Kreider's In Praise Of Not Knowing

Praising Praise

Nowadays, information can be easily obtainable from several different sources: newspapers, magazines, and all the multiple sites made available on the internet. With it being so accessible, it is not much of an achievement to learn something that one may not have known before. Kreider’s In Praise of Not Knowing effectively demonstrates this point.

In Praise of Not Knowing is an argumentative piece which argues that today’s easily accessible sources of information is doing an injustice for people today who wants to learn new information. Kreider mentions multiple personal anecdotes, from music, to movie plots, to science articles. All arguing if it is truly effective to simply look up the information rather than going through the journey to find out the information yourself. Questioning whether people today are truly learning that “what we cannot find inflames the imagination.”(Kreider 203).

Kreider argues his thesis extremely well.

His first anecdote of how he was mystified by the unknown instruments was an excellent example. The instruments making the music he was hearing sound like “music from another planet: unearthly yowling strings, metallic twangs, rippling liquid percussion.” (Kreider 202). When today, one can simply look up what was making those sounds, showing that the knowledge now loses some of its magic. He also mentions an example that was only discovered this year, what Pluto actually looks like. Up this year, Pluto could only be seen by telescopes and even then the pictures taken by them are blurry and all Kreider can say about knowledge of Pluto at the time was, “In the meantime, we just get to wonder.”(Kreider 203). But now that the New Horizons has reached Pluto and taken the pictures, the mystery and wonder has diminished now the one can simply look up the pictures that were

taken.
Kreider makes In Praise of Not Knowing have a mystifying tone as he makes his audience question how they learn themselves as they learn that “instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more [information].”(Kreider 203). Making his audience think about everything they simply looked up and learned whether they were actually satisfied by what they learned, or simply yearning for more. How Kreider ends the work only adds to this mystifying tone even more, talking about “the most important things in this life—why the here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us— are things we’re never going to know.” (203), only leaves his reader sitting there contemplating about these points.
All and all, how Kreider approaches the topic of ignorance is bliss extremely well. As he brings up great examples of how knowing can really just leave one craving for more and how “learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simply not knowing into wonder.” (Kreider 203).