March 17th, 2025
How much do you think you know?
And have you ever considered our individual knowledge (or lack thereof) as a significant reason for the tension and division in this country?
I was savoring a wonderful article by Laura Kennedy a few weeks ago; it was a list of advice to the reader based on all of her work so far. One of the pieces really stuck in my teeth:
“When you think ‘the other guy’ is nuts or stupid, put serious intellectual effort into constructing the most charitable and strongest possible argument in favour of their position. Avoid engaging in conflict or critique until after you’ve done this. Inability to do [this] is a sign that you are being prejudiced, intellectually lazy and engaging in poor reasoning. Work on this as a matter of urgency.”
It bothered me. Not because I disagree with it; I think it’s true! But lately, and often, when I try to stand in a position or see a situation like somebody else does, I just can’t; it is devoid of logic and sense and heart.
Enter the term “knowingness.”
One of my absolute favorite writers Brian Klaas wrote an essay on the matter this week, and helped explain it: “Knowingness is a term coined by philosopher Jonathan Lear. It’s defined by a relationship to knowledge in which we always believe that we already know the answer — even before the question is asked. It’s a lack of intellectual curiosity, in which the purpose of knowledge is to reaffirm prior beliefs rather than to be a journey of discovery and awe.”
Sometimes knowingness is the answer.
This is when people refuse to take in new information that challenges what “they already know,” which often isn’t true at all.
Forget the idea that politics is the big divider. It could just be as simple as this: we can’t agree on anything because some people refuse to learn anything.
Klaas proposes that there are two distinct subsets of knowingness in modern society: type 1, the people who think they know but they don’t; and type 2, the people who don’t want to know.
Klaas continues: “Intellectual exploration is a uniquely human gift, producing the most extraordinary pleasure for those who engage in it. As modern humans, we have access to more knowledge than anyone, ever. Even the poorest, most uneducated person has more quality information available to them today — in public libraries and on the internet — than the richest scholar with packed mahogany bookshelves from bygone eras. And yet, paradoxically, deliberate ignorance has become one of the biggest threats to our fragile democracies. In the past, we needed to worry about uninformed voters, those who didn’t know much about politics. These days, we need to worry about the much more dangerous misinformed voters. Uninformed voters often recognize the limits of their knowledge and are therefore more hesitant. Misinformed voters are certain they know something they don’t — and they don’t hesitate to act, sometimes aggressively, on those false beliefs.”
Jonathan Malesic speaks on the phenomenon today: “In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes. It’s the ideologue who knows the media has a liberal bias – or, alternatively, a corporate one. It’s the above-it-all political centrist, confident that the truth is necessarily found between the extremes of ‘both sides’. It’s the US president Donald Trump, who claimed, over and over, that ‘everybody knows’ things that were, in fact, unknown, unproven or untrue. Knowingness is why present-day culture wars are so boring. No one is trying to find out anything. There is no common agreement about the facts, and yet everyone acts as if all matters of fact are already settled.”
So how much do you know? Is it enough, maybe, to expose to you the idea that you don’t know much at all?
Because that’s the truth. And until we find common intellectual ground (and our curiosity!) again, things are just going to get worse, no matter how much good information exists.
The Den 