We are all aware that becoming good at something takes time and practice. We often forget however that becoming good at being human, or rather becoming a good human being, is no different. It is easy to become really complacent with regards to improving our character, refining our selfish motive, and becoming more emotionally mature.
No doubt life provides ample opportunity to learn the required lessons but we have the habit, and indeed I see it in myself, of telling ourselves that we are good. Occupying the wind swept hills of moral justice is a default position for the human being. We are in fact, as a species, ridiculously good at occupying the wind swept hills of moral justice. I think this is a tendency we should be absolutely deliberate about dropping, it is a dangerous tendency. It can have catastrophic results and it prevents us from achieving true moral development as it often prevents us from recognizing what is truly the right and good thing.
Now, the worst kind of ignorance is ignorance taken to be knowledge. If I take myself to know something I do not know then I am not only ignorant but I am also committed to an untruth. Ignorance in itself is no great evil. Ignorance when recognized can only lead to wonder which is itself a benign and pleasant state. Being committed to a falsehood however can be a dangerous thing. Do not trust a man who does not act out of reality, even his most benign intentions will often be carried out in a completely illogical manner. A person who thinks they know when they do not know does not act out of reality, they are ignorant of what is but behave as if they know. This kind of ignorance, ignorance accompanied by a pretense to knowledge, is to be avoided like the plague and is better known as arrogance.
Arrogance validates the saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I always get uncomfortable when people throw this saying around. There is a glimmer in truth in this saying but the fault does not lie at the feet of good intentions as people often seem to think. The fault lies at the feet of ignorance with a pretense to knowledge. Yes good intentions can lead to catastrophic results but only if the person who has the good intentions is ignorant but takes themselves to know. A person who is ignorant and who recognizes their ignorance will not act in manner that may have catastrophic results, they will instead wonder as to what is the case.
In fact the state of wonder is one of the few states in which we do not run the risk of directly causing catastrophe through our actions because the state of wonder can only inspire one kind of action (if we could even call it an action), namely contemplation. A person who contemplates is inert, they merely grasp at things to understand them, they do not grasp at them to change them.
Now of course it is not entirely practical to live our entire lives in a state of wonder. Sometimes we need to commit to knowing that something is so or is not so that we can act in the world with conviction. It does seem to be the case however that we must return to the state of wonder as often as is feasible so that we do not run the risk of becoming catastrophically caught in ignorance with a pretense to knowledge.
When we stand on the wind swept hills of moral justice we assume we know what is right and wrong and we are committed to our own righteous as an immovable item of dogma. In the event that we get things wrong, and human beings are particularly good at getting things wrong, then our actions can have catastrophic results. They will necessarily fail to bring about what is good because they are not guided by what is good. The only way to avoid this kind of blunder is to avoid assuming that we know, to step down from the wind swept hill of moral justice.
Again this is not to say that we should not take a stand on what we think is right and good. Of course we must stand up to what we think is right. What we must not do however is just assume that what we think is right is actually right. We must take the stand but still always consider the possibility of our own ignorance. We must take our stand then wonder at it, wonder whether what we thought was right was in fact right. This is the remedy to the rampant, destructive and polarized dogmas which plague humanity today. We as a species must become more comfortable with the possibility of our own ignorance. This will allow us to grasp what is truly good and avoid blindly pursuing what is not.