We don’t know
It seems to me that the more we learn, the less we know. Really, when you get right down to it, there’s an awful lot we don’t know.
Writer Olga Tokarczuk thought of it as “anti-knowledge,” and thought perhaps it should be given as much respect as knowledge. I thought she had a point.
A year after Tokarczuk had gotten her Nobel Prize, Patrik Svensson’s The Book of Eels was published. In one of the book’s more-quoted lines, author Svensson had written that “eels argue with our confidence that the world is explained.” I think the reason it got quoted was because it expressed an idea not often said, but something that when we heard it, we immediately felt its truth: we were confident that the world was explained. Or that it could be. At least we pretended to be.
The narwhal was like the eel. In the early 1980s, Barry Lopez had written, “No large mammal in the Northern Hemisphere comes as close as the narwhal to having its very existence doubted. The obscurity of narwhals is not easily breeched by science. About the regular periodic events of their lives, such as migration, breeding, and calving, in relation to climatic changes and fluctuations in the size of the population, we know next to nothing.”
Why did mockingbirds mock? Biologist Dave Gammon didn’t know, and he’d been studying them for over a decade. “Everyone was interested” in why they mimicked other birds, but no one studied it for more “than a year or two.” All he could say was “mockingbird song-learning is not as open-ended as most folks originally thought.”
Maybe humans had a certainty gene — its own gene, not part of the madness gene. We’d decide we were certain about something and that was it, no matter the reality.
We would take whatever facts were at hand to assure ourselves that we knew. We read articles beginning “a study suggests….” and sped right over the “suggests” part to the part that confirmed what we already knew we knew: A study suggested that staring at gulls could deter them from swooping in to snatch our food. A study suggested that air pollution aged the brain. A study suggested a link between word choices and extraverts.
Studies showed that sugar was not good for a child’s brain development; that “time on screens” had little impact on kids’ social skills; that sleep played a part in healing traumatic brain injuries; that language learning made the brain grow; that where you lived had a significant impact on whether you’d live to be 100 or not; that adding more wine and cheese to the diet might help reduce cognitive decline; that climate change had likely driven some early human species to extinction; that antibodies from llamas could help in the fight against COVID-19.
A study had found that regular tea drinkers had “better organized brain regions” than non-tea drinkers. (Studies like this one made me say, “Aha! I knew that!”) These were balanced, though, by studies we felt must surely be wrong, or rigged. Plugging “study suggests” into the search bar of the website of ScienceDaily.com returned 121,000 results. We were awash in an ocean of information, facts, presuppositions, conjecture, conviction.
In reality, though, it seemed we knew far less than we believed.
We insisted pundits tell us the future. What would happen when we finally bested COVID-19 and ended the pandemic? Who would win the election? What would the new administration do? And pundits complied.
One week just for fun I conducted my own study: I counted the number of pieces sent out in email newsletters from places like The Washington Post and The New York Times, purportedly “news” stories. The vast majority of them were not news at all. They were simply speculation about what was going to happen. We loved it; we needed it; we required it.
Rousseau had evidently said that with things we considered important, we preferred to be wrong than to believe nothing.
I wonder if “belief” is the right word. But maybe it is. Maybe belief, in fact. is what it’s all about. We‘ve transferred our belief in what we once called “spiritual” things to the things of the material world. Because those, we felt, we could know. And so we believed.
One of our techniques for being certain, which seemed to have been hit upon several centuries ago in the Enlightenment, was to get rid of uncertainty by declaring that things we could not understand did not in fact exist. It was pretty refreshing when our government finally came out and said they simply didn’t know what a lot of the things spotted in the sky actually were. They’d even changed the name from “Unidentified Flying Objects” — which every body took to mean space aliens. They’d changed it to “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” Eventually people would attach the “space alien” meaning to that, too, of course. And I’m sure they knew that. So they just finally admitted that nobody knew. That made me happy.
Thomas Jefferson, having studied John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, concluded that “the world was eminently knowable.” Perhaps it was with this in mind that he hit upon his project of rewriting the Christian bible so it made sense; to get rid of all the spiritual stuff. What Jefferson wanted to weed out of the Jesus story seemed to be things “beyond us” in a manner of speaking. It was, I felt, a good example of what the Enlightenment was about: Mystery vs. no mystery, or mysterium that we are unable to figure out, vs. mystery that is such just until we figure it out, which we most certainly will be able to. That kind of thing.
To me it seems like hubris.
We do, in fact, keep finding out things:
Fish did migrate through the deep of the sea — marine biologists had suspected as much, and now they had proof.
And for a long time now we have known the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around.
And we know water is necessary for life on Earth.
But it wasn’t clear why parrots wasted food. (Or why cats wasted food.)
To me these kinds of things inevitably lead to questions about what had happened when life had started, and when hominids had emerged. But there were no totally clear answers.
It seems some animals mourned their dead. We’d recently figured that out. Or had we?
“What we don’t know about the brain still eclipses what we do. We don’t know how the brain generates consciousness. We aren’t sure why we sleep and dream. The precise causes of many common mental illnesses and neurological disorders elude us. What is the physical form of a memory? We have only inklings,” wrote Ferris Jabr. This was in 2017. We are not all that much further along now.
Many conditions are idiopathic: their symptoms could be described but no one knew what caused it. I have a few things like that myself.
Gannon stuck with his mockingbirds, but it didn’t appear that any existing hypothesis could explain mimicry in mockingbirds. He said, “In science, it’s better to embrace lingering uncertainty than to be proven wrong later on.”
We know a lot, and we keep finding out more — yet it is all of a type. By which I mean scientific. We seemed to learn about things, but the things themselves, we did not know — not in that Biblical sense. Science today left out any other way of knowing, as if no other way of knowing were real.
“In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknowingly shifted between worldviews,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, author, and enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe,
from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science. The questions scientists raised were not “Who are you?” but “What is it?” No one asked plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was “How does it work?” The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective.
I’d read other stories like Kimmerer’s, where someone who knew something — but not in a scientific way — was dismissed; sometimes ridiculed.
Kimmerer continued,
Following the path of science trained me to separate, to distinguish perception from physical reality, to atomize complexity into its smallest components, to honor the chain of evidence and logic, to discern one thing from another, to savor the pleasure of precision. The more I did this, the better I got at it, and I was accepted to do graduate work in one of the world’s finest botany programs, no doubt on the strength of the letter of recommendation from my adviser, which read, “She’s done remarkably well for an Indian girl.”
“Getting scientists to consider the validity of Indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water,” she wrote.
The Amazonian Waorani, I’d read, considered the life of the giant ceibo tree part of their own life — certainly not something Kimmerer’s botany profs would have considered knowledge. They didn’t “think of trees as a ‘species’ but an intrinsic part of the living forest,” wrote David George Haskell in The Songs of Trees. They “could not bring themselves to give individual names for what Westerners call ‘tree species,’” he said. They “live like one” (their words) with their trees, and consider them part of a relationship. “This dissolution of individuality into relationship is how the ceibo and all its community survive the rigors of the forest.”
All Indigenous Amazonian people, wrote Haskell, “appear to agree on one thing: what Western science calls a forested ecosystem composed of objects is instead a place where spirits, dreams, and ‘waking’ reality merge.” The forest, including its human inhabitants, was considered one entity. It was not “a union of what were separate parts.”
He called it a spiritual relationship. But the word “spirit” wasn’t right, exactly. At least not as we understood “spirit” — as something not “material” (and therefore not real). That evidently wasn’t what the Waorani meant at all. The closest we could come to understanding it, Haskell said, would be something like “union” or “relationship.” Haskell called the Amazon “the place where biological hubris dies.”
Science’s mistake — its hubris — is to insist that if it couldn’t be known scientifically it was not real and did not exist, couldn’t have happened.
That was science’s problem.
