Knowing nothing
 |
| Punts pulled-up for the night in Cambridge |
“You think you know
everything” is a phrase that runs off the ignoramus’s tongue as smoothly as “I
don’t know”. Difference is that the first is ad hominem and then usually tinged with
a little puerile contempt, while the latter – which often really means “I’ve
been discouraged from finding out and conditioned not to care” – lacks any inkling
of apology. “I’m an ignoramus, but it’s OK ‘cos I can talk kewl in
monosyllables.” Of course, the prevailing climate of anti-intellectualism doesn’t
help anyone other than those who would prefer to keep the population
dumbed-down, ignorant, and accordingly unquestioning and pliable.
In the Middle-Ages it was easy: Hand-copied tomes and thereby literacy and education were the preserve of the moneyed or privileged few, mainly clustered around crown and mitre. They would often use their knowledge and education to lord it over and turn the public and its will to their hand. Ordinary people who knew what they shouldn’t, thought too much or asked awkward questions were simply burned at the stake. And knowledge and education themselves were as much a measure of your status as your clothing.
In the modern age, however, Western society as well as several in the East has more or less managed to make education accessible to the public at large, or at least to pay lip service thereto. And that’s notwithstanding the (relative) increase in the canon of human knowledge and understanding since the rennaisance.
This leaves those who would control rather than govern us with a dilemma: If you make knowledge and education accessible to all – de rigeur for a modern “democratic” regime – how do you stop the population from becoming educated, questioning, and hard to control?
It’s not that difficult. If the political zeitgeist dictates that to hold your head up in the community of nations, you have to make broccoli “accessible to all” but would prefer they didn’t eat it, just hand-out ice cream on every corner as well. Problem solved.
So if a culture of anti-intellectualism is oozing out of the inner cities and ghettos you’ve managed to get away with neglecting for so long, let it. Give it its own TV channels, glorify intellectual underachievement in “accessible” (read: really dumbed-down) music, comedy and cartoons, and you’ll soon have a convenient ignorance pandemic. It won’t take long to achieve the medieval condition of education as the preserve of the moneyed or privileged few, again, mainly clustered around (albeit more symbolically) crown and mitre, but as education is de jure “accessible to all”, nobody can accuse you of “elitism”.
The reality for those of us who have grown up in the modern world is that while in 1212 it was completely normal and acceptable “not to know”, in 2012, you often have no excuse – and deep down inside, you know it – so it makes you feel inadequate by showing-up your intellectual laziness.
An easy parallel is the way a modern couch potato pokes fun at joggers and gym bunnies. A medieval person “of prosperous proportions” was something to aspire to. In an era when “a healthy meal” meant something entirely different to alfalfa sprouts and tofu, disease was often exorcised rather than treated and almost everyone died of something or other by their 40s, there was little way to make more than a conjectural correlation between how and what you ate and how early you died.
But a 2012-model couch potato doesn’t have that excuse. So he pokes fun at the joggers and gym bunnies to hide his own feeling of inadequacy, while lapping-up the “bad boy” stories the tabloids carry about his sporting heroes, which give them “street cred” that more than compensates for their lack of physical indolence.
At the other end (extreme?), consider a brain surgeon talking to an astophysicist. While it’s implicit that Dr. X will know many things Prof. Y doesn’t and vice versa, neither person will have the slightest problem with that, far less court justifiable ridicule by accusing the other of “thinking you know everything”.
Some time ago, I was discussing something with a group of guys over a few drinks when one of them – a snappy dresser with a corporate title – told one of the others (light-heartedly) “you’re talking shit”.
We all assumed he was disputing what the other guy was saying. It was only after the argument had been (equally light-heartedly) reformulated and Mr Corporate repeated “you’re talking shit” that we realised what he was really trying to say: “I don’t understand what you are talking about while I know I should, and if I’d done my homework I could, and I find that difficult to admit and express.”
So next time you encounter someone who knows something you don’t and it makes you feel inadequate because you realise that if you had spent more time reading books other than pulp fiction or watching documentaries rather than sitcoms, you could also have known that, think twice before you knee-jerk “you think you know everything”. You might think it makes you look kewl with your buddies but it only really identifies you (even with them) as an unrepentant ignoramus.
In the 21st Century, “I don’t know” simply isn’t acceptable for anyone with a Mk.1 human brain. “I’ll find out” is, and then frequently, you’ll come up against something “we don’t know” but that is OK. In the process, you might make the liberating discovery that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. - AMB
ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα (hen oída hoti oudén oída I know that I know nothing) – Socrates
In the Middle-Ages it was easy: Hand-copied tomes and thereby literacy and education were the preserve of the moneyed or privileged few, mainly clustered around crown and mitre. They would often use their knowledge and education to lord it over and turn the public and its will to their hand. Ordinary people who knew what they shouldn’t, thought too much or asked awkward questions were simply burned at the stake. And knowledge and education themselves were as much a measure of your status as your clothing.
In the modern age, however, Western society as well as several in the East has more or less managed to make education accessible to the public at large, or at least to pay lip service thereto. And that’s notwithstanding the (relative) increase in the canon of human knowledge and understanding since the rennaisance.
This leaves those who would control rather than govern us with a dilemma: If you make knowledge and education accessible to all – de rigeur for a modern “democratic” regime – how do you stop the population from becoming educated, questioning, and hard to control?
It’s not that difficult. If the political zeitgeist dictates that to hold your head up in the community of nations, you have to make broccoli “accessible to all” but would prefer they didn’t eat it, just hand-out ice cream on every corner as well. Problem solved.
So if a culture of anti-intellectualism is oozing out of the inner cities and ghettos you’ve managed to get away with neglecting for so long, let it. Give it its own TV channels, glorify intellectual underachievement in “accessible” (read: really dumbed-down) music, comedy and cartoons, and you’ll soon have a convenient ignorance pandemic. It won’t take long to achieve the medieval condition of education as the preserve of the moneyed or privileged few, again, mainly clustered around (albeit more symbolically) crown and mitre, but as education is de jure “accessible to all”, nobody can accuse you of “elitism”.
The reality for those of us who have grown up in the modern world is that while in 1212 it was completely normal and acceptable “not to know”, in 2012, you often have no excuse – and deep down inside, you know it – so it makes you feel inadequate by showing-up your intellectual laziness.
An easy parallel is the way a modern couch potato pokes fun at joggers and gym bunnies. A medieval person “of prosperous proportions” was something to aspire to. In an era when “a healthy meal” meant something entirely different to alfalfa sprouts and tofu, disease was often exorcised rather than treated and almost everyone died of something or other by their 40s, there was little way to make more than a conjectural correlation between how and what you ate and how early you died.
But a 2012-model couch potato doesn’t have that excuse. So he pokes fun at the joggers and gym bunnies to hide his own feeling of inadequacy, while lapping-up the “bad boy” stories the tabloids carry about his sporting heroes, which give them “street cred” that more than compensates for their lack of physical indolence.
At the other end (extreme?), consider a brain surgeon talking to an astophysicist. While it’s implicit that Dr. X will know many things Prof. Y doesn’t and vice versa, neither person will have the slightest problem with that, far less court justifiable ridicule by accusing the other of “thinking you know everything”.
Some time ago, I was discussing something with a group of guys over a few drinks when one of them – a snappy dresser with a corporate title – told one of the others (light-heartedly) “you’re talking shit”.
We all assumed he was disputing what the other guy was saying. It was only after the argument had been (equally light-heartedly) reformulated and Mr Corporate repeated “you’re talking shit” that we realised what he was really trying to say: “I don’t understand what you are talking about while I know I should, and if I’d done my homework I could, and I find that difficult to admit and express.”
So next time you encounter someone who knows something you don’t and it makes you feel inadequate because you realise that if you had spent more time reading books other than pulp fiction or watching documentaries rather than sitcoms, you could also have known that, think twice before you knee-jerk “you think you know everything”. You might think it makes you look kewl with your buddies but it only really identifies you (even with them) as an unrepentant ignoramus.
In the 21st Century, “I don’t know” simply isn’t acceptable for anyone with a Mk.1 human brain. “I’ll find out” is, and then frequently, you’ll come up against something “we don’t know” but that is OK. In the process, you might make the liberating discovery that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. - AMB
ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα (hen oída hoti oudén oída I know that I know nothing) – Socrates
