To Boldly Go in Ignorance

There is no l in the word chimney. Most people say they remember what they were doing when they heard the news of 9/11; I remember where I was standing when I discovered there is no l in chimney. It was on a box in the basement with the word written vertically on it and I tilted my head to read it. Do you mean to say I had spent my entire literate life—all five or six years of it—mispronouncing it as chimley and fully persuaded I was right?

I guess so. I was convinced they misspelled it on the box and am still not sure about it.

I can spell chimney correctly now, but every day I come into a bit more knowledge that sets straight my former ignorance, most of it being more significant than mispronunciation. What will happen when I am fifty and reread this very essay and see all the words with an l where the n should be? How to live with courage and hope in the presence of such abysmal ignorance? We know that we don’t know, but the sun rises just the same. When younger, I mistook youth—a segment of life characterized by lack of experience and offset by an abundance of energy—for a kind of infinity. Now I see the foolhardy confidence of those energetic-but-directionless days hovering somewhere between an innocent courage and a hopeless audacity.

If we could only be privy to our own billowing ignorance, we could begin to see what we’re up against. Mystified does not appear to be a temporary condition. The unknown spreads out in concentric rings, and the narrowness of human experience and the smallness of human knowledge, while variable, only highlight the circumference exposed to mystery.

II.

No one takes a young man seriously. Even if they did, it shouldn’t be allowed on one hand and wouldn’t be desirable on the other. Like Winston Churchill said, “If you are a conservative at the age of twenty-five, you have no heart. If you are a liberal at the age of forty, you have no head.” This rite of passage, when we are in it, is a slide-rule of correlating realism and idealism and we hope when it computes to our life it will be a productive number.

In an essay “Intellectuals and Roughnecks,” a humorous poke at the wild-eyed youngster trying to change the world, Christopher Morley writes:

"They are quick to scoff, but they are not humorous; they are eager for human perfection, but want to escape from humanity itself. They say a great many admirable things, true things, but say them so condescendingly that, by some quaint perversion, they impel us to fly to the opposite view."

We get that, Mr. Morley. But what to do? We are untempered blades, brittle, lackluster, not very sharp. Changing the world is a young man’s term and is better left with the teens. The safest way to navigate our excesses of energy and scarcities of knowledge is to lie low and keep our mouths shut. But safe is not always better.

Maybe we should take William Strunk’s approach: “If you are going to say a word wrong, say it LOUD.” We just need someone to correct our grammar. We can handle correction; in fact, I think we welcome it more than most realize as long as it is guided by a smile of bemusement and not one loaded with condescension.

III.

Take life seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. This strikes me as a working model for us as we learn to cope with limited knowledge and the willingness to harness bad ideas. This model would allow us to infuse our actions with meaning—we must have something to stand on—without the necessity of Always Right, which I think is humanly impossible. We could turn our inflated ideologies from latent energy to kinetic energy and keep them fluid enough to allow us a detour now and then while still enjoying the scenery.

The distance between knowing and not knowing is but a step, about like a tightrope, stretched between where we are and where we are going. We have enough to keep going with a bit of help and balance, but to walk a tightrope we must be very aware of the abyss. What if we made our decisions with the reality of knowing so little instead of thinking we know so much?

This would accomplish a couple things: 1) Demand of us an epistemic humility, and 2) Draw us into the community of knowledge. When I submitted an earlier version of this writing to a friend for criticism, he wrote back that it felt “fatalistic.” This is not what I wanted to say, but it took someone with more insight and honesty to see it for me. Something like this fatalism is what happens when we compound ignorance with pride instead of building community through conversation. Here is the highway to disaster: Actions, based on personal, unchecked narratives, take us to individual interpretations of a reality so dynamic, so complex, that an individual without a community of minds to blend with will become a kite without a string.

IV.

But we still are faced with the same basic problem in that, even with limited knowledge, we need to live as though it mattered. Today has an urgency in it for anyone aware of the calendar. Take sleeping seriously and take work seriously. Scratch your back like you mean it. If you cannot have fun washing dishes, you cannot have fun. At twenty, the world is your oyster; at forty, you still haven’t pried open the shell. Still, we all believe our oyster has the pearl—why shouldn’t we?

Perhaps, it would be more efficient for us to be preprogrammed with all necessary knowledge, but I am not sure it would be desirable, even if it were an option, because the struggle is precisely what gives us purpose and makes us human. What is death, if not a cessation of struggle? What is a desire to cease from all struggle if not a longing for a kind of death? What is vulnerability, but a hallmark of humility?

Anyone selling us relationship without risk, church without brotherhood, youth without failure is selling us a compromised version that will leave us wondering why our deepest needs are not met. Life is like that. All lives worth living are expensive, but not all expensive lives are worth living. Do not spend the precious life on consumerist ideas.

I hear old men looking back on their youth with an indulgent self-pity, patting themselves on the head kindly, saying, “You did the best you could with what you had to work with.” This I want for myself—it is the least I can do. It would be better than the urge to slap my younger self across the face.

What I want not only for myself, but also for my contemporaries, is to wake every morning, some of us groggy, some of us alert, but all of us looking at the day as though it will never pass this way again, going at it with hope and with a love of people and place and determined to change the world knowing it is mostly futile. People who can enjoy the rain and mud not only with an obliging humor but also with a love of life that renders small nuisances trivial, knowing somewhere out there are more insignificant lads doing the best they can with what they have to work with and are having the times of their lives washing dishes. We may not measurably change the world, but no matter: We will be changed.

All I ask is that you don’t take us too seriously.