A Month of Mays: May We Acknowledge Our Ignorance
One of the insults many people seem to enjoy hurling at each other is about how ignorant they think the other person is. This seems to be universal. It apparently doesn’t matter which culture you come from, and it also starts young. I certainly remember being called “馬鹿” when I was a child in Japan. The characters translate to “horse-deer”. I also remember being quite smug about having good grades, though the memory makes me cringe now. We all have a chip on our shoulders when it comes to the issue of our ignorance and intelligence.
I think the reason why the words like “stupid” and “ignorant” stings so much is because we all secretly fear that we are. We were all children once, when we simply didn’t know as much as the adults around us due to lack of experience. Unfortunately, during those childhood years, many of us were implanted with the idea that ignorance and intelligence correlate directly. So, whenever we spot someone who doesn’t know a piece of information that we know, our egos feel relief. “Whew! At least I know more than that person! I’m not the stupidest one after all.” It’s one of the lies we all seem to tell ourselves.
Let’s Separate Ignorance from Intelligence
But if a 3-year-old can’t recite the multiplication table, you wouldn’t label them as “stupid”. And an expert on ancient Sumerian culture can still be “ignorant” about certain aspects. The information they know are based mostly on educated guesses, so artifacts are necessary to fill in the gaps. Their interest is also limited. Ask them to explain the string theory to you, or even Mayan culture, and they may not be able to do so. But that’s not a measure of their intelligence, either. We are simply well-informed in some areas, not so much in others.
Also, there are still many questions that even our brightest of the bright can’t definitively answer, like “What’s on the other side of a black hole?” or “What happens after you die?” Ignorance is the human default. You can’t possibly know everything. The universe is so huge, even all of the human race combined still haven’t been exposed to everything that there is to know. What we call “common sense” now may become outdated in the future, maybe even within our lifetime.
The smartest thing we can do now is to acknowledge our own ignorance and stop judging others for their lack of knowledge and experience.