“[W]e may aspire to truth, but it remains the faintest of all human passions,” thehub.ca critic Patrick Luciani writes in his take on Ignorance and Bliss, for “we also desire to remain in the dark.” After all, “ignorance is deeply comforting to the point of bliss,” whereas “truth and knowledge demand that we accept the unpleasantness of a messy, real world.”
Britain’s The Guardian declares Mark Lilla’s book “certainly timely,” for “we are slap bang” in an epoch in which “‘evident truth’ is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. […] These are parlous times, and we need the likes of Lilla to help us face, and face down, the massed cohorts” rushing “to restore an imagined past.” Lilla finds “the wriggly measures humankind adopts in order not to look the facts in the face.” In the end, he “hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.“
In Ignorance and Bliss, Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, “foray[s] through a broad array of religious, philosophical, and historical examples [that] produces many…thought-provoking insights,” Publishers Weekly declares. Church Times agrees: Lilla “refers to his book as ’these rambles,’” but, oh, “he brings erudition to his rambles….”
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
By Mark Lilla
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024