Ignorant Modernity: Homo Ignorans and the Making of Modern World

Modern societies like to describe themselves as knowledge societies. They produce, store, process, and transmit more information than any previous civilization. Science, technology, expert systems, digital networks, global institutions, and artificial intelligence have expanded human power over nature and society. And yet this book argues that modern societies must also be understood as ignorance societies. Ignorance and the Making of the Modern World explores the paradox at the heart of modernity: the same processes that multiply knowledge also generate new forms of non-knowledge. The more knowledge society accumulates collectively, the less any individual can master personally. We live surrounded by systems of intelligence-scientific, technological, bureaucratic, financial, digital, and increasingly artificial-that we use every day but cannot fully understand. Drawing on agnotology, sociology of knowledge, theories of modernity, risk society, globalization, expert systems, consumer society, and digital networks, Agustín Galán Machío develops the figure of Homo Ignorans: not an ignorant primitive outside knowledge, but the modern subject who lives inside knowledge systems he cannot fully comprehend. The book examines how ignorance is produced, distributed, concealed, organized, and experienced in contemporary societies. It analyzes the triangle of ignorance, the social production of non-knowledge, the fragmentation of expertise, information overload, manufactured uncertainty, global cities and nation-states, consumer commodities, technological black boxes, and networked ignorance. This is not an anti-modern book. It does not deny the achievements of science, democracy, technology, education, global communication, or artificial intelligence. Its purpose is different: to understand how modernity has reorganized the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. The book is structured in two complementary parts and substantially rewrites and updates, in a more concise, unified, and accessible form, materials originally explored in the author's previous works on agnotology, ignorance, and modernity. Written before the rise of generative AI and revised in the age of intelligent systems, the book offers a broader theoretical framework for understanding why the expansion of knowledge does not eliminate ignorance, but transforms it. Modernity did not abolish ignorance. It made ignorance one of the central problems of the modern world.

Pagina's: 267, Paperback, Independently published