Who hasn’t heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss” a thousand times?

Like all cliches, it sticks because it’s rooted in truth, but it’s worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying. If you read the history of philosophy, you don’t find all that much interest in the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth, which is assumed to be a universal human impulse.

That’s not entirely wrong, of course. But denial and avoidance are also human impulses, often more powerful than our need to know. So these drives — a need to know and a strong desire never to never find out — are often warring within us, shaping our worldview, our relationships, and our self-image.

Mark Lilla is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and the author of a new book called Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. It’s short, elegantly written, and maybe the highest compliment I can give is that it reads like a book that could’ve been written at almost any point in modern history. It engages one of the oldest questions in philosophy — to know or not to know? — and manages to offer fresh insights that feel relevant and timeless at the same time.

So I invited Lilla on The Gray Area to explore why we accept and resist the truth and what it means to live continuously in that tension. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The book opens with a kind of parody of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In the original story, there are prisoners who spend their whole life bound by chains in a cave looking at shadows being cast on a wall, and they mistake those shadows for reality because it’s the only reality they’ve ever known. What’s your spin on it?

In Plato’s edition, a stranger comes in and turns one of the prisoners around so that he realizes that he’s been living in a world of shadows and is invited to climb up to the sun and then lives up there until he’s told to come back down and get other people.

In my version of the story, he’s got a little friend with him, a young boy who also goes up. When it comes time to go back down, the man tells him he can stay up staring at the forms and being in the pure sunlight and seeing what is, and it turns out he’s desperate to return. It’s a cold life. All of his fantasy and imagination have dried up. He misses his virtual friends and eventually he’s taken back down. And so I start the book saying it’s an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing.

We want to know the truth, we want to see the world as it is, but we also need to be ignorant of certain things and we really, really hate to admit our own ignorance. So we’re constantly playing........

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