Image credit. Hegel’s famous tagline “The Owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk” explains his theory of how we gain knowledge. We may only gain wisdom of history through hindsight (dusk). ‘Minerva’ is the Greek goddess of wisdom and her ‘Owl’ is the spirit by which the wisdom takes flight.
Everyone knows this type of uncomfortable dream: you need to move quickly to escape from danger but your body hardly responds to the urge. To me, discussing NSA-surveillance issues feels a bit like the dreamer's straight-jacketed impasse. My mind intends swift and decisive action: I urgently wish to make a strong case, but sooner or later I am overcome with a sagging feeling that reminds me of the holes in my knowledge.
Like me, I would guess, most of us do not even know the knowable as fully as is desirable -- another case of rational ignorance. There is a limit to the effort a non-specialist can make to become conversant with an issue.
Comfortingly, unlike Minerva, we may take flight in daylight, if we so choose. Unlike Hegel in his information-starved times, nowadays, once you decide to put serious energy into researching a certain topic you have a good chance of becoming rather knowledgeable, thanks to our open society and its internet.
Every society will have to cope with the irremediable problem of rational ignorance, and hence a certain level of political disagreement will be due to the blind bumping into the blind.
But again, she who gets seriously involved in a theme of heightened interest to her can expect substantial returns of expertise in our free societies.
Compare Richard Epstein's cautioning against Surveillance Alarmism and Snowdens's unaired remarks about September 11 which a commenter summed up as follows:
[T]he information grab is expanding until Big Brother, under the guise of (failed) protection now knows everything about its citizens. Simply said: this is merely government bloat in its most purest - spending ever greater amounts of money to become increasingly more inefficient, in the process destroying the concept of individual privacy.
See also Spying on Germans.
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