I’m a Don’t Know person. I’m passionate about saying clearly what I can and can’t know. At school, I remember I was told by my 6th form tutor Mr Childs (hello, Mr Childs! You’re on the internet) that it was important to have an opinion. He encouraged me to have a clear opinion about current events and history, and to try to defend it. That’s the orthodox view in our culture: that the world is known and if something happens we should have the answers, that the world would be better off if only more people were better informed and had clearer opinions. The struggle to live up to that impossible idea causes a lot of suffering, and no good comes from it.

My view is quite the opposite. For most things, we just can’t know what the right answer is. The world of things I cannot know and about which I cannot speak is vast and manifold and the world of things about which I know and can speak is tiny. Curiously, one of the few things I know is that there are lots of things which I cannot know. Sometimes I call myself a fundamentalist agnostic.

Sometimes you hear bold statements driving others to make bold statements to the opposite effect. The most common one I hear is from materialists (often scientists who naively and unquestioningly believe that science supports their assertion) that there is no God. Atheism is as bold a statement and requires a very similar burden of proof. It is a purely subjective choice to say that the assumption of no deity is more parsimonious than the assumption that there is one. It is much simpler to say both are statements which we cannot know.

Not being able to know about things is okay. In fact, that can be an enormous relief. A lot of people spend a lot of their mental lives struggling with matters, which frankly are beyond them. Giving up is the first step towards getting an answer.

I heard a definition of a beliefs as “thoughts which people no longer question”. I do my best to question a lot of my thoughts. Although admittedly I tend to fail at that a lot. 100% of my feeling is coming from my thinking, so when I have a crappy feeling, it’s a good sign that my thinking can’t be trusted. My ego is a tricky bugger and it likes to feel in control.

Just to be sure I’m not misunderstood, that doesn’t mean I give up on learning, discovering or exploring. Quite the opposite. Knowing that you don’t know is the first firm bedrock from which you can start to explore.