Don't tell me

Political scientist Mark Lilla tries to get to the bottom of why we prefer not to know.

- BY ANDREW PAUL WOOD

There's an old Latin tag of uncertain provenance: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur - “the world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived”. More succinctly, “ignorance is bliss”. Mark Lilla, political scientist, historian, journalist and professor of humanities at Columbia University, purports to explore why in his latest book. The rather banal answer is that human beings prefer comfortable self-delusion over uncomfortable truths, but Lilla’s thesis rewards careful reading.

Through a collection of essays, Lilla goes on a open-ended tour, an “intellectual travelogue” of various facets of Nietzsche's “will to ignorance” via literature, religion and psychology. It must be said that it reads like a book written in the expectation that the reader knows this stuff already. And it’s in the recherché, slightly supercilious tone of one who writes opinion pieces for The New York Times, which of course Lilla does; style is often prioritised over succinctness and clarity. Intellectual history, Lilla shows, is split between those who view Prometheus as a hero of Enlightenment, and those who see Prometheus as traitor to the gods who got what he deserved.