Complete knowledge versus supposition.

Everything is done out of ignorance; everything is done with a view to gaining knowledge. If we did everything knowing exactly how it would turn out, then what would be the point of doing it?

You may argue that you walk somewhere fully in the knowledge of what you were going to see or do once you arrived at your destination. I would argue that whilst you do probably have some foresight of what you are going to see or do, that that foresight is really just speculation. I guess the issue here is one of supposition versus complete knowledge. You cannot have complete knowledge of what you will encounter on your walk to Sainsbury’s, to give an instance. you might believe that you are going to walk through that park and see that tree you always see, and then you are going to cross that zebra crossing you always cross, and then you’re going to buy some eggs to make that omelette you fancied earlier; but what if there is building work going on and you have to reroute, or what if that ancient Oak fell in that storm last night, or what if a rabid squirrel appears seemingly out of nowhere, bites you, and you require immediate medical attention? Or worse, what if they don’t have eggs in stock?

The variables are endless, and they all get in the way of even the most innocent of omelettes. But such is life — it was L.P Hartley that said that ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ but I would argue that the future is far more unfamiliar and far-flung — you can have complete knowledge of the past in a way in which you cannot have complete knowledge of the future. Of course, it depends on what type of past we’re talking about, as I am also a proponent of the view that generally, history is written by the victors, and so is ripe for manipulation and misinformation. I guess the type of past I have in mind is one’s own past, which mostly consists of previous trips to Sainsbury’s and if this is the case I think you can be fairly safe in the knowledge of previous trips you took, the path you took, and the outcome of taking that path. But what if your friend thinks you went a different way last time? I guess the past could always potentially be the victim of an innocent misremembering as well an evil type of misremembering, like what neo-Nazis do about eugenics and the Holocaust.

However, that particular tangent does not convince me that the past is more foreign than the future. After all, no one has written anything of any certainty about the future. No one has ever pre-written the news. You can’t get a degree in the future, in the same way as you can about the past. Admittedly, the more you study history, the more you become aware that so much of it is a matter of conjecture; however, it is still less a matter of conjecture than the future. I’m sure Elon Musk has his own opinions about that, but I for one don’t really trust Elon Musk’s opinions about anything. Everyone thinks that they have an idea of what will happen in the future, but that is exactly my point; you can have ‘ideas’ about the future, but ideas are a world away from complete knowledge. I concede that you can’t have complete knowledge about the past either; we’re still trying to figure out what happened at Sutton Hoo, and what really happened on the twenty-second of November 1963, but we still have more of an idea about what happened then than what will happen on the fifth of April 2035.

I suppose that there have been books published about the future. There’s been plenty of discourse about the future of robotics for instance, and the science behind climate change. In fact, vast swathes of science are predicated on clever peoples’ hypotheses about the future. But in none of those books does the author say what will certainly happen. And if they do, then they are a fool. Because they don’t know what will happen. They can take an educated guess, but they can’t swear down on it. And don’t get me wrong, I am a big believer in an educated guess! Educated guesses are very useful when it comes to pub quizzes or the impact of mass deforestation on the environment, but the whole point of them is that they’re not conclusive. There’s a margin of doubt. And it is in that margin of doubt that this article toils.

And do we really want to know what will definitely happen in the future? Not only would it be anxiety-inducing to know that you absolutely will trip up on your way to the shops and that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, wouldn’t it also just create a culture of laziness? If you absolutely knew the outcome of each action you took over the course of a day, you would probably do a lot less of them. If you knew you were going to fail, you wouldn’t try, even though failing is the only way to ever succeed. If we had true knowledge of ourselves and our future, then living would become an impossibility. We would all just sit in our separate houses, in the dark, terrified of all the embarrassing, terrible, perhaps dangerous things that we are all bound to do that day. That’s no way to live. It’s much better to go about one’s business, blissfully ignorant of all the terrible, embarrassing, amoral things one is destined to do. Because everything we do, we do with a view to know ourselves better. Complete knowledge leads to certainty, and certainty will only lead to anxiety and complacency. Complacency is different from knowledge because it is predicated on laziness, whereas knowledge is urged on by curiosity.