‘Wanting not to know’ is such a salient motivation for the world right now. In this special issue of Applied Psychology Around the World (APAW), an eminent figure from Harvard University leads a discussion on the concept of Deliberate Ignorance. As well as its content deliberate ignorance, its format too is new. In it, a Lead Article is Commentated by a series of scholars, advocates, activists and practitioners in applied psychology and related domains. Likewise, capping off the resulting special issue is an article calling for greater global collaboration to advance the sustainability agenda. This call is very apt: Tackling deliberate ignorance, and wanting not to know, is one of ways for applied psychology to make its collaborations pay.

This editorial is not the place for me to try and parse what is about to follow. That is for the contributors to do. What I must do, though, is say a few words about how the article itself was, and is touching. Animal rights is an issue that we have, as a species, overlooked for far too long. As a student I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1976), and indeed still have a copy of it on my bookshelf. The subtitle for that book, from 1976, is ‘Towards an end to man’s inhumanity to animals.’ It is sad that we are still only on a trajectory ‘towards,’ but this article gives that arc more than a new nudge in the right direction.

In-between reading P. Singer’s seminal treatise on animal rights and C. Sunstein’s leading article on deliberate ignorance, I have spent a lifetime in applied psychology. Most of it has been focused on applied psychology and the eradication of poverty in all its forms, everywhere. This goal, today, is the primary mandate of the 2016-30 UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), and before them, the UN MDGs (Millennium Development Goals). None of those goals, though, has ever mentioned animal rights or speciesism. And for that, we have been all the poorer, as a species that prides itself on being ‘humanitarian’.

Professor Sunstein’s article is a wake-up call on animal rights, not only to humanity but also to applied psychology. But it is also, through the concept of Deliberate Ignorance, a wake-up call for no less than the sustainability of our own species. Many of the world’s current woes, whether we call them crises, or challenges, or social divisions, are arguably about people not wanting to know.

Perhaps the biggest of all these motivational challenges is climate change. None of us really wants to know what the earth scientists and others have been warning – that our small and fragile life-support system, Planet Earth, may be in dire danger. It is almost un-thinkable in fact. No wonder then that many of us do not want to know, do not wish to face the deep anxiety that our systems of production and consumption are unsustainable and yet seem almost unstoppable at the same time. Deliberate Ignorance is understandable, but also confrontable psychologically. ‘Drill baby drill,’ ‘bring back coal,’ and sustainability backlash in general are surely portents of the wider relevance of this special issue and its underlying concept.

References

Singer, P. (1976). Animal Liberation: Towards an end to man’s inhumanity to animals. London: Paladin.