IGNORANCE IS BLISS?

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise" - Thomas Gray

The oft-quoted mantra of 'Ignorance is bliss' is a clever but specious quip. It has raised the status of Ignorance to a pseudo-virtue. Many are quite fond of quoting it to justify to themselves their general indifference to all things religious/scriptural. But the quote is actually a statement of sad and profound irony. It appears at the end of a poem by Thomas Gray titled "Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College":

• To each his sufferings: all are men,
  Condemned alike to groan;
  The tender for another's pain,
  Th' unfeeling for his own.
  Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
  Since sorrow never comes too late,
  And happiness too swiftly flies?
  Thought would destroy their Paradise.
  No more; where ignorance is bliss,
  'Tis folly to be wise.

The "Ode" by Thomas Gray is a poem of great moral despair and it ends with those famous lines on a deeply ironical note. It was written at a time when England was in the throes of great economic and social turmoil caused by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The poet was reflecting upon the many ills and injustices that were bedeviling his country but of which his countrymen, the silent and thoughtless, seemed utterly ignorant. The line "Where Ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise" actually was meant to describe the attitude of the young but ignorant English masses of those times. They had really "no sense of ills to come"; they didn't seem to know "their fate". They busied themselves only with the humdrum, day-to-day cares of personal life and livelihood. They did not seem to "care beyond today", believing that any thought of the Beyond would only "destroy their (petty, private) paradise" (an apt description, perhaps, of the non-voting population every where).