Mark Lilla, _Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know_

 I BECAME AN admirer of Mark Lilla mainly through his work as an intellectual historian: The Reckless Mind, The Stillborn God, The Shipwrecked Mind. All three touched on matters of contemporary relevance, certainly, but mainly through a kind of excavation of the ideas of influential thinkers. His previous book, though, was more explicitly an intervention in debates of the moment; The Once and Future Liberal made the argument that liberals and/or Democrats would improve their electoral chances by placing less emphasis on identity-related issues. He had a point, maybe, but one more white guy arguing that we should put identity issues on the back burner mainly just pissed everyone off. 

Ignorance and Bliss splits the difference, we could say. It's about the don't-know-and-don't-want-to-know stance that underlies our current impasse of polarization. No one wants to have a calm, give-and-take discussion about Trump and MAGAism. You're either passionately behind him or passionately opposed, and whichever side you are on, you are not about to change your mind. Thus Ignorance and Bliss is about an important contemporary political phenomenon. It approaches the phenomenon, though, with an historical array of illustrations, many drawn from the Bible and classical literature, but with additional insights from Freud, Kafka, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Ibsen, and quite a few more.

Lilla generally adopts the sensible (and liberal, I'd say) position that yes, one ought to seek to know the truth, with all that implies about freedom of speech and the press, open debate, objective investigation. But he certainly understands why it might not always be best to insist (he makes some interesting points about Ibsen's The Wild Duck). 

He frames the book with discussions of Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Might one leave the cave and find the blinding illumination of broad daylight a little...oppressive? Intense? Or just uncomfortable? Might we want to go back into the cave, to the familiarity of those dancing shadows, and just hang out? "Think very hard before answering that question," he concludes. It's worth thinking hard about.