Willful Ignorance

November 29, 2011 by Susan L. Smalley, Ph.D.



According to James Carse, Professor Emeritus at NYU, there are three kinds of ignorance: ordinary ignorance, willful ignorance, and higher ignorance. The first is the very essence of learning—you move from unknowing to knowing—like learning history, science, facts and trivia. The second type, willful ignorance, is when you know something but choose to pretend you do not. The third type of ignorance is lofty in scope and hard to achieve—it is a reverence for the unknown—for mystery—or what may be unknowable. It is infinite, as Carse notes, ‘the intellect … never comprehends truth so precisely that truth cannot be comprehended infinitely more precisely’ (p. 15, The Religious Case against Belief). A higher ignorance allows us to be open and curious in the face of knowing that we do not know.

The most disconcerting form of ignorance is when it is willful. We seem to be living in a culture that condones it more and more. The Penn State sex abuse tragedy is a perfect example of willful ignorance where individual values were ignored in the face of a culture of secrecy. As discussions emerged around ‘how can this happen?’. I started to see that willful ignorance can be accepted as part and parcel of a cultural mindset.

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I’ve been working with a human rights organization lately on a book about survivors of the sex trade. As we talked about the book, it became clear that we hoped to get people to become aware of the presence of harmful actions of human against human when sex is for sale. The question we kept asking was,

“Should girls and women be sold for sex’?

We heard story after story of westerners (often college students) buying sex from prostitutes while on vacation in Brazil or Cambodia or other travel destination. It’s very unlikely these men and boys are fully aware of the abuses and bondage of females in prostitution that is connected to buying sex. I doubt many men would do so if they fully understood the extent of violence toward women and girls that underlies or is connected to their purchase. The average prostitute starts at 12-13 years of age and begins that life because of being sold or forced into servitude because of poverty, lack of education, or dire family conditions. Few people would think that at 12 years of age, a decision to sell oneself for sex would be truly of ‘free choice’.

There is both an element of ordinary and willful ignorance when it comes to buying sex. Naivety arises because we aren’t that well informed about the insidious nature of the sex trade, the abuses that are connected to pornography, strip clubs, and other mainstream sex for sale media. Yet willful ignorance arises when we are somewhat informed and yet ignore it for the pursuit of individual pleasure. Willful ignorance arises when we pretend it happens ‘over there’—somewhere foreign to our backyard, affecting girls and women who we wish to think are different from our own mothers, sisters, and daughters.

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Willful ignorance happens all the time and it is up to each of us to battle it individually and then around us when it arises. A battle is an appropriate metaphor because countering willful ignorance requires action, often contrary to self-serving interests. It requires learning about the effects of ones actions on others and may involve sacrificing personal pleasure for the benefit of others.

When we choose to act in ways that we know are detrimental to others or the planet and pretend to ourselves that it is not so, we acknowledge and accept willful ignorance.

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