple life of the primitive (the theme of Rousseau or Gauguin). Nor is my point that of Milton in Paradise Lost that our search for knowledge represents the hubris of humans to transgress into God's domain.
Nor am I thinking about the idea, which I have spent my own scholarly career exploring and which I believe to be extremely important to the development of a democratic character, the idea that a greater consciousness of one's ignorance will or ought to lead us to be more tolerant and accepting of a pluralistic world and, therefore, able to sustain a better life than a more rigid commitment to a set of beliefs.
Rather, I want to say something along these lines: that a greater level of comfort with and respect for our ignorance enhances our likelihood of increasing our knowledge. This may sound self-evident, and if it does, fine; the fact is it's harder to achieve than we imagine. Knowledge is not all it's cracked up to be. The knowledge we possess can sometimes be a barrier to increasing our knowledge. It is easy to rely upon what we know, to be comfortable in that sphere and to be slack in inquiring into new evidence which is sometimes right before our noses and ought to compel us to acknowledge that there are things we cannot account for, or to look at old evidence in a new way.
Let me give an example.
A decade ago, the well-known historian, Robert Darnton, published a book entitled The Great Cat Massacre--and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. While doing research into the lives of ordinary French people in the eighteenth century, Darnton came across a writing by a man who had worked in a printing shop. The funniest thing that ever happened there, the worker said, was a riotous massacre of cats one night. Puzzled, Darnton set to work to understand what had happened, rather than being unwilling to grapple with the seemingly incomprehensible or the grotesque idea of a massacre of cats being hilarious. Behind this bizarre statement lay a revealing vignette about the relationships between the bourgeois shop owners, including the owner of the printing shop, and those who labored in the shops. The story, in short form, was simply this: The workers lived a hapless, degraded existence. "They slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat." Shop owners, on the other hand, lived apart from all this mayhem. The owners also happened to have, at this particular time, a passion for cats. As a result, the cat population in Paris had increased dramatically, and for workers, who slept near or above the alleys where the cats congregated at night, it was impossible to sleep for the cats' screeching. The exhausted workers decided to let the cat-loving owners of the printing shop have a taste of what they endured; and, so, one night they climbed to the roof of the owners' house and howled like cats, which kept the mistress awake all night. The next day the mistress ordered the men to kill all the cats in the area, save her own, of course. Gleefully, the workers set about their task, not sparing the mistresses' cat. They staged mock trials with the cats and pretended to have executions. The mistress and the master saw this and flew into a rage. This is what the workers thought was the "funniest thing" they had ever seen.
From this specific incident, so revealing of the nature of the feelings at work at this moment in history, Darnton is able to deepen our understanding of class and labor relations in eighteenth century France and to go on from there to consider the cultural practices of the age, all of which are illuminated by the strange story of the great cat massacre.
Now, my point in raising this not-so-pleasant story on such a glorious occasion as this is not to entertain you with eighteenth century historical studies, but rather, as I indicated earlier, to offer you an important observation about our intellectual condition.
In his introduction Darnton describes how he goes about his historical research. He speaks of how different are people across the ages, and of how easy it is to assume that they are just like us. To guard against this natural inclination, he says, and to achieve something approximating a true understanding of the human condition over time, the historian must be watchful for what he or she does not understand. He says, wisely: "When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning. The thread might even lead into a strange and wonderful world view."
This is a useful principle not only for historical research but for all of life. The principle is deceptively simple: Watch out for what you don't understand, and then pursue its meaning and significance with all the energy you can muster. To do this, however, you will need to nurture an appetite for being puzzled, for being confused, indeed for being openly stupid, and that--despite what you might think--is very difficult, especially when your egos invest so heavily in your status as an expert.
There is, finally, something even more striking about the relationship between our ignorance and knowledge and the process of developing new insights. This goes beyond being open to new data and lines of inquiry; it involves creativity in understanding old data. It is a cliché that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It is also true that a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing as well. Something happens to us as we settle in to the existing patterns of our understandings of our world. It's hard to break out (that's the Darnton point) but it is also hard to reassemble the patterns within which we see the world. Yet, there is a moment typically when we cross from ignorance into knowledge in which there is the greatest possibility of reorganizing and reconceiving the knowledge we inherit. In that moment of freshness our ignorance is, in a sense, our anchor to the new truth or the new insight.
There are many striking examples of this phenomenon. Rudolph Arnheim, now retired from this faculty, once wrote a piece on art forgeries in which he noted how often skillful forgers could fool their generation but not the next, because the next saw things slightly differently and could detect the forgery. This is also the theme of Thomas Kuhn's well-known book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, about how creative minds have taken the same scientific data and seen new "paradigms." He identified the phenomenon but he said he couldn't account for it: "how an individual invents . . . a new way of giving order to data now all assembled--must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so." What we do know is that this occurs most frequently just at the moment of transition--and maybe partial transmission--from ignorance to knowledge. We are then freer to think revolutionary thoughts, before the chains of knowledge settle upon us.
So what does all this mean for you? It means that there are many reasons for celebrating not only all the knowledge and expertise you have acquired but also the ignorance you take with you. It means, if Kuhn is right about this too, that your "youth" and "newness" to your fields is a vital asset, perhaps your most vital asset, as you try to think critically about your fields. Focusing on, becoming comfortable with, the very fact that there is much you do not know can be one of your most important characteristics. Make the most of it, and enjoy its benefits.
Now, I suppose it would be a bit too much for me to try on our behalf to take credit for leaving you with just the right amount of ignorance as we send you on your way today. But I know it would not be too much to say how thoroughly proud we are to send you off into the world as graduates of the University of Michigan, as likely as anyone in this country to use your ignorance as well as your knowledge for creative ends.
Congratulations and may you have healthy, creative lives and careers.
© Copyright 1997, University of Michigan
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