Don’t get it? Color me unsurprised.

“Stupid, ignorant fools!” Does today’s title sound like someone you know? Perhaps like a good many people you know? It should, for it is the human condition. If I am a little wiser than the average, it is largely in this that I am aware of the foolishness in myself as well as others.

There are the great thinkers of history, of course. I would be a real fool to not admit that they tower above me intellectually. But they were also limited. Aristotle was one of the founders of philosophy as we know it; he thought you could choose to have a boychild or a girlchild by tying off the appropriate testicle. Martin Luther, no matter what you think of the Reformation, was a great scholar, speaker and linguist; he was also a raging anti-semite.

As I have previously quoted C.S. Lewis on, by reading the books of previous ages we realize that each age has its own particular myth-takes which are accepted without question at the time, but not in our time and not even in other ages before and after. And unless we are complete morons, we should begin to suspect that the same is bound to be true about us.

Apart from the collective delusions, there is also the fact that we are born knowing nothing but a few basic instincts, and only live for some decades at best. It is the rare soul that stays lucid for as long as a century. Of those who do, not many have devoted themselves to knowledge and insight. Not saying that this will shorten your life – quite possibly the opposite – but few people are scholars at the best of times, and few people grow old without losing their mind. And even if you do both, there is still simply too short a time to become an expert on more than a couple things, and get a passing acquaintance with some others.

It is not like we have unlimited processing capacity in our brains, either. We learn a little more than we forget for much of our lives, but only a little more. Things we don’t understand deeply tend to fade unless we use them. And to understand things deeply, we often need to know quite a bit already. “Inspiration comes more frequently to those who make effort.”

To once again quote Ryuho Okawa (although this may well be a familiar view in Japan), you should not consider yourself an intellectual until you have read a thousand books. I would assume fluffy entertainment and trashy romance novels don’t count in that number, but a lot of people would not reach it even then. How then can one think himself a scholar on a particular topic without having read at least a hundred books from various sources? I hope I have mentioned this before, but on Google+ I frequently see people who have very strong opinions. And in very nearly all cases it all comes down to the Dunning-Kruger effect: Being too ignorant to realize even that one is ignorant.

I am convinced it is hard to have a strong opinion on, for instance, Islam or Mormonism once you’ve read a couple *dozen* books by insiders, outsiders, friends and enemies of the faith. What I don’t really know is what happens once you have read a couple *hundred* books on the topic. Are you still uncertain? I think perhaps not. But I do not know:  There is no single topic I have read hundreds of books on. I tend to flit from one topic to another, so I am at best a jack of a few trades but a master of none. So perhaps you are certain – but something I know, even if you are certain, you deeply understand the views you disagree with. Now that I think about it, Aristotle said the same: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Quick note on that ancient proverb. What you find with the people with the intense opinions is that they have latched on to a thought and accepted it, then either simply not come across an opposing view, or shunning the opposing view. Usually, they are not able to entertain the opposite thought because that would be like accepting it. There is nothing morally wrong with this when used rightly: If you have found a virtue you should not seek a vice. But intellectually speaking, it becomes wrong, because the burden of an intellectual is to see things from many sides. Not necessarily to live many different lives: Life is too short for this, and it may be bad in other ways too. But the price of being an “educated mind” is to be exposed to lies, lots and lots of them. The reward is sometimes knowing them for lies, when you would otherwise not.

Even if you are educated in the most literal sense, having a Ph.D or some such, that actually only tells something about your mastery of one particular field. You probably also have had to sit through some more general classes, of course, but that may be a while ago and their impression on you may not have been all that deep. I see from time to time people who are experts in one field and make bold statements about unrelated fields of which they are clearly ignorant. Having a long education or even having contributed noticeably to the world does not make you a universal genius. And even if you are that, you may still end up saying something stupid. That’s human nature.

We all make mistakes, walking in twilight at best compared to the blinding light of absolute Truth. But we should not stop trying to chase truth and wisdom, even if our progress is like that of the snail. If we do not, then who? And if not truth and wisdom, then what?