Prudence Makes The Librarian III
How To Think About Knowledge
Here I am addressing a sense of disappointment: that knowledge is not necessarily power. Unlike Lord Bacon, I do not think that knowledge is itself power. And I hope you will hear my case on the matter. I was sold a false expectation. And I do not think I was sold it by liars. A falsehood is not always a lie; sometimes the utterer believes the falsehood and that is why he says it. But then, how did that false expectation come to be to us as a society? How did we elevate a false sentiment so high and hold it strongly that when reality says otherwise, we say that reality lies?
Sad as it is, we live, socially, globally under what I call “France is Bacon”-ism. Essentially, that knowledge is power. May I in describing this, allude to the metaphor of a cloud sitting up and out of the open sky; towering above us all. We know we live under it even when we do not pay strict attention to it. It regulates our affairs as the cloud does. It shields us from the excessive heat of the sun. And when it gathers and becomes dark, we expect rain, and shuffle our activities accordingly, looking for where to hide our heads or how to get home. This is how “knowledge is power” hangs over us. Kip is short for ‘knowledge is power.’
What do I mean by it hanging over us? How does it work? First, it works by supplying the false light that since knowledge is power, more knowledge necessarily means more power. This illusion further works in detail by providing a sharp distinction—separating subjects into ‘useful’ and irrelevant. Useful subjects are subjects that fill an economic need or at least tie into a course of study that fills an economic need (now or in the comparatively near future, to contribute to the material comfort of mankind, so that mere intellectual satisfaction is irrelevant). In other words, a relevant subject is something that can either fetch you money, a job, status, power, and crude forms of pleasure. This distinction, I believe, already paints a picture in your mind—some subjects are already dropping out of your mind because you have always either been confused or curious to know what relevance these subjects have. You look at them and those who study them and you wonder what they have to gain from it. But let me deviate swiftly: that we have cliches that allow us to act as if this distinction is not necessarily there, reinforces the distinction. For example, when we say “no knowledge is lost,” we mean that we must keep on learning whatever we are learning, whose benefit we may not immediately deduce, just in case we might need it one day. It may also go in the cliche that “it is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” It reinforces the distinction between useful and irrelevant subjects because useful subjects present their usefulness immediately. But irrelevant subjects largely feel like a waste of time. However, we are willing to hold on frantically to irrelevant subjects like holding on to a rope which is cutting our flesh because we might someday need it. So, whether conscious or not, there is an agreement that some subjects are relevant and others are less relevant except when they accidentally are.
Unconscious as this distinction may seem, a prevailing sentiment arises out of it. This sentiment is kipism. With Kipism, learners (as children) are confused between learning the relevant and the irrelevant. We are encouraged to learn any and everything. In the same twist, we are told to learn in hopes for a career; and should push come to shove, we should cast aside irrelevant learning for the relevant type. And it is at this point—where push comes to shove—that we know where society’s priority and value lie; namely the relevant subject. It is pretty telling and it is a maxim that what matters most rises to the surface when we are under heat and constraints. The other side to this is that human beings instinctively and unconsciously know that their resources (like energy) is finite. So when under constraints, we make a choice of one at the expense of others. This is admissible until you realise that even when the resource pool expands, we always never go back to seeking that option—the options calcify. And so it is with learning. After a child comes under pressure to learn the relevant subjects, it becomes hard to keep on learning any and everything. Like dried fish, their posture is stiff and rigid; to move them is to break them. Kipism rules.
As we live right now in the age of the internet and abundance, kipism is doing a number. Remember that it is a cloud. Once a while it gathers and darkens and men must scamper. But here, I present two reasons why kipism must not be left to hang over our heads like clouds as a society: (1) because kipism is false: if knowledge is power, then every class of things we call knowledge is powerful. But if all things knowledge is not necessarily powerful, then kipism is not true. Still if power is the measure of knowledge, then you will have a class of knowledge that is not powerful by any means; (2) because kipism erodes: kipism by being technically efficient, it erodes culture, leisure, and conversation. One is more likely to lose his cultural heritage by deferring to a relevant curriculum. Kipism is untrue in that in the here and now in history where I write, kipism only applies to a small section of things we call knowledge. It does not apply to all things knowledge. And kipism erodes because the desire for empowerment swallow up other types of knowledge that we so class as “irrelevant.”
I might have employed the librarian metaphor to a ridiculous point of exhaustion. But it is necessary that I continue to do so because, without the attitude and prudence of a librarian, kipism prevails as it has already done, putting the society and its individual men under its merciless servitude; giving no room for rest or respite and asking every and everything to serve its ends; it leaves no end for us. (The sabbath is a religious antidote to Kipism).
As the bank and store of things we call knowledge increases, it becomes increasingly necessary to have a librarian's prudence. For if I had a room with ten books, it doesn't matter what type of books they are. I can know them by name, know what is in them, perhaps memorise them by heart. No much work there. But as the store of books increases, going from ten to a hundred, to a thousand, to a sheer number that it becomes hard to keep up with—by knowing them by name, we have to change our approach. We may no longer know them by name; we shall now sort them by category. What categories and classification do is to keep things pure and sorted, letting us know where to look and where to go should we have a need. The librarian’s prudence to cataloging mirrors the attitude we ought to imbibe as we live in an age of knowledge abundance.
But first, why does kipism prevail? Under what conditions do kipism prevail best? The answer to this is twofold, both of which I would love to pass over without mentioning but without which I may have just said nothing. Primo, kipism prevails because we live in an age of abundance that shadows us to think that more is always better. And secondly, we genuinely wish for material progress but we carelessly allow this push for material progress to metastasize into every other instinct that allows us to be human (per Albert J Nock).
Prudence today, demands that we revise how we think about knowledge and what kinds of knowledge there are; and what types may loosely fit our time. This is a personal effort.
I: Trivia: But not trivial
That there is a set of things we call “fun facts" immediately signals to us that life is not always serious and that one does not have to be homo faber 24 hours of the day. All of life does not point to expansion and continuous improvement of material well-being. Some things are by nature lighthearted, unserious, and without clear utilities. And that is what all trivia qualifies as.
Trivia stands in the class of mere amusement; where either relief or stimulation is all you get. Because, what good is it to know that the armhole in clothing is called an armsaye? Will it make you richer? I do not think so. Will it get you laid? Perhaps with an imaginary woman. Or will it get you a job? Maybe if you are a tailor and a rich man needs a tailor who knows a lot of fun facts. Otherwise, it is just a fun fact that may be a good icebreaker as you sit anxiously in your tailor’s shop. If such a category and its contents are ubiquitous around us, why then is there a pervading sentiment that you have to chug all knowledge with the clear intent of improving one’s material well-being?
Of course, in my experience with human beings (of which fortunately I am one), it is not surprising that we may employ trivia in our minor games; in status games and TV shows. We still try to up one another because by improving your chances in the game you may be improving your chances of expanding. Nonetheless, trivia cannot explicitly lend itself to the instinct of expansion unless it has been warped and its core essence—which is leisure—has been sucked out of it.
Still, trivia is not trivial. Although it is light on the mind and “fleeting” in the collective, we would be a lost cause without it. Many a public speaker would be helpless without it. Essayists would have no metaphors without it. And who knows, an infatuated young man is one fun fact away from missing his soulmate for life. And if we were to eliminate everything that is trivial from society we will be left nagging and dissatisfied without it. Because at the end of all our labours, we wish to enjoy a modicum of leisure; to enjoy something light; something that we are poised to forget as soon as the moment washes; something fun; something trivia.
But I must add—and I must quickly run two steps ahead—that instrumental knowledge may also be trivia. Dense scientific facts in highly specialised domains are trivia to those not accustomed or qualified to put the knowledge to work. For instance, the fact of physics that “Saturn can float on water like ice (Saturn is a huge planet, the second largest among the eight planets in the solar system. Saturn has a density of less than that of water, around 0.7 g/cc, whereas the density of water is 1 g/cc. According to the theories of flotation, a substance which is less dense than liquid floats in that liquid. So, Saturn might literally float on water)” is useless to me a layman but useful to an experimental physicist. I may impress my friends by quipping about it but I have no use for it after that.
The mistake—as I should restate occasionally—is in thinking that knowledge is power. If power is the ability to do work, I don’t know how knowing the four kings of a pack of cards—King David, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Alexander the Great—makes me a better poker player. Knowledge is power is only true to the domain where knowledge is instrumental. If it does not yield itself as a raw material to fabricate something else, knowledge is not power.
II: Scaffolding: The Unsung Hero
It gets interesting here. Because what is a scaffold and who has respect for it? For, we may respect trivia because we all know that it is meant to be fun and useless. However, we turn our noses up at things which pretend to be serious and useful when actually they are useless. We love the honestly useless and despise the pretentiously useful; we would prefer to have wasted time interviewing a madman than to hire a professional who turns out to be a madman. For long, many people have been disillusioned with the scaffold category for these subjects purport to be useful when if we look long enough, they are pretty useless.
Or are they?
Scaffolding, also called scaffold or staging, is a temporary structure used to support a work crew and materials to aid in the construction, maintenance and repair of buildings, bridges and all other man-made structures.
That’s right, there is a category of subject knowledge that is scaffolding. In other words, while they have no obvious, long-term instrumentality, they are crucial in helping you gain instrumental knowledge.
For starters, mathematics is a master scaffolding. It is such a scaffolding that up until tomorrow, folks ask why we learn it in school. And that may just be a test to know a scaffolding subject: its unobvious practicality. No one blinks about the uselessness of the statement that if all toilets in a housing block were flushed at once the building would collapse. But we always ask why schools do not teach how to calculate your taxes and in the same breath condemn schools for teaching fractions, geometry, and calculus. The irony!
Scaffolding as a temporary structure of the mind, helps you to develop instinctive frameworks that allow you to absorb more practical information. E.g learning logic may help you detect when someone is bullshitting on a topic as you see that their statement does not proceed logically no matter how smooth it is. Alas it's not taught in schools
Philosophy is another scaffolding subject around the block. Disdained by many men of science who cannot see it as anything else but mental masturbation, and despised by the layman as unnecessarily pedantic, its practicality is hidden out of sight. The building it helped to come alive survives as if the scaffolding was never there. That fine edifice: science. No one can forget the beauty science is; but philosophy, that is a consolation for men who could not secure jobs—academic philosophy is neither philosophy nor a job.
For nomenclature's sake, and on surface value, “foundational knowledge” should have been a better term for this category of knowledge. Everyone knows that a building requires a foundation. And even though we cannot see it, we know that the foundation is there; the building requires it. Scaffolding is a better term because scaffoldings are while being used, not attractive. They obscure the architecture’s beauty as it slowly comes to life. And they are usually removed after the building is completed. And they are not so often needed when making repairs or improvements to the building. When the building is complete and beautiful, the construction workers are removed from memory; the hammer is not remembered; the bamboos and woods and metallic scaffolds are not salient. All we focus on now is the building and its function. The scaffold always departs from being visible while the building is always there when we drive by.
It is this way then for instrumental subjects that use mathematics and philosophy for their scaffolding: it is easy to lose sight of the importance of these subjects after the instrumental subject has made significant achievements. It is not uncommon for us to think that performing experiments in a physics laboratory is a better use of your time than trying to quibble over whether drag queens fit the definition of “woman.” “What is a woman?” the philosophers ask while staring at the Ship of Theseus. But we are also quick to forget—or are probably ignorant—that the maternal works of Physics came from brilliant philosophical minds; Archimedically speaking.
If one thinks he learns something quite serious but to which he cannot find immediate use and practicality, feel free to check if it is a scaffolding—if it serves something else invisibly rather than glaringly.
Consider Poetry which furnishes the mind and mouth with rhythm; with melody to serve other purposes like professing one’s love and romance; and may also supply orators with eloquence and persuasion; and the mere practice of it is good for memorisation.
Consider also Logic. It permits the mind to have a condensed structure of the world wherein one lives. It cautions us against taking unnecessary leaps especially ones that may lead to grievous errors. Not many people in the world are adept at logic. But what we cannot deny is that we have done much in the world because a few people committed themselves to studying logic.
Many more subjects are scaffolds: Religious Education, Literature, trigonometry (lol), and calculus; all of which are crucial to culture, citizenry, traffic lights, and computers. They are everywhere, all around us; doing their work silently. A few people keep them alive. And these people try to raise their importance which may have the adverse effect of making us hate them because they “do not make us money or help us score chicks.”
As the scaffold has invisible, sometimes far-fetched benefits, I leave you with Roger Scruton’s long assessment of knowledge. As Scruton stated,
“Although knowledge is useful, it comes about because we value it, whether or not we have a use for it, as people valued the study of the classical languages and ancient history, the study of logic and set theory, the study of probability and statistical inference. Nobody would have guessed that ten years of Latin and Greek was exactly the preparation required by those British civil servants, as they travelled around the globe to administer a multicultural empire; nobody would have foreseen that the abstruse workings of Boole’s algebra and Frege’s logic would lead to the era of digital technology; nobody, least of all the Rev. Thomas Bayes, had any idea of what Bayes’ theorem in the calculus of probability would mean for our understanding of statistics. All such knowledge arises because people pursue it for its own sake, in the context of institutions that are maintained by our curiosity and not by our goals.”
Succinctly put, scaffolds are unsung heroes of the knowledge world. By the time their benefits come to light, only the construction workers know the part they played in giving us this beautiful world.
III: The Instrumental: The Servile Arts
To borrow Mr Nock’s archetype, we are about to confront the spirit of Mr Finkman. And from where should I start? Shall I take my first swipe at folks who sitting around microphones and a camera, only speak as if all of life’s waking moment is a transaction? I am talking here about those who are all about the “hustle culture.” I am talking about those to whom eight hours of sleep is a sin against commerce. Mr Finkman has influenced the world all around to think of the instinct of expansion as the only instinct available to us.
Of course, I must restate that it is sloth if we divorce knowledge and learning from prudent attitudes that we ought to take with them; and many people allow this slothfulness to pass like it is nothing. I say it is not nothing. But what it is not, is not mere transgression. What it is, is an abomination. To separate learning from prudence and commensurate instincts is to pollute our world and make it gradually unfit to live in.
Perhaps it is lazy but I hope you permit me to lay the blame once again at Sir Francis Bacon’s feet. For it is from him we have the famous “For knowledge, too, is itself power.” We also owe him good credit for the thought that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
You see reader, the instinct for expansion is the instinct that wishes to command, to bend, to fabricate. And while we owe it a measure of credit for our progress, the remaining instincts get forgotten. Think it: who praises the Literature teacher for tutoring the best poets? What has modal logic offered us at the corporation? The capitalists are almost said to be without manners and morals. Worse, that we can expand and improve our material well-being allows Mr. Finkman and the hustle culture boys to purge the line over genuine beauty as consumerism and commodity fetishisation creep everywhere like extraterrestrial goo. Warning: good cells can become cancerous.
Since I have started drawing from Nock’s Mr. Finkman, it will be appropriate to employ Nock’s own description of Finkman. For “Mr. Finkman's excessive simplification of life has made anything like the free play of ideas utterly incomprehensible to him. He never deals with ideas, except such limited and practical ones as may help get him something, and he cannot imagine anyone ever choosing, even on occasion, to do differently. When he "talks it business," the value of ideas, ideals, opinions, and sentiments, is purely quantitative; putting any other value on them is a waste of time. Under all circumstances, then, he tends to assume that other people measure the value of their ideas and opinions as he does his.” All in Nock’s words.
Allow me to redescribe the instinct for expansion as the optimisation instinct. Because, this instinct has the particular feature of maximising a distinct property of an event, process, or practice. It is particularly reductionist. It is the tyranny of technique; the gospel of optimisation; the opposition to ambiguity; the loathing of quality judgment; and the elevation of the single-strand.
In music, this instinct calibrates the quality of a composition by how many streams and listens the song had. And the gullible citizens of arithmocracy follow to think that “if it has a million streams on Spotify then it must be a good song.” Conversely, they also think “If the song was so good, why isn’t it popular?” The good ol’ “If you were so smart, why aren’t you rich?” but for music.
Definitely, some good songs will be widely listened to. But the possibility exists that some singers and producers have such terrible marketing and distribution that they will never see fame. But under the jurisdiction of the optimisation instinct, distribution success is equal and same as good music. Apply this scenario to books, art, and other endeavours that should subject themselves to extensive quality judgment and critique and the point stands—statistics border on trivia when they are starved of quality interpretation.
But let’s get some respite. Because despite this attitude and instinct we are confronting, this category of subject knowledge remains relevant; we cannot do without it. In fact, the earlier we define its tight boundaries, the better we can secure its integrity and avoid it being infiltrated by espionage agents like Gender and Queer Studies and other bad eggs. The earlier we secure the hedge, the quicker we can safeguard the instrumentals from every element that wishes to advance nasty ideological agendas under the legitimate epistemic authority of the sciences and other legitimate disciplines—Alan Sokally speaking
A quick distinction to help differentiate between scaffold and instrumental knowledge: in classical education, scaffolds are usually referred to by the tag “liberal arts” and instrumental knowledge is called by the tag “servile arts.” Self-explanatory at that. The liberal arts—that is scaffolds—are so called because “the ‘liberality’ or ‘freedom’ of the liberal arts, Joseph Pieper wrote in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, consists in their not being disposable for purposes, that they do not need to be legitimated by a social function, by being ‘work.’ ”
The servile arts—that is instrumental knowledge—are targeted for purposes other than themselves which may be demonstrated in terms of “work” or commercial viability.
This is an exercise on how to think about knowledge. Prudence is a virtue and virtue lies in giving things their rightful place.