The Vasts of Ignorance

The title of this article comes from chapter 45 of George Eliot’s celebrated novel Middlemarch (published 1871-2). In full, it reads: “Oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.”

I was drawn to the passage by the story on this site about the Oxford academic, Dr Michael Foran, who cancelled himself after being barracked by two trans ‘activists’ (you can read that here). Celia Walden also covered the story in the Telegraph, in which she said she “bet the Oxford trans brigade haven’t read their cancelled professor’s book“.

I’ll bet they haven’t too. Walden’s story features a video clip showing the two earnest and bespectacled zealots in action. I say action, but the double act features a silent partner who stands there with her arms folded while the other sounds forth in the style of la jeunesse d’aujourd’hui reading her declamation from her phone. Perhaps she needed the phone to act as a counterweight to her preposterously sized backpack.

Ignorance is a priceless gift. It’s cherished by some of the young who, realising the value of this great endowment, make the most of their mastery of the “illimitable range of objections at [their] command”, unhindered by doubt or knowledge. We’ve all been there but few of us ever take to the stage to embark on a blaze of destructive obscurity, their few minutes of reckless fame capable in our unhinged world of ending careers and destroying lives. “There is no sinner like a young saint,” said the 17th-century playwright Aphra Behn in 1673.

You have to have been young once to know that “no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind” (Middlemarch again, chapter 55). In our era we have seen fit to indulge these swaggering popinjays and allow them free rein to try and impose their adolescent whims on everyone else.

Mark Twain spotted the problem in a nutshell when he described his own voyage through ignorance: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Today we could add at least seven years to those ages and in some cases several decades, but the point is clear. One wonders how the Oxford protesters will see themselves in years to come. Unfortunately, ignorance is far from a monopoly of the young. Those in possession of it are equally culpable when they inflict it on those around them, regardless of their age.

Samuel Johnson, that great man of letters, wrote in his The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia [sic] (1759): “Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.” Nine years earlier in his magazine the Rambler (no. 83, 1750) he had written: “He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.”

Johnson’s observation raises an interesting question. Were the Oxford protesters voluntarily ignorant and therefore should be prosecuted, or was their ignorance imposed on them by the education system? Having spent nine years as a history and classics teacher (up until 2016) I can believe the latter all too well.

Some of the most conspicuous features of the school curriculum were a complete lack of any lateral links between subjects or teaching functional skills of any use in the real world. I once overheard two students discussing their homework and that they could not remember what osmosis meant. I told them. “How could you know that,” said one, astonished, “you’re a history teacher.”

Fascinated by this I began to look further. I discovered not a single student or teacher who knew what a quadratic equation meant, merely how to perform them by using a formula. None of them knew what they were doing. Chemistry students were forever flummoxed by new words and terms that bore no relation to words they were familiar with and found them difficult to remember. No-one had, for example, ever explained to them that ‘isotope’ means ‘same place’ in Greek and means merely that the isotope sits in the same place in the periodic table as the element on which it is based. Unsurprisingly, I then learned that not a single science teacher at my school either knew that or had ever thought to find out. The point is not the detail but the lack of inquiry and the consequent ignorance.

Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World (1995):

We’ve arranged a global civilisation in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

All these examples are indicative of a system that often encourages closed minds and never more so than today. Witness, for example the The Black Country Living Museum that has set up a replica 1960s public library but placed trigger warning inserts in certain books, including those about Janet and John, explaining how “This book may include negative depictions of people or cultures, and outdated views. These depictions were wrong then and wrong now.”

How wonderful to be in possession of such eternal righteous judgement on the past, present and yet to come. Of course, the museum claims that the idea is to “spark conversation”, but why? The judgement has already been made. There is no more interest there in a conversation than in the hapless Oxford professor’s lecture theatre.

Therein lies the real danger: undetected ignorance. In his Journey to the Western Isles, Johnson wrote of the Isle of Skye, “The nation was wholly illiterate. Neither bards nor Senachies could write or read; but if they were ignorant, there was no danger of detection; they were believed by those whose vanity they flattered.”

Ignorance, above all, makes it possible to adopt and stick rigidly to a single train of thought, oblivious to any other perspective or point of view. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Telegraph on August 22nd last year, that “Mistakes are part of normal politics. You face hard facts and you correct course. But that is what Miliband refuses to do. It is the time-honoured pathology of very clever men. The cleverer, the worse, in fact, because it takes genius to rationalise insanity.”

In his Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens depicts Scrooge being shown two children by the Ghost of Christmas Present. He asks who they are:

”They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with many books to his credit, many on the ancient world, especially the Roman Empire. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025).