IGNORANT MODERNITY AND HOMO IGNORANS: Towards a Sociology of the Production of Ignorance in Contemporary Societies

Modern societies are commonly described as knowledge societies. Never before has humanity generated, accumulated, stored, transmitted, and applied such vast quantities of information and scientific knowledge. Yet the expansion of knowledge has not eliminated ignorance. On the contrary, it has transformed its structure, scale, distribution, and consequences. This paper develops the concepts of Ignorant Modernity and Homo Ignorans as analytical tools for understanding the paradoxical relationship between knowledge and ignorance in contemporary societies. Drawing upon agnotology, sociology of knowledge, risk theory, and theories of modernity, it argues that knowledge and ignorance grow together. Globalization, specialization, digitalization, expert systems, and information overload increase collective knowledge while simultaneously expanding individual dependence upon forms of knowledge that cannot be directly verified or fully understood. The paper proposes a conceptual framework centered on the social production, observation, communication, management, and governance of ignorance. It introduces the Triangle of Ignorance as a general model for analyzing ignorance fields and develops the ideal type of Homo Ignorans as the characteristic subject of advanced modernity. The central claim is not that contemporary societies are becoming less knowledgeable. Rather, it is that the growth of knowledge systematically generates new forms of ignorance. Knowledge and ignorance should therefore be understood not as opposing historical stages but as mutually constitutive dimensions of the same social process.