Ignorance is n't something to be proud of. Certainly not a state to celebrate, nor to revel in. "There's nothing in here...nothing" as I once heard some one say as he pointed defiantly towards his head.

Well, it all depends.

These days, I'm beginning to think the benighted state of ignorance might just have some value, (parts of it anyway), providing you look at it counter-intuitively and with a touch of self-awareness.

You're getting lost already, I can sense so it, so let me explain. As there many different shades of a particular colour - say red, which goes from the palest rose to the most brazen scarlet - so it goes with ignorance. Consider the etymological distance between: unaware, dumb, vulgar, obtuse, indifferent, all the way to plain old crude, and these are just a handful of the synonyms for ignorance.

It's like an extended family tree; many of them are n't anything more than second, third, or even fourth cousins. The root stock is that diluted.

So if I've established there's diversity in ignorance, where's the usefulness that I implied at the top of this post?

It's how you view some of the family members, the feebler ones, the less potent relatives. Unsuspecting, for instance, is ignorance, albeit an innocent version, as is simply saying I don't know.

It's what comes next; do you leave the room, or stay and try to find out what it was you did n't suspect, or did n't know?

Should I stay or should I go? Teach someone the value of the former, to stay and ask the questions - why don't I know and what am I going to do about it - and you've detoxified ignorance.