The eCrozier

There are some things I don’t want to know. I just want to be as ignorant as I can about them. Some of my desired ignorance is mundane or, maybe, even petty. For example, Mike Tyson is now doing a one-man show in Las Vegas that is billed as the “Undisputed Truth” about his life. I don’t want to know such things about the train wreck of his life. I mean I really don’t want to know. And I don’t want to know Justin Bieber’s favorite color. Roger Clemens is on trial again over his alleged steroid use. I kind of do not want to know about that either. I’m a baseball fan. I want my illusions to last a little longer.

There are other things – serious things – about which I want no knowledge. For example, I do not want to know how to torture another human being. I do not want to know how to make an improvised explosive device. I do not want to know the difference between love and justice. And, I believe, these are things God wishes all of us NOT to know – ever – and for all time.

Roger Shattuck, in his book, Forbidden Knowledge, argues that there are some things that are just too evil for us to know. This, of course, is not original thinking to Professor Shattuck. The story of human creation in Genesis tells us that our desire to be like God and having the knowledge of God and knowing good and evil is what led God to cast our forbearers out of the Garden of Eden.

It is our human insistence, however, that we must know everything (and that everything must be made known) that leads us, at least in part, to many of the tragedies humanity experiences. Humanity may well have been better off if we had never known how to split the atom. The “know how” to do so many things is now easily attainable through sources such as the Internet. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is how we humans justify making so much information available so widely.

I believe it was T.S. Eliot who once asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Knowledge and information are amoral. It is what we human beings do with knowledge and information that lead us to either moral or immoral behavior. Wisdom is needed to wade through it all and then to discern what is the good and what is the evil. The questions then must be asked: Where do we find the necessary wisdom? Who will make us wise?

I’m not advocating blanket censorship on information that some, maybe even a majority, find objectionable. We know that does not work and is not healthy for human community. I am suggesting, however, that “sunshine on everything” is equally problematic and not healthy to the human soul. Such openness presupposes a people wise enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. It also demands as a prerequisite a people who have learned the wisdom and virtue of exercising restraint. Just because we can know something does not mean we should know it. Just because we can do something, does not mean we should do it.

+Scott