Towards a Critical Theory of Ignorance: Science, Politics, and Myth in Times of Uncertainty

• Applicant: Dr. Carmen Dege
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2022 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509538439

My book, titled "Towards a Theory of Ignorance: Science, Politics, and Myth in Times of Uncertainty," discusses how democracies respond to conditions of uncertainty. I argue that uncertainty is a challenging problem for two main reasons: First, the conditions of uncertainty have changed; we are no longer primarily dealing with crises that have a beginning and an end, but with complex instabilities with no clear solution. Second, the two default modes with which democracies have usually responded to uncertainty in modern history reveal severe limitations. Following the fact-value distinction typically attributed to Max Weber, I define those two modes the “science” response and the “politics” response. The former controls uncertainty through facts, rational politics, and expert knowledge (e.g., epistocracy, technocracy), while the latter institutionalizes uncertainty in form of citizen science or agonistic politics (e.g., radical, deliberative, epistemic democracy). The first part of the book investigates the limits of these two responses, especially the growing epistemization of politics in moments of crisis and an increasing double bind of technocracy and populism. The second part develops a critique of the fact-value paradigm in exploring ignorance as a third response to uncertainty — eclipsed or stigmatized by the idealization of facts and the relativization of values. I do so in (1) complicating the legacy of Max Weber with regards to the role of ignorance in his work and (2) turning to the tradition of political myth to develop a more detailed analytic of ignorance. In particular, I argue that we can trace a transition in 20th century myth debates from what I call 'willful ignorance' to 'learned ignorance'. While willful ignorance isolates a position from its limits in order to defend the certainty of a conviction, learned ignorance relies on the ambiguity of belief structures as a way to live and act under conditions of uncertainty. The third part of the book takes up this analytic of ignorance to develop an alternative to the larger epistemological debate of post-truth politics and its focus on fact-checking and shaming practices. I offer a new framework in environmental theory for conceptualizing the differences between winning an argument and telling a better story. In particular, stories that rely less on a recuperation of certainty – reflected by, for instance, forms of technocratic mastery and dystopian despair – are better equipped to dissolve the sense of inevitability and powerlessness that surround hegemonic conceptions of nature and its rootedness in origin myths.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Stefanos Geroulanos, Ph.D.