An extract from ‘We Don’t Know – First Meditation’, We Don’t Know! (unpublished as @ November 2026)
We are, deep down, afraid of what we don’t know. This fear has come to dominate our response to each other and the world about us. We see this in our politics, media and commerce. It is also the underlying cause of so much hate and vitriol on social media. So endemic is this state of fear around not knowing that we have become fearful of it without knowing precisely what it is about it we are actually afraid of. It is ‘not’ knowing, after all. Unfortunately, this ‘negative anxiety’[i] is now a dominant feature of many people’s lives.
In a way, it is my own fear – in this case of falling short, failing, having nothing important to say or contribute, not knowing – that spurs me on in this project and that has brought me to this place (both physically and conceptually). Ironically, it is the very fear of ‘not knowing’ that emboldens me to put forward a claim that I ‘know’ something about what’s wrong with society today. (At the same time, I find myself wary of conceding to the idea that ‘I know that I know’.) Well, here goes:
We marginalise or wholly exclude the ‘unknowable’ … in favour of ‘the unknown’… We do this out of fear. Since it is impossible to rid ourselves of the fact that ‘we don’t know!’, and the attendant fear this causes, we have devised ‘clever’ ways of diminishing its power over us, and so feeling less fearful. In particular, we have learned to rationalise ‘the unknowable’ as ‘the unknown’.
The unknown, which I have introduced as a kind of knowledge, is, paradoxically, reduced to something we know, and so we (believe we) can control. We enact this control of the unknown for ourselves, and for society at large, through a myriad of practices, institutions and systems that we rely on to manage ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’.[ii] In effect, ‘the unknown’ is locked away in ‘a prison of certainty’[iii] where we believe it can do us no harm. Of course, in many respects, this gives every appearance of being enormously successful for orientating ourselves in the world. But it comes at a cost. Because in our eagerness to treat what we don’t know as ‘the unknown’ we have, however unwittingly, shut ourselves off from the mystery and meaning of the unknowable, and indeed, of our very being.
The situation just outlined describes what I believe to characterise the dominant over-arching culture of our times: I call this the culture of knowledge.[iv] I use the word ‘culture’ here knowingly. In an age where ‘culture wars’ and ‘war on woke’ are expressions that have not only gained prominence in politics and governance around the world, but are leading to unconscionable consequences for many, it is becoming all too easy to dismiss culture out of hand. But this dismisses the systemic nature of value recognition, under which some views, and not others, are legitimised.
It is certainly not a new idea to suggest that we don’t know what culture is. The enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder ‘complained about nothing being vaguer than the term “culture”’.[v] Raymond Williams famously stated that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.[vi] Oftentimes, culture is associated with what a group, collective or nation thinks or does – it’s way of being. In my view, culture is not so much about our collective sharing of values per se (even within our own family and friends we often hold different opinions), but our collective sharing of the structures, institutions, practices and norms that form our systems of value recognition.[vii] In this respect, of course, the proliferation of views on culture made by powerful politicians and leaders is itself part of the ‘culture of knowing’ I describe.
Under the culture of knowledge, which has become our hegemonic mode of interaction and value recognition, life is restricted to a positive[viii] actualised outlook where, in order to control people and things (the raison d’être of this culture) there is (or can be) only what is (or is allowed to be).[ix] In other words what is ‘known’. Whilst it might appear paradoxical, this actually includes what (and that) we don’t know. To treat our ‘not knowing’ as ‘the unknown’ or as ‘uncertainty’ is, in effect, to know them as such. They become forms of knowledge for us. And this has the effect of excluding the unknowable. Consciousness is narrowed. We lose touch with the fuller consciousness of our being – that which includes the unknowable.
The culture of knowledge appears to optimise conditions for utilising what we want for organising, making decisions and living our lives successfully. For maximising utility over meaning. It is now the overarching culture of education, commerce,[x] and technology. Reflecting on my own professional work over the last quarter of a century in a university context, I cannot but help observe that I, along with my colleagues throughout Higher Education, have been (and remain) complicit in the reproduction of this culture of knowledge. (At the same time, those working in academia are perhaps increasingly marginal to society’s decision-making.)
The culture of knowledge is the predominant culture within which AI is being developed and which, in turn, is being reproduced and ever-deepened by AI, built as it on a dichotomising logic – the binary principles of the digital (1s and 0s) and algorithm (machine code and rules).[xi] It is a culture that values answers not questions. Its foundation is the being-less, static, ‘finished’ therefore closed, form of knowing which we call ‘knowledge’. Knowledge is something we recognise (or not). Knowledge is power – because (as the culture of knowledge’s logic has it) we can control what we know (what we recognise). And this control gives us (at least the illusion of) certainty.
[i] Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (2023) makes the very important distinction between negative and positive anxiety.
[ii] I discuss ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ (made (in)famous by a speech given in 2002 by the then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) in the Fifth Meditation.
[iii] Many commentators have championed stability and security over fear. Thomas Hobbes, for example, wrote in 1651 that without security ‘there is no place for industry…no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ (Hobbes, 1996[1651]: 89.)
[iv] Elsewhere, within my work on aesthetic critical realism, I have described this culture as ‘persecutory’: ‘we are living through a time when simplistic notions of good/bad, right/wrong, and us/them have come to dominate our encounters with each-other and our planet.’ (Wilson, 2020b: 398.) I trace this back to the ‘actualist’ tendency to reduce the necessary and the possible to the actual. ‘The actualist relies on what is evident, and what is actually apparent, rather than what is possible or necessary for the phenomenon being “explained” to exist.’ (Ibid. p. 399.)
[v] In Grünberg, 2000, p. 55.
[vi] Williams, [1976] 1983: 87.
[vii] For a detailed overview of my position on ‘culture’ see Wilson (2020a) Chapter 7: Cultural experience.
[viii] According to post-structuralist critique, presence occupies a position of dominance in society over absence because we see absence as what you get when you take away presence (see Derrida, 1981). Moreover, under the culture of knowledge’s ethos there would be ‘nothing’ for me to write about in this book: the unknowable is unknowable.
[ix] This ‘purely positive’ perspective can be traced back to the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea (6th century BC) who defined all things that can be thought or spoken of as Being.
[x] As every investor knows, markets hate uncertainty.
[xi] Exploring the relationship between human beings and Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the role of algorithm, is not new, of course. See, for example, Dreyfus (1965).