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Apr 15, 2025
New York Review of Books critic Mark Lilla joins bestselling author and New York Times columnist David Brooks for an intellectually dazzling exploration of our wish to remain ignorant — and Lilla’s new book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.
The impulse to bury our heads in the sand is at least as old as the Book of Genesis. But where does it come from? Centuries after the Enlightenment, in the heart of the information age, how does the will to ignorance continue to shape our lives? In Ignorance and Bliss, acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know. Erudite and bold, Lilla ranges from Plato’s dialogues to Sigmund Freud and beyond, revealing the paradoxes — and dangers — of hiding truth from ourselves.
In a wide-ranging, intellectually heterodox conversation about the nature of our relationship to reality itself, hear Lilla and Brooks discuss the taboos and impulses that drive us to distraction from our most urgent political, emotional, and spiritual truths.
“A wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit.” — John Banville, The Guardian
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