Ignorant of Ignorance

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.

                -Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell

Growing up, I always considered myself to be an intelligent individual. Perhaps this was because I was one of the few in my family who understood my grandfather’s jokes and comments, or because I consistently had good grades or because I could read above my grade level. Perhaps it was because people just assumed that since I was shy, quiet, read a lot and had a drier sense of humor that I was smart, and I took those assumptions to heart. Within the last year, however, I’ve come to realize that I’m not as smart as I once thought.

It’s been said before that religion doesn’t teach you how to think, it only teaches you what to think. In tandem with that, and this could very well have been my own isolated experience, but the public school system operates in much the same way, college perhaps being the exemption. There are very few subjects that require you to reach your own conclusions. In my mind though, the biggest difference between school learning and religious learning, is that religion doesn’t even give you the opportunity to try and discover things for yourself. It offers no tangible route to test your knowledge. Reading anything other than Church approved materials is not promoted and one is taught to believe that disregarding this warning will ultimately lead to eternal damnation. Everything is based on feeling.

For 25 years I allowed myself to be told what I should think and what I needed to know, and it was easy. I didn’t think about it in terms of ease or difficulty, but even if I had, I’d been brainwashed into thinking that living the religious way was the difficult path in life, and that this made me a better person.

Then, for the first time, my beliefs were challenged. Perhaps I should say that my beliefs were challenged by someone outside my normal circle of friends and who was a person I respected on an intellectual level. I wasn’t attacked. I was questioned. I was suddenly faced with the “why” rather than just the “what”, and ‘feelings’ as an answer was no longer sufficient.

For awhile I allowed myself to hear the arguments and to watch the debates, but I didn’t actively seek out these avenues for myself. I was still allowing someone else to tell me what I should watch and what I should read, but the biggest difference this time around was that I wasn’t being told what to think after reading or listening. I was being shown how to think.

The transition wasn’t easy, and internally I resisted a lot of the new ideas and especially the work. This was mostly out of terror. I felt like a foreigner in a strange land, surrounded by a host of exotic food who chose to only eat Top Ramen because it was the only label I could read. I wasn’t willing to learn this new language so that I could try new, and most likely, tastier food. Really, that was my entire life up to that point. I had been told that the only way to live was through Christ, and more importantly, as a member of the LDS faith.

It finally dawned on me that I had a decision to make, and that I needed to make it. I could no longer pretend that I understood everything or that I (dis)agreed with something. I couldn’t coast through life anymore. My relationship would never have the potential to progress and my blissful ignorance or real-world issues had been cracked enough that I would never be satisfied with blindly accepting either side of an argument. I decided to pursue the route of knowledge to learn how to think about things rather than waiting to be told what to think. I became an active participant in my own life.

Transitioning hasn’t been easy. Occasionally I find myself longing to be told what I should be learning from a particular book that I might be reading, or which side of an argument I should be on. I’m finding that I need to slow down when I read through material or when I’m listening to debates or podcasts so I can research terms and ideas that are completely unknown to me or that I may only have a cursory knowledge of. It’s a slow and frustrating process, but it’s a lot more rewarding. I feel a burning ambition in regards to furthering my knowledge, but I’m still working on fully accepting, and perhaps sharing, this new information.

It’s scary and exhilarating and occasionally depressing, but overall, I feel like I’m actually earning the position of an intelligent individual rather than being granted the acknowledgement based on feelings and assumptions.