The most difficult thing for lay people to understand about science, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once told me after a lecture in Portland, is how very little scientists truly comprehend about the basic nature of nature, how vast is our ignorance of the fundamental reality of the cosmos. Gell-Mann's statement reminded me of the comment of that supreme master of quantum physics, Nobelist Richard Feynmann, who remarked famously: "I think it can be safely said that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics and author of the Principia -- perhaps the single most sublime achievement of the human intellect -- made exactly the same point some 300 years earlier when he said: "I don' t know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Why is it that our greatest geniuses -- Gell-Mann, Feynmann, Newton, and their ilk -- can humbly concede how pitifully limited is the reach of deep human insight and comprehension while lesser spirits noisily proclaim the certainty of their conclusions and forcefully dismiss dissent or doubt? It is a question that must be asked not only in the precincts of science but equally in the fields of intelligence-gathering and national policy formulation.

The short answer, I think, is that humans crave certainty, even false certainty, in preference to the sense of vertigo induced by a clear-eyed acknowledgment that we are, at least most of the time, stumbling in the dark down an unmarked path through the baffling wilderness of an unknown -- perhaps unknowable -- reality. Facing up to the limits of our knowledge and the enormity of our ignorance is an acquired skill, to put it mildly. But it is a skill well worth cultivating, particularly in the field of geopolitical strategy (and policymaking in any realm, for that matter).

Amidst the furious national debate over responsibility for faulty pre-war intelligence about Iraq's purported possession of weapons of mass destruction, it is worth noting that the Senate Intelligence Committee's scathing report evidences a deep and largely unnoticed structural flaw in the intelligence process: a systemic tendency to project an illusory sense of sure-footed command of the facts and a deep aversion to forthright acknowledgment of nuance, doubt and uncertainty.

Here is a suggestion for addressing that flaw. In addition to heeding the calls to reform the Central Intelligence Agency -- to insulate it from political pressure, to enhance the savvy of intelligence consumers and train them to eschew "group think," to better calibrate our policy options to the limits of our intelligence collection and analytic capacities -- we should do something else: We should institutionalize the process of acknowledging how little we know at any given moment in history about the geopolitical reality of the world around us.

To accomplish this, we need a new Central Ignorance Agency.

The mission of the CIgA would be to serve as the ultimate Red Team by systematically challenging every assumption and inference embedded in national intelligence estimates. The CIgA would serve as the ur-skeptic about issues ranging from WMD to the technological capabilities of hostile foreign powers. The new agency would focus not only on purported evidence indicating threats to the U. S. homeland but also on shallow thinking that fails to grapple with emerging dangers and with potentially fatal failures by intelligence analysts to imagine threats that never previously existed or materialized. (Think 9/11.)

The limits of our language are the limits of our world, the philosopher Wittgenstein once wrote. So too in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering and analysis, the limits of our knowledge are the limits of our capacity to rationally shape national policy and preparedness strategies.

What could be more useful to U. S. policymakers than an agency dedicated single-mindedly to the task of accurately mapping those limits?

James N. Gardner, a Portland attorney and former state senator, is the author of "BIOCOSM --The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe."

Copyright 2004 Oregon Live

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