'No one really knows': practical knowledge and uses of ignorance

Scientists in some ways similar to the public intellectuals of decades past, pursue the translation of epistemological progress into progressive policy, through work in advisory committees and campaigns from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) Immanuel Kant points to a melancholy paradox in the relation between the growth of practical knowledge and the insight thus acquired into how little we know:

The observations and calculations of astronomers have taught us much that is wonderful; but the most important lesson that they have taught us has been by revealing the abyss of our ignorance, which otherwise we could never have conceived to be so great. (trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 1929).

This paradox is as ancient as our need for guidance in the unbounded darkness of our disorientation. Myth and religion have provided stories to live and die in. God will show us the way, preach theocracies. In a secular world politics propounds reasoned routes. Democracies as we know them leave millions to find their own orientation, with more or less help from the state. Practical knowledge, however, has not gone away.