Book Review: 'I don't want to hear it'

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know by Mark Lilla

Socrates is quoted as saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

To which political scientist Mark Lilla observes, "It does not follow that the relentlessly examined life is." His question then is, "Where does that leave us?"

In his latest book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know," Lilla argues that historically –"the will not to know; the will to ignorance" – the denial of evident truths has been integral to the human condition.

I read this book, which is about "the will not to know, the will to ignorance," with the October 7 War as a menacing backdrop. Although our conflict goes unmentioned, it made Lilla's case all the more timely.

We delude ourselves in matters great and small because there are things we would rather not come to grips with. From the Cheese Danish that I ate while telling myself that it was not a diet breaker biggie to what the Israeli collective tells itself about trading hundreds of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists with blood on their hands for a small of living hostages.

Ahmed Jabari claimed that the terrorists released in the Shalit deal were collectively responsible for murdering 569 Israeli civilians. And that was before October 7, orchestrated by Yahya Sinwar, one of the released in the Shalit exchange. So far, the October 7 War has taken over 1,800 Israeli lives and exhausted our country over nearly 500 days of war.

Before the war, Israeli political and military leaders were convinced Hamas would avoid a conflict with Israel and that the potential was for years of quiet along the border. The New York Times revealed that Israeli decision-makers knew of Hamas's plans to attack more than a year before October 7, 2023. They even had a blueprint that laid out the assault in detail. However, as the Times reported, "Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings."

In his 2005 book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, psychiatrist and historian Kenneth Levin explored the phenomenon of conning ourselves about Palestinian Arab intentions. "The determination to hold fast to a particular comprehension of reality no matter what the strength of countervailing evidence, to be impatient with all invoking of such evidence and brook no debate, is virtually a textbook definition of 'delusional.,'" he writes.

In the real world, dialogue is not Socratic. As Lilla points out, people bristle at being told they are wrong. Hence, there is more angrily shouted, cross-talking punditry on television than cerebral, respectful dialogue.

Another aspect of not wanting has to do with our inner selves. If our unconscious did not cloak at least part of who we really are, we could not bear to suffer our existence. Lilla shows that we don't want to know ourselves – not totally. "Neuroses are jailbreaks – not out of prison but into one."

It is probably a blessing not to know such things as when we will die or whether our children will be killed in battle. Or even mundane matters like how fat we look to others and what our friends really think of us. Here, we need not to know to survive emotionally.

Lilla says it is no blessing not to be able to discern human duplicity. Follow the maxim "trust but verify" – that Russian proverb Ronald Reagan mirrored back at the Soviet Union.

It is prudent to be diplomatic rather than brutally honest to those we care about, for they do not really want to know the unvarnished truth.

What happens when you get the truth? What God did for Augustine was to allow him to see himself as the sinner he was. That was the epiphany. Lilla suggests that humans created religion because they needed a framework for living and an authority for demarking taboos. The more terrified you are of doing wrong in the eyes of God, the more you come to believe the Deity is just.

I have been told with a hint of acerbity that it must be hard for me to be right all the time. Of course, I am not right all the time, literally. However, now that I have read Lilla, I can quote him as saying that, indeed, "Revelation is a burden." To be an enlightened, well-intentioned elitist among the ignorant masses is no fun.

Nostalgia is yet another example of wanting not to know. We cling to the false grandeur of the past, the good old days. When I was a yeshiva boy, the rabbis would say that every generation since Mount Sinai has been spiritually diminished. But a careful reading of the Hebrew scripture shows our foremothers and forefathers were just as human, imperfect, and—in some instances—as self-deluded as we are.

This short, readable, and thought-provoking book is a smorgasbord of ideas covering political philosophy, literature, religion, psychology, and faith. The common denominator is the tension between our wanting to know and wanting not to know. In the final analysis, we want both.