When You Don't Know
Ministerial Meandering
When you don’t know
Back when I was still learning my trade as a surgeon, I had a colleague who was on a different orthopaedic team, working for a different boss. These were the days of proper apprenticeship where you took your orders from your boss and followed them to the letter. You also sat alongside him in every clinic, until he felt you were sufficiently experienced to start seeing patients on your own. Even then you would have to present them to him, demonstrate the physical signs, and explain your plan of proposed management. You were his first assistant in the Operating Theatre, and expected to intuitively know exactly what move he would want to make next, what instrument he would need to use, and how not to get in his light or block his view. There was always the old saw of “Would you like the sutures cut too long or too short this morning, Sir?” A comment which could have you looking for another job the same day - and without a reference.
My colleague, whose name was Nick, worked for a boss who said to him one morning, “A man who knows what he doesn’t know, is a man of power.”
I have thought about this often, and come to the conclusion that it is an oxymoron; in other words, it can’t be true because it doesn’t make sense. After all, you cannot possibly know what you don’t know. But you can know that you don’t know - and that might make you ‘a man of power’, in that knowing your level of ignorance and knowledge is a safeguard against hubris and bullshit. Perhaps I misheard what Nick told me all those years ago; who knows?
It leads on into life in general, however, and I have just started another very challenging book; ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ by Friedrich Nietzsche. He starts with the challenge that we know what is good and virtuous - and then asks if perhaps we’ve had it wrong all the time, and that selfishness and evil are in fact the way to go. I confess that by the time I had read the first chapter, I was very confused. I think it is not a book to be read last thing at night before sleep! I think that possibly an annual of Garfield or Far Side cartoons might be less challenging.
Nevertheless, I believe that trying to improve our knowledge and educate ourselves throughout our lives is a good thing to do, but it goes hand in hand with retaining the ability to acknowledge when we don’t know. I have a lot of respect for those who can own up to the fact that they don’t have all the answers.
Having had to present papers at a lot of national and international fora, I have been asked questions following my talks to which I have had no answer. I think it is much better to admit that I have no answer than to try and bluster my way through some invented response on the spur of the moment. You will always be found out.
The same is true of questions of faith. If any of us knew all about God then He (or whatever you envisage as your God or Higher Power) then He wouldn’t be that. If you understand God - then He isn’t God. By definition, we cannot understand the incomprehensible. That would be another oxymoron.
Beware, therefore, of all those overconfident preachers who would tell you that they have all the answers. They don’t - and you should be able to catch the miasma of methane coming from their direction.
If I don’t know the answers to your questions, I will tell you so.
Philip+