Random Thoughts

In his 1930 book, The Revolt of the Masses, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset addresses what he considers to be a strange byproduct of the prevalence of specialization in everything specifically the intellectual sphere. 'Previously,' he writes, 'men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other.' Now, however, a new kind of person has emerged, 'an extraordinarily strange kind of man,' who cannot be called 'learned for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty,' yet at the same time cannot be considered 'ignorant because he is a 'scientist' who 'knows' very well his own tiny portion of the universe.' Thus, Ortega y Gasset says that the only fitting name for such a person is a 'learned ignoramus'. There can be no doubt that numerous learned ignoramuses can be found in all parts of the society but most importantly they are very clearly involved in the response to the COVID-19 virus, as sweeping calls for months of lockdown make clear.