Knowledge v. Acquisition

Human beings are distinctly averse to acknowledging that anyone else might ever (a) know anything that they don't know, or (b) be more skilled at any given cognitive task than they are; thus, the devices for avoiding any such acknowledgement have always been many and ingenious. One of the classic maneuvers is to bite the bullet -- to say, in effect, that yes, someone else might "know" something, but that there is an all-important difference between "knowing" something and really knowing it, you know?

A friend and I were using this tactic the other day on a talk we heard that appeared to contain information that was new to us. This caused a momentary ripple in our self-satisfaction. It was quickly calmed, however, once we discovered that most of the information in the talk had been lifted "straight from Wikipedia." Phew! We breathed a sigh of relief. That person didn't really know it, they were just pulling from an outside source.

The tricky thing about this device, though, is that it can only be deployed so long as one is willing to overlook how much of one's own knowledge originated in Wikipedia, at some point in the past (I was part of the first Wikipedia generation, after all -- it was coming online just as I was coming into historico-political-literary consciousness). And if not from there, from some similar source. Indeed, any knowledge we have had to originate from outside oneself -- at least any cultural knowledge -- practically by definition.

In George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss -- to which we will be returning below -- a character says to the erudite Maggie Tulliver, upon learning that she has been conducting secret liaisons with the Nietzschean creative type Philip Wakem, "Ah, now I see how it is you know Shakespeare and everything, and have learned so much since you left school; which always seemed to me witchcraft before -- part of your general uncanniness."

Somehow, Maggie has been robbed of her semi-daemoniacal power by virtue of the fact that some of her books and learning are discovered to have come from a second person. But why should this be the case? Did not Philip learn it from someone else in turn?

Plainly, we are left with a rather mysterious rule that tells us we are allowed to learn something from a book, website, or other person, but that we can't have learned it too recently.

But where is this temporal line to be drawn? How long ago in the past can one have read something on Wikipedia before one can conclude that it is now, truly, part of one's knowledge? The more one looks into it, the more one suspects that the line may be getting drawn always precisely at the point where oneself learned something, and nowhere else, for one's own knowledge is legitimate, and everyone else's must somehow be cheating.

Which rather makes one doubt the wisdom and sincerity of the rule.

Yet, there does seem to be some true and meaningful distinction between real knowledge and mere acquisition, toward which this rule is pointing.

In Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, the narrator draws it rather well. He is speaking at this stage of his then-wife, Florence. And, since everything about the characters' relations to one another in that most fascinating of books is revealed only by inches, at this early point in the narration we still think he finds Florence somewhat charming, and that her tendency to read obsessively in guidebooks and history tomes before any vacation in order to then be able to forcibly dispense "facts" upon everyone around her was merely some adorable foible or quirk of her nature. Comparing her to the aristocratic and Catholic Leonora, he notes:

"It really worried Florence that she couldn't, in matters of culture, ever get the better of Leonora. I don't know what Leonora knew or what she didn't know but certainly she was always there whenever Florence brought out any information. And she gave, somehow, the impression of really knowing what poor Florence gave the impression of having only picked up."

Later in the book, we discover that this is simply the first strike in a long indictment against Florence, leading to the conclusion that "she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates." But that's another matter.

The point is that somehow Florence's knowledge is genuinely less real than Leonora's for having been gleaned the night before from a desperate flipping through of Ranke, and then parroted the next morning as if it were something that of course everyone knows, unless they are odiously ignorant.

The Florence v. Leonora distinction also points to a difference in cultural styles that seems somehow to map onto class. Those who are presumed smart -- because, in a British context, they are landed gentry, or because, in an American context, they have a law degree from Harvard or what have you -- can simply quietly nod in these contexts and not be seen to be less intelligent or knowledgeable. Indeed, they gain in esteem for this silence -- it merely shows the confident depth of their learning.

Those, meanwhile, like Florence, fact-hunt and fact-dispense because they have something to prove. In their very efforts to display culture, therefore, they betray their lack of it.

This is the insight toward which Carl Wilson gestures, in his book exploring the reasons why he and so many other people despise Céline Dion, when -- summarizing Bourdieu -- he writes that people who are "self-taught" are likely to have "an anxious, fact-hoarding intellectual style [read: Florence] in contrast with the relaxed mastery of a fully legitimated cultural elite [read: Leonora]."

Wilson, let it be noted, places himself among the fact-hoarders. Readers of this blog -- or even just of this post so far -- will probably know where to put me as well. My whole life is a performance of autodidactical "look-at-me"-ism, I'm afraid. I am very clearly among the Florences of the world.

And, as is the tragedy of all Florences, I have often thought while attending the lecture of an esteemed academic -- that is, a "fully legitimated cultural elite" in action -- gee, I appear to know more than he does. Why is he so famous? Perhaps our positions in life are cruelly reversed?

I should have realized, poor Florence me, that it was this very perception that he really ought to have been spouting more quotes and citations that betrays my inferiority. I discover all over again that I have in fact not been able to defy or elude sociological laws. My very efforts to be untrue to type are in fact characteristic of type. *Sigh.*

Far from making me calmly pursue an ideal of quiet cultural polish, however, this realization just accentuates my Florence-like tendencies. I try to out-Florence the Florences. I feel the need to show that my facts are really hard-won, not just "picked up" the night before.

To be sure, this post may already be a "fact-hoard" in formation. But the quotes all came from reading the books, I swear, rather than from reading the internet -- and surely this somehow makes them more real! Though I'm not sure, at last, whether this distinction makes any more real sense than does the temporal line-drawing described above -- the recency counter-bias.

Perhaps instead of trying to outdo the Florences and the fact-hoarders, therefore, I should come to their -- our -- collective defense.

After all, the disdainful aristocratic distinction between "really knowing" something and having "only just picked it up" has been put many times to the nefarious use not only of reinforcing class distinctions, but also of putting down the achievements of racial and gender groups that the dominant society is anxious to suppress.

The notion that knowledge is "real" when some people have it and only "acquired" when it is found among others has of course been a sexist trope for centuries. We have seen one version of it in The Mill on the Floss already. Another occurs earlier in the book, when the young Maggie Tulliver -- who is precocious beyond her years and far ahead of her plodding brother -- asks her sibling's tutor if she might learn Euclid as well.

This leads to the following interchange:
Tom: "Girls can't do Euclid: can they, sir?"
Tutor (Mr. Stelling): "They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say [...] They've a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow."

George Eliot's omniscient narrator observes: "Maggie [...] had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called 'quick' all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow, like Tom."

Maggie is discovering, after all, that by the standards of male-dominated society, she cannot win. Slowness would be a sign of dullness. Quickness is a sign of superficiality. Throughout the rest of the book, learning will be a symbol of her self-liberation from the dominance of her male relatives, as well as the ultimate temptation of self-will she feels she must guard against.

You detect perhaps an element of the anti-Florence ideology in Mr. Stelling's view. When a man fails to know something, and makes no effort to know something, that is a sign, buttress, and re-affirmation of his confident superiority. When a woman knows something, it is proof that she is just "picking things up" in order to make a point.

A quite similar ideology is often used to demean the academic successes of socially ascendent but culturally "outsider" ethnic groups -- in particular, Jewish people and Asian Americans in the U.S.

Harvard University's efforts -- due to a recent lawsuit -- to deny that they negatively weight East Asian ancestry against certain applicants -- who otherwise have outstanding grades and achievements that would make them shoo-ins -- is laughable. When I was applying to colleges, it was widely understood that this was the practice among most elite schools. Nor did it occur to me at the time, I confess, how unfair and precisely analogous to the maligned anti-Semitic "Jewish quotas" of yesteryear this practice was.

Yet it exists, and follows precisely the same logic as the earlier practice. After all, the thinking goes, Asian Americans do better academically on average than other people (rather like Jewish people). If we consider their good grades as equivalent to other people's good grades, we'd (a) end up with classes full primarily of Asian Americans (and why not?); and anyways it would (b) be somehow unfair to everyone else.

The notion that it is somehow cheating and unjust for certain outgroups to perform well academically (when it would be congratulated and celebrated if done by a WASP) is a curious and persistent one. In Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands, the character Malone -- a white Christian pharmacist living in Jim Crow Georgia -- blames the Jewish students at his school for foreclosing his chances to become a doctor. How did they do so? They worked too damn hard and were too damn smart. "They ran up the grade average so that an ordinary, average student had no fair chance," writes McCullers -- with tongue in cheek -- "The Jew grinds had crowded J.T. Malone out of medical school and ruined his career as a doctor[.]"

(We've seen in an earlier post, from a few Philip Roth novels, that of course in reality it was Jewish professionals who were being crowded out of medical school by quotas -- and a generation of justly resentful podiatrists thus was born.)

You gotta love -- by which I mean hate -- the protean genius of Anglo-Saxon self-contentment that dreamt up the solution of declaring -- in the face of Jewish achievement -- that hard work and smarts are themselves now -- and all of a sudden -- a form of playing dirty.

It is similar to the public reaction that greeted Arthur Chu's success at Jeopardy! The same WASP viewership that had celebrated Ken Jennings as an instance of Mormon local boy makes good (I know I did -- and continue to love Ken Jennings) sniffed disdainfully at Chu's similar achievements. Well, his victories weren't real, it was said. He had a strategy for how he sequenced the questions. He went in with a plan.

And that's bad, for some reason. Nay, more than that, it's cheating!

One is reminded of Schwartz's immortal put-down of our hero's academic coup at the end of the Jean Shepherd story, "Lost at 'C'": "You phony bastard. You studied!"

Speaking of the great Ken Jennings, meanwhile -- who cannot in any way be faulted for the discriminatory response that he vs. Chu received from white audiences -- he has some great stuff on the knowledge vs. acquisition distinction in his book about the craft of trivia, Brainiac (which I'll confess -- since we're all trying to play fair here in the knowledge game -- I never 100% finished).

He writes in one section, for instance, about the University of Chicago quiz bowl team -- which is, as they will eagerly tell you, the winningest quiz bowl team ever -- and which I know intimately, having joined it for a total of three weeks or so at the outset of my college career.

I left it in that short amount of time out of fear for my sanity. The people who I met on the team not only were awful, they also seemed to be awful in a way that maximized all of my own worst potentialities. Among them, I became just as awful, if not more so (I seem to recall actually blurting out answers a few times while another person who had already "buzzed" was still searching their mind for the recollection -- a cardinal no-no).

If Florentine fact-hoarders with an inferiority complex were to design a school devoted solely to proving that they were "actually smarter" -- contrary to the official canons of prestige -- "than Harvard" they would -- and did -- create the University of Chicago. And the worst offenders among them would -- just as naturally -- tend to congregate around the quiz bowl team.

Jennings' account tends to reinforce this inchoate recollection. The UChicago team often wins. But it does so in ways that seem at times rather Florence-like and false-ringing. Unlike many other teams, for instance, it allows graduate students. One of them is described by his teammate as “the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life. Also the most egotistical person I’ve ever met in my life.” This teammate, a UChicago "phenom" in Jennings' telling, once: "sat down and wrote eight thousand five hundred 'lead-ins,' or hypothetical beginnings to quiz bowl questions, so he could recognize them when they came up in game situations. It took him months."

Is this cheating? No. But it's also not quite the same as simply happening to know all of that stuff through idle and various reading. It's not -- in short -- an approach that the Leonoras of the world would be caught dead taking.

Having come this far, however, I would still on the whole choose to be among the Florences than not. Writing those thousands of hypothetical quiz bowl openings sounds rather fun. I'm craving to see his list so I can test how many of them I might be able to get right.

To be sure, I feel a mad, angry, insensate jealousy and competitiveness with the person described in this anecdote. I detest that he knows so much that I don't. But this is just further proof, of course, that I am myself of his ilk. I -- like my family and most of my friends -- am one of the Florences.

Ultimately, of course, I suppose I'd like to achieve some attitude that embodies the best of both approaches -- a pinch of Florence with a dash of Leonora.

I'd like to savor the acquisition of knowledge without getting hung up on whether I did so while obeying all the canons of "fairness." I'd like to quote freely both from books I've finished as well as those I haven't without getting stumped by the question of whether I have "the right" to quote from the latter. I'd like, on the whole, to be more learned all around, yet to be less of an obsessive freak in the pursuit of that goal.

I take a certain kind of apocalyptic, nihilistic comfort from the thought, however, that we may soon all be technologically downloading knowledge directly to our brains, and this whole elaborate distinction -- and the edifice of self that I have painstakingly reared upon it -- will be rendered moot.

That would be a hard day for me. I'd have to come up with a different way of defining what it is that makes me special. But I'd probably pull through. And maybe it would even be a kind of liberation.