Prudence Makes The Librarian
Where erudition got the praise, booktubing has disguised as erudition. Where erudite got the encomiums, book influencers now fart on the prize
On the subject matter of this thing we call “knowledge,” there is so much to be sorted. I look at the myriads of facts, theories, propositions, findings; anything that calls itself knowledge and I am appalled by the mess. Now not just by the mess alone but by the sheer volume of the mess — it is both a qualitative and a quantitative mess. However, I do not merely complain about volume. I complain about judgment: what should I be learning from this mess and why? A question tough to answer; only answerable by anyone ready to do the sorting — only by the librarians.
Verily, a librarian does not get his credit and honor from reading all the books in the room. His prowess is not a result of volume. He is not a search engine, not Google; he is not a facts machine; you don’t ask him for answers — at least not the kind that is preserved in books. What distinguishes the librarian from the library visitor is the prudence he applies to sort the books in the room. A librarian is only as honorable as his sorting, only as sharp as his cataloguing, only as precise as his prudence.
What so many men of learning and budding intellectuals — on whatever mission —miss is the librarian factor. Prudence. It is evidently so because as stated earlier that the pool is a mess, these eager learners take pride in being pigs — swimming in mud puddles — as long as the puddle is designated “knowledge and learning”. You hear “knowledge for its own sake,” and “in pursuit of truth”; some say “knowledge is power.” Such is the trend among the everyday man. However, there is a trend among the everyday man, the phony, who likes to pretend he is not the everyday man. He says, “don’t teach people what to think, teach them how to think.” It took me a while but I eventually realised that it was nonsense. When probed, not many people can defend what they mean by teaching how to think. They wouldn’t know it if it came as a bullet train and crashed into their living room; they have never seen it before. It is a meme. How do I know this? Easy, I know that you are not giving your best to thinking if you cannot distinguish what kind of “knowledge” you are wielding. You are not worth listening to if everything chuggable and recitable is knowledge to you. And where all knowledge is power. Everything may go by the genus “knowledge,” but even knowledge has species.
Where erudition got the praise, booktubing has disguised itself as erudition. Where erudites got the encomiums, book influencers now fart on the prize. The race to the top of a pile of books confirms to me that I live among people who lack prudence and sorting ability; who chug everything because it is in paperback and audio form; who speed the audiobook by two so that they can pad their output. Yet, these phonies stand face to face with prudent people and pat themselves on the back that they love knowledge. Prudence makes the thinker as it does the librarian.
There are many reasons why we may at such a time like this be poor in prudence — of course, prudence pertaining to knowledge. First, we must blame the miserly English Language. Second, we must blame our instincts to optimise. Two crooks, one better than the other; the latter, more criminal than the former, but the two in partnership, are forcing men to be dull.
Am I being pedantic when I tell you to define what you mean by knowledge? Well, I hope not. Scratch that: I am not. One is not pedantic when he knows that you have to identify a sibling in an especially large family by his first name. Where the surname is Johnson, it is futile for you to tell me to enter a house and bring you Mr. Johnson when in fact, there are five Mr. Johnsons all wearing shorts and Nike shoes and drinking Coke at the same time. Give me a name; a first name; make my work swift and easy.
It is the same when an enthusiastic teacher — most likely a mentor tells his protege “go for knowledge.” I ask as a mediator: what knowledge sir? For if I turn to Greek, I find many words that denote knowledge — I have a whole box of them. Be it nous, sophia, episteme, phronesis, gnosis, or epignosis, I have them all in abundance. These are all knowledge in the English Language. But they all bring you into different realities depending on what you select. Peter the Apostle, in a few words in Greek, commended the believers to get gnosis and stay learning until they reach epignosis. Translate that to the English Language and you get “get knowledge so that you will get knowledge.” No shit Anglo-Saxon, you must feel so proud of your sophistication.
If a listener cannot distinguish based on your verbalism what he should be going after, you are not qualified to get a librarian’s card.
Consider that a librarian lives with books and sees nothing but books. Just as a layman would see. But a librarian is no different from a layman if he says that he sees nothing but books. Then why is he there? It is his job to help readers understand that these items they see, although they all look alike — by having jackets and texts — are not in fact the same and they do not all meet the same ends. He understands the difference between a textbook and a journal; between a novel and an anthology; that there are encyclopedias and there are Bibles. It is his one precious task to sort these jackets and texts in a manner where he eliminates confusion, where everything sits in its right category, to intuit where everything is and where everything ought to be and to have a directory that indicates all these. He helps, to sort. All books but not the same ends. As is a librarian, so is a fine thinker. So is an intellectual. So is a knowledge man. A good thinker is not a “facts” machine. He is a sorter: he puts things in place; consider the term he “puts things in perspective.”
Without letting the Anglo-Saxon off easy, this second point, the more notorious criminal, must be held with a healthy amount of contempt. And how best should I describe it than a Procrustean bed; stretching or fitting everything to fits its stiff model and discarding anything that does not fit as useless? Identified as the instinct of expansion by Albert. J. Nock, it is in fact, with good credit, largely responsible for the continuous improvement of man’s material wellbeing. The discredit follows immediately after: its damage is so potent because its function has proven beneficial.
See, there is no dimension of the world I currently live in where the statement that “the armhole of a shirt is called an armsaye” meets the standard “knowledge is power.” More like a joke. Why? Because it won’t make me a better tailor to know that trivial piece of knowledge. Fun fact maybe, definitely not powerful. Likewise, knowing the identity of the four kings of the poker deck of cards would not make me a better poker player. I am not even a poker player right now. When then is my piece of knowledge power? Are you telling me that I have been learning all these pieces of knowledge when they are actually useless?
Do you see the word “useless”? That’s the notation you get when what you know doesn’t play in the Procrustean realm of “knowledge is power.” If it is not yielding mula, we don’t need it and we don’t want it. We tell kids as soon as they grow up to ditch all these types of knowledge. After all, it won’t fetch them a job. This is the only time we make it clear what kind of knowledge we want people to get — the type that fetches one a job. Congratulations, you just killed a child’s curiosity and created an economaton.
The overemphatic use of the optimising instinct allows us to raise instrumental knowledge to a prideful height that ignores that it is not only the instrumental that is necessary for our flourishing. The knack for efficiency includes the exclusion of the subjective, the messy, the scaffold, sometimes the humane, and especially, wisdom.
When you find people who cannot but “talk it business,” who deride leisure, who snort hustle culture like heroin and are all enmeshed in how to leverage everything they learn, you have found the living caricature of the optimising instinct. By viewing everything through a utilitarian and instrumental lens, you miss out on the colorful spectrum of knowledge. When you cannot separate knowledge from instrumentality, from power, you will not have it long after when you meet your goals and gain power.
For my last inadvertent jab, I once again meet that dwarf named “critical thinking should be taught in schools” crawling around school fences. I apprehend him and say, “critical should not just be not taught in schools, you cannot teach critical thinking in schools.”
I recommend, about this increasingly dying institution called schools around the world, that we desist from clogging the curriculums of the factory-workers producing factory and regain the adventure that is out there in the wild. Leave us space to breathe. There is more to knowledge than what can be formulated, curricularised, narrated, shouted down, strictly tested, and instrumentally appraised. Know that there are types of learning one does when one needs no job. But I assure you, most of us won’t identify it because we have donned our monochrome lenses to adapt to our myopia. What you need, is prudence. And, IQ testing is a fraud.