Ignorant Modernity
Understanding the Homo Ignorans of Our Time (The Sociology of the Post-Modern Era)
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Ignorant Modernity
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Narrated by:
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Virtual Voice
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About this listen
Are we moderns more ignorant than the ancients? In some respects, yes; in others, no. That's what this essay on ignorant modernity is about; the transformation of the fields of ignorance and of the concept of ignorance itself, which is not always something negative per se, nor does it amount to a lack of education. Here the reader will find a kind of 'anthology' of postmodern sociologists (Bauman, Beck, Giddens), annotated from the perspective of agnotology (the sociology of ignorance) and from the brilliant prism through which the Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset, at the beginning of the last century, viewed the evolution of mass society, what today we could call the 'society of ignorance'.
Much contemporary sociology tends to describe our age as a moment in history in which reason finds its limits (its ignorance). We are immersed in a process of returning to the ancient Socratic wisdom that makes the questioning of the real the foundation not only of science but of society itself. This is what makes our modernity in part an ignorant modernity, a society that finds it difficult to distinguish the true from the false; but at the same time - beware! - it is also freer and more tolerant, because no one believes that he is in possession of the absolute truth.
In the societies of globalization, the rupture with a fixed space-time framework , the processes of delocalization of social agents, who now communicate with everyone in a frenzy of global exchange of goods and data, the individualization of social agents, the rupture with institutional or social frameworks (class, religion, cultural identities), and digitalization plus hyper-communication lead to new forms of ignorance.
The paradigm of ignorant modernity, according to this theoretical framework, would therefore be that complexity, specialization, and globalization - processes in which our societies are immersed - increase both knowledge and ignorance.
We would live in a second nature, the artificial world created by humans, in which homo ignorans - the archetype proposed here for individual agency in contemporary societies - would have to trust with the same intensity that primitive humans had to believe in their natural world.
We are witnessing the triumph of homo ignorans, the mass man or the ignorant sage, to use the term coined by Ortega y Gasset at the beginning of the twentieth century, born into a social world that takes things for granted. A super-specialized world whose keys homo ignorans does not know and for whose maintenance he feels largely irresponsible and unsupported. Homo ignorans lives in this world, embodied in each of us. He is an individual who moves from the sapere aude of the Enlightenment to the ignorare aude of this second modernity; from the dare to know to the dare to ignore and yet continue to explore new and potentially infinite fields of new knowledge and ignorance.
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