Clarkson Integrator

Issue date: 1/21/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Jason Holloway Bill Vitek spoke and read excerpts from his essay, "Joyful Ignorance and the Civic Mind."

"I'm going to try to convince you … that ignorance is a good thing," said Bill Vitek to a packed room in Snell on Friday. Vitek's talk was titled "Joyful Ignorance and the Civic Mind," the same as his chapter in the upcoming book, The Virtue of Ignorance.

What he means by ignorance is not willful stupidity, but willful not knowing, disregarding the most obvious information. He spoke about recognizing the limits of knowledge and when it no longer applies, and understanding that knowledge derived from simple observation may be incorrect. "A student of ignorance," Vitek said, "is a student of boundaries."

Vitek's coeditor for the book, Wes Jackson, is a plant geneticist whose Land Institute has been working to develop a sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture. Jackson believes that current methods for agriculture are not sustainable - farmers are mining the land for fertility, causing erosion and other ecological problems. The Land Institute has been promoting research into farming from natural systems, based on existing ecologies. Jackson was awarded with the McArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship in 1992.

Their proposed ignorance-based worldview is a reaction to what they see as a knowledge-based worldview, the sort of thing that goes on at Clarkson. Vitek compared gaining knowledge to hunting, where the hunter is searching for the secrets, and once he wrests them from his subject, he owns the secrets and can do what he wants with them. He used the example of naturalists, who used to send smoke into the canopies of the rainforests so that they could study the species there by the types and numbers of dead animals that fell to the ground. Knowledge has been subdivided into subjects, and those subjects subdivided still into smaller and smaller specialties. Vitek thinks that this knowledge-based worldview is "inadequate and dangerous. The solitary Cartesian mind is insufficient for the task ahead."

While he likened a knowledge-based worldview to hunting, he compared the ignorance-based worldview to gathering. In the ignorance based world view, you are not collecting, you are not competitive, and you must understand a broad range of things, much like in gathering, where you must understand seasons, terrain, and plants. An ignorance-based worldview is broad, rather than specific. Its practitioners understand that they will fail often. Like civil minded people, they see things as relationships. In this way, the ownership that comes with the knowledge-based worldview is transformed into fellowship.

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