Things Fall Apart, pt 3: Unknown Knowns and the Research Seminar
by zunguzungu
In the class I’m currently teaching about the problem of “first contact,” we read books like Things Fall Apart not only because I want to read them, but because “first contact” between different cultures gives us a uniquely useful critical distance from the epistemological problem of how to make knowledge out of ignorance, the deceptively difficult problem of how to identify the things we don’t know so we can go about learning them. And because it’s a research seminar, I’ve been trying to take advantage of the way the problem of research and the thematic problem of the class converge: both when we meet people we don’t know and when we attack a research subject we know nothing about, the first task is a similar one, the problem of identifying what we don’t know so that we can know it.
The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, as always, is our guiding star in these troubled waters:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
We get a certain schadenfreude in making fun of Rumsfeld, of course, but mocking it as poetry doesn’t change the fact that what he was saying makes perfect sense, as Geoffrey Pullum pointed out at the time, a distinction between “(i) areas of knowledge that we are aware of possessing and (ii) areas of ignorance that we are aware of” which, Pullum asserts, “seems to allude to a familiar old Persian apothegm:
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, can be taught; teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.
He who knows, and knows that he knows, is a prophet; follow him.
The problem for Rumsfeld, of course, was that he had inherited* a piece of critical epistemological without fully understanding it (or, at least, was willing to mis-uses it so as to retroactively justify an already made decision). As John Quiggin noted, for example, an awareness of our own intelligence limitations is a much better case for not going to war, since it indexes precisely our inability to understand just what kind of genie we might be releasing when we uncork the bottle. And assuming that a thing which we don’t know to be true is true is precisely the opposite of what this line of reasoning should lead us to conclude: contra Rumsfeld on the WMD’s we hadn’t yet discovered the definitive absence of (and never will, by definition) not having disproved a fact doesn’t make it true.
But more troublesome, as Zizek nicely pointed out, is that is also our own knowledge that sometimes gets in the way. From a nice In These Times column, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib”:
“What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”
Zizek might have added the “knowledge” of the existence of WMD’s as an unknown known, in fact; because our leadership was so positive of their existence, they never realized (not that they cared) that the thing they “knew” was actually unknowable, because wrong. But the more germane point here is simpler: how we learn the things we don’t know is always a function of the things we do already know. One proceeds not from ignorance to knowledge, but through ignorance into a kind of knowledge that therefore still carries the trace of its origin. Not that I say it to my students in this way, of course; I emphasis, instead, that the choices we make when we first set out will have consequences in how we proceed once we are farther along that path.
Something as simple as how you frame that first google-search, after all, will shape everything you do from that point on. I presume that my students, like me, generally begin with the easiest option in attacking an absence of knowledge, and thinking about this process provides a semi-clear illustration of something that’s otherwise true but not so apparent: because the tree of possible second steps that emerge from a first step google search will be radically unique to the particular search terms one uses, it’s really, really important to think critically about which search terms you start with (and not be bound by one’s original formulation of the problem). A paper whose author googled “Things Fall Apart Igbo Culture” and one which began with “Things Fall Apart African Culture” will not only be very different beasts, most likely, but a better paper than both will be the one which (understanding the distinction) googles both.
(If I can get my head out of my own ass long enough, I’ll try to write a followup to this post illustrating how Things Fall Apart addresses this problem thematically; at every stage of the “first contact” process, Achebe very programmatically treats this very problem, the difficulty of how old knowledge helps and hinders the discovery of new ignorances and the process by which they are converted to new knowledge.)
zunguzungu 
All good, except for one detail: Rumsfeld, et al, didn’t actually think there were any WMDs. And it didn’t matter. The rest was just noise.
(I agree with your main point, but don’t feel the example serves it.)
Didn’t they? I don’t think they particularly cared, of course, and I don’t think they in any way addressed the question in good faith. And you may kn ow a lot more than I do about this. But my suspicion is that the cynical ones who willfully lie about stuff like that are heavily outnumbered by the number who are actually able to convince themselves that what they want to believe is true. I think the Joe Wilsons of the world, to pick a topical example, genuinely do believe that Obama is lying, in a way that is real to them, however irrationally (and dangerously) so; the fact that they don;t require evidence (and can actively filter it out) doesn’t c hange the fact that they do believe it. And my sense from reading the Rise of the Vulcans was of a group of people driven by ideology, of course, and incapable of not coming to the conclusions that their ideology required of them, of course, but not of people who were cynical in that way. Not that this question really matters; you can reach the conclusion that those kinds of people should never be trusted with power regardless of whather they made the decisions they made in good faith or bad, since it’s still the wrong one for the wrong reasons.
Although, that said, there certainly are a broad swathe of Carl Schmitt neo-cons who believe that lies in service of a higher truth are no vice. This, for example, is David Horowitz:
“I don’t have a big quarrel with Frum’s view that Beck’s view of Cass Sunstein is “over the top” or off target. … Frum is right that Sunstein is not a raving leftist. … [But] Our country is under assault by a determined, deceitful and powerful left which will stop at nothing to realize its goals. Facing them, I would rather have Glenn Beck out there fighting for our side than 10,000 David Frums who think that appeasing leftists will make them think well of us. No it won’t. It will only whet their appetite for our heads.”
As DAvid Frum pointed out:
“In other words: Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. The country is “under assault.” (As the broadcaster Mark Levin has said, President Obama is “literally at war” with the American people.) In a war, truth must yield to the imperatives of victory. Any conservative qualms about the untruth of Beck’s defamation of Sunstein amounts to “appeasement” – an appeasement that will end with the left decapitating the right.
I’m getting this from Matt Yglesias , by the way. But my sense is that this kind of “noble lie” neocon is actually much more common in the media than in actual positions of power. Not because any decisions get made any differently — as I said, this hair I’m splitting is not one which has any consequences at all — but because politicians need to identify themselves to a different kind of ego-ideal. And the Vulcans were (and are) idealists of a certain sort, and all the more dangerous precisely because they were willing and able to belief nonsensical things with all their hearts and minds. At least a Carl Schmittian knows he’s lying, after all, and I think those guys really didn’t know it, and could let themselves.
I do believe that Rumsfeld and Cheney and the gang believe a lot of the crap they spew(ed). But I also believe that they were indifferent to the existence of WMDs, on the one hand, and knew they likely weren’t there, on the other. Otherwise they wouldn’t have directed intelligence to change reports, etc.
That said, I think you’re right to an extent about the media figures as opposed to politicians. That quote from Horowitz is astonishing in its disconnect from reality. If only there were a powerful left!
This reminded of the Quaker (because I am one) peace testimony that was first presented to Charles II: there is one part which claims to “certainly know” that the Spirit which was Jesus would never lead anyone “to fight any war against any man with outward weapons”. And yet another, perhaps more via negativa, way of reading this testimony folds in the idea that we cannot reject violence because we know what it does to us (in terms of rationally anticipating or calculating its effects); rather we have to reject war because we will never be able to know what that violence does, will do, did to our human souls. In both the interpretive and practical traditions of Quaker communities, the boundary that is the reminder of our ultimate ignorance about the possible effects of violence is carefully (even lovingly) maintained.
Thank you for posting that comment, Biryanilady. I like that.
That is lovely, Biryanilady, and one doesn’t have to be a Quaker to see something profound in it (so much interesting and powerful thinking gets overlooked by secular types because it’s implanted in religious theology; an inability to recognize it as such is such an impoverishing disability for our societies, I think).
I agree completely with your parenthetical, Aaron. I think it’s an important point.
On that note, Terry Eagleton:
“I’m certainly not urging them to go to church. I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns. In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological. But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue. There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that. I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment.”