Accepting Ignorance

“Wow, you speak English really well; you don’t even have an accent!” I always feel awkward and a little embarrassed when I respond, “Thank you, we speak English in Singapore – it’s our first language,” and add, “but we do have an accent!” to make the other party feel a little better.

I always get asked if I feel offended at people asking me questions that appear ignorant, like the example above, or others like, “Is Singapore in China?” or “So what’s your real name?” with the assumption that I adopted an “American” name upon my arrival in the United States. Sometimes, I do not even get asked - someone else, fully well-intentioned, volunteers to feel offended on my behalf. The truth is I do not feel offended when people express ignorance through asking questions, because it is humility that allows them to risk appearing ignorant, and it is an invitation into an honest conversation. More importantly, it allows me to forgive my own ignorance about issues that are currently beyond my scope of knowledge, and frees me from my pride that prevents me from admitting that I do not know everything. Really, who does?

We are all ignorant about something, whether or not we would like to admit it. Someone may have a full experience with issues of hunger and homelessness, and be clueless about issues of environmental sustainability. Someone who is well-versed in issues of racial injustice in the United States may not know much about issues of human-trafficking in Russia. We cannot know everything, and there is beauty in that, because that has the potential to bring us together so we can learn from each other. However, this requires us to start from a place of humility, which can sometimes be a huge challenge, because it demands vulnerability and trust in others.

I recently started to realize that while there are many societal issues I find to be important in addressing, I need to hone in on one or two and go deeper with them, committing to focusing my energy and my resources to them, as opposed to dabbling in the waters of a breadth of issues without really investing myself in anything. I used to want to learn about everything, thinking that hiding behind the projection of being well-informed would gain me credibility, dreading hearing the response, “How do you not know about that?” in a situation where I was forced to admit that I knew nothing about what was being talked about. However, what I soon learned was that the depth I was lacking due to the focus on breadth was leading me to place of false confidence. Information that I had was minimal and barely scratched the surface, but I misunderstood myself to be well-informed, which was more ignorant than not knowing anything at all.

The way I see it, pride is the biggest and most dangerous form of ignorance, because it keeps us blind to the complexities that exist in the world where different viewpoints, developments and subjective experiences shape and inform the multiple perspectives of any given situation, issue, or experience. It is pride that keeps us locked away in a box of close-mindedness that leads us to a refusal to learn and understand things from a different and expanded perspective. I know that for me personally, it is pride that leads me to pretend that I know things when I do not, because I am too afraid to appear ignorant. However, at times when I have chosen to risk vulnerability in saying, “Sorry, I don’t know anything about that, could you tell me more?” I have experienced liberation of spirit - the burden of willful pride taken off my shoulders. So perhaps it is not ignorance in and of itself that is harmful to the fabric of our society, but rather, the pride within us that locks us up in our own jail cells of ignorance. As Benjamin Franklin said, “being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”