In May, along with others, I went to hear a lecture by the nonfiction writer Simon Winchester. It was, appropriately, at a branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library—appropriately because the lecture was a distillation of his new book Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, of which I now own a copy signed by its genial and unassuming author. The subject is a natural one for Winchester, for the book is implicitly a kind of meditation on his career. He began as a journalist for The Guardian, the newspaper I most admire: in other words, as a purveyor of current information to the public. But he went on to write an extensive series of nonfiction volumes—a list in the front of the book contains 34 titles—on serious subjects (there is, in other words, no biography of Kim Kardashian). Knowing What We Know is the first I have read, but, if it is any example, Winchester has the twin skills of a gifted teacher: the ability to clarify and make any subject accessible, combined with the ability to hook his readers and fire their curiosity. So he has been a transmitter of knowledge whose books are aimed at the goal of creating that seemingly impossible ideal, an informed public. But he has simultaneously been thinking about two issues that underlie his quest. First, the possession of knowledge, in other words, erudition. Second, the process by which knowledge is transmitted, accessed, and utilized.
The book’s narrative moves forward historically from the first great revolution in the storing and transmission of knowledge: the invention of writing, and the shift from orality to literacy. Here, Winchester’s account can be supplemented by another clearly written and fascinating book, Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963), whose point of departure is the notorious attack on the poets, basically on Homer, by Socrates in the 10th book of Plato’s Republic. Socrates would exile the poets from his Republic because they lie. What is at stake, as Havelock shows, is what counts as authoritative knowledge: the orally transmitted knowledge of the poets, which is basically mythical, and the logical knowledge of the philosophers (to which he could have added the empirical knowledge of the historians), which was at that time about to become written, even though Socrates himself is a transitional figure, the last of the oral philosophers. From that point, Winchester moves through one fascinating account after another, all of them having to do with the preservation and transmission of knowledge. There are chapters on education, on the invention of the book, on libraries and their classification systems, on encyclopedias, on newspapers, and finally on the Internet and its progeny: Wikipedia, GPS, Google, and the like.
The uneasy question at which the book arrives only towards the end of its journey is nevertheless foreshadowed in its introduction. Any teacher will be familiar with it as the “Why should I have to know anything when I can just look it up on my phone?” question. The course of mine in which this issue most often arose, ironically, was called Introduction to the Study of the English Language. Given the factual and conceptual material of the course, I gave objective exams that required memorization. For each exam, I provided a study guide that more or less promised that exactly this is what is going to be on the exam. If you memorize these things, you will get a good grade. The amount of material covered by each exam was moderate and not very technical. Despite that, although most students did just fine, I regularly got students who failed or almost failed every exam, leaving whole sections blank. They claimed that they were incapable of memorizing. Some of this may have been timed-exam panic, minds going blank. But it appeared that much of it was that the students had simply not memorized. Believe me, I have a lousy memory, but I do not believe that anyone without a learning disability is incapable of memorizing. I think that a lot of students do not know how to memorize, and sometimes have a resistance to it that amounts to a mental block.
Even students who can do it will sometimes express impatience with memorization. They have been taught that memorization is “rote learning” and is actually anti-educational. Or so they say. I think they really have been taught that memorization in the humanities is anti-educational. If they are in a pre-med program and insist that they should not have to memorize what the trigeminal nerve is, that that is mere rote learning, they are not long for the program. The amount that doctors and nurses have to know often impresses me, and they are constantly having to learn and memorize new things as the field changes. The same goes for computer science, although a new excuse is on the horizon there. I am already reading predictions that AI will eliminate the profession of developer: programming will be automated. And I have read true-believer articles that predict that eventually our doctors also will be AI’s, that all fields without exception will be taken over by machines that have memories far better than ours can ever be, and have the capacity to think and apply that unlimited knowledge.
Hence the thesis of Winchester’s book, stated at the outset and then worked towards in the process of the narrative:
If our brains---if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be? (7)
One way we understand a subject is exactly the method employed by this newsletter. We try to break a huge field down into smaller categories, then understand how the categories all fit together into a total picture. This is what composition teachers mean by critical analysis, and it is an integral part of teaching students to write. It is also the method of Socrates: most Platonic dialogues begin by the attempt to understand a big, amorphous term like “justice” or “love” by coming up with a sharply focused definition that distinguishes among various things that have been called “justice” or “love.” For example, in the previous two newsletters, I tried to define “marriage” according to its various sub-categories: marriage as a political and/or economic arrangement; companionate marriage as a life partnership; romantic marriage; marriage as distinguished from the kind of irrational desire that I called “passion,” and so on. What is called “prototype theory” in linguistics, as I taught in my English Language course, says that much if not most human understanding is a matter of fitting a phenomenon into a category. If we can label it, we understand it. Therefore, let us try to acquire knowledge about knowledge, so to speak, by asking what we mean when we use the word knowledge, which can be various things depending on context.
The most basic level of knowledge is what we can call “practical knowledge,” practical in two senses. First, it is practical in the sense of useful: knowing how to cope in the real world. Second, it involves the practice of some physical skill. In the class system of our society, this is working-class knowledge, usually acquired by some kind of hands-on apprenticeship rather than by obtaining a degree. Such knowledge is curiously both respected and not respected. A plumber, an electrician, a landscaper: we need their skillful knowledge, but they are not regarded as “educated” because they do not have academic credentials. Moreover, there is an expectation that a working or middle-class male will have a good deal of practical knowledge himself, only calling an expensive specialist when the task exceeds a certain level of difficulty. Men are supposed to know how to do the small handyman tasks that need to be done about the house, and also how to do moderate-level redecorating. You lose a little bit of male status if you go to Lowes or Home Depot and betray that you do not know what parts are necessary to, say, change the mechanism of the toilet and how to install them. All is not lost: if you do not know, there is a YouTube instructional video for everything: how to rip up your old tile floor and install a new one, how to rewire a lamp, how to do simple soldering, how to hang wallpaper. However, jobs require tools, and men are also supposed to have a collection of handyman tools and know how to use them. A running joke in the comic strip Blondie is that his best friend and neighbor Herb Woodley is always borrowing Dagwood’s tools and not returning them. Another running joke, so to speak, is Dagwood’s attempt to fix the leak under the kitchen sink. He invariably creates havoc, and Blondie calls the plumber before he does worse damage.
I was a bookworm who knew very few fix-it things (although I did learn how to rewire a lamp in 8th grade shop class), and I have always been grateful for my five years as a part-time janitor and apartment caretaker after college under the tutelage of my father-in-law, who knew how to build entire houses from scratch. With his patient teaching, I at least learned some basics. It used to be part of the knowledge required to be a real man to know how to tinker with your own car—to change the oil and spark plugs, replace tires. That requirement is almost as old as the automobile itself: the great comic strip Gasoline Alley began, as its title implies, as daily jokes about four male friends obsessed with maintaining their cars, which, in 1918, when the strip began, needed a lot of maintaining. Even when I was growing up in the 60’s, there was a type of male teenager in movies and TV shows recognized mostly by his legs protruding from underneath a hot rod. That is all gone: cars have become simply too sophisticated and computerized. Insofar as it survives, the male car obsession seems to have migrated to video games. Other types of practical knowledge have also disappeared, victims of a culture of planned obsolescence. I am a member of the last generation to remember the TV tube testers in most drug stores, with which your father tested the vacuum tubes out of the TV to see whether they were defective. No one fixes their own TV, or radio or toaster anymore. No one else fixes them either: we throw them away and buy new ones. My brother’s first job out of high school was in a small-appliance repair store: such shops are as extinct as the passenger pigeon.
My male bias is showing: women too have traditionally been expected to have certain practical knowledge: how to cook, how to sew, how to take care of children (changing diapers, boiling formula, what to do for a high fever). Men occasionally pick up a bit of this, as women may pick up handyman skills. My mother taught me how to iron when I went away to college because, as she dryly put it, you aren’t always going to have some woman to do it for you. Regrettably, I never learned how to sew from her: if a shirt loses a button, I can’t wear it any longer. My mom also insisted that I take lessons to learn what was in those days a “female” skill: how to type. It is one of the things I have been most grateful for: my generation is famous for men who wrote whole novels with two-fingered typing. Or who, in business, hired secretaries for their typing and shorthand skills. How young people learn these days I have no idea. We had high school typing class, taught by the eccentric woman who also taught Latin and named her dog Julius Caesar.
The functioning of society depends on this kind of practical knowledge much more than it depends on most careers demanding “higher education.” Especially during the anxious days of the Cold War, there were survivalists on both the right and the left who felt that civilization was going to collapse. On the right, survivalists built fallout shelters in their back yards and began to stockpile both goods and knowledge for surviving after a nuclear war, without electricity, plumbing, modern medicine. There is some amount of this going on again today, this time on survivalist websites. Robert Heinlein’s darkest science fiction novel, Farnham’s Freehold (1964), concerns a family’s struggle to survive a nuclear aftermath. Critics have examined Heinlein’s preoccupation, in novel after novel, with the Competent Individual, a kind of super Boy Scout who is always prepared, nothing he can’t do, the ultimate Yankee individualist. But Heinlein was sane enough to recognize the limitations of such an attitude. Survivalism means natural childbirth, but there is a birth scene in Farnham’s Freehold in which there are complications and the mother dies in a horrible, agonizing way. Another survivalist classic is Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955), set here in Ohio where Brackett lived, based on the premise that the society most equipped to survive a total civilizational breakdown is the Amish, who already know how to live a non-modernized life. On the left, survivalism permeated the hippie communal movement. Its Bible was The Whole Earth Catalog, published between 1968 and 1972. The attitude behind the catalog resembled that of the off-the-grid people nowadays. In an age before Google, it was a compendium of tools, materials, how-to books and other instructional materials, with evaluative descriptions, like an old Sears catalog but not actually selling what it listed, just providing useful information and recommendations. How useful it really was is debatable, but it became legendary, a symbol.
Practical knowledge is non-elite. The practical knowledge of most aristocracy in earlier times was limited to the tools and techniques of warfare. An exception, in this as in so many other ways, was Odysseus. In the opening lines of the Odyssey, Odysseus is called the “polytropos,” the man of many turnings. He is just as great a warrior as any other Homeric figure, but he is many-sided and possesses many other kinds of knowledge, making him the consummate survivor. In Book 5, he knows how to flatter and manipulate a powerful nymph, Calypso, into letting him go (though admittedly he has the command of Zeus to back him up). Immediately when she gives him permission to depart, we get a two-page description of Odysseus singlehandedly constructing a raft on which to sail away. Why do we need two pages on how to build a raft? To show that Odysseus is The Man Who Knows How, ready for any turning. Achilles would no doubt have relied on someone else constructing the raft for him. I thought of this episode when reading Winchester’s riveting account of having to sail, when young, utilizing the knowledge of the old-fashioned method of navigation, with compass, sextant, and a lot of mathematics. His point is that this kind of knowledge became almost instantly obsolete with the invention of GPS. But GPS depends on a network of satellites—what if they failed, or what if some villain or psychotic idiot rendered them inoperable, as Elon Musk just shut down his Starlink network to foil a Ukrainian offensive? How far should we keep the old kinds of practical knowledge just in case? Intelligent machines may do everything for us—but most of humanity, even without AI, is already as dependent as babies on a network of technology. What if, in the title of a famous story by E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”? Pixar’s vivid “Wall-E” (2008) amounts to an extended riff on Forster’s story.
A second type of knowledge, a step up the ladder from practical knowledge and its ground-level concerns, is what we might call “citizen’s knowledge,” knowledge of the society in which one lives. Democracy can only survive with an informed citizenry, and it is easy to lose hope in the face of the appalling ignorance of most people about the most elementary political facts. Students notoriously are unable to name the three branches of American government (executive, legislative, judicial). I doubt whether a great number of my students could name one Supreme Court justice, let alone all 9—for that matter, I wonder how many know there are 9. I recently taught an essay titled “Bombs Bursting in Air” and got summaries from two students showing that they thought the bombs referred to World War II. I would be afraid to ask them the date of the beginning of World War II, for fear of getting “1812.” This is not a put-down of students but a simple fact of our educational system of a kind that many a teacher can corroborate.
Lack of political knowledge is merely a subset of most people’s lack of what, a generation ago, the literary critic E.D. Hirsch called “cultural literacy.” His book “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know” (1987) generated a great deal of culture-wars controversy, and Hirsch was accused of being a reactionary conservative, although he was really more of a liberal centrist. In part this was guilt by association, as he himself explains in his Preface, because his ideas were cited approvingly by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett: “This endorsement from an influential person of conservative views gave my ideas some currency, but such an endorsement was not likely to recommend the concept to liberal thinkers, and in fact the idea of cultural literacy has been attacked by some liberals on the assumption that I must be recommending a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read” (xiv). That would indeed be a grotesque misreading of a book whose driving motivation, according to its opening lines, is egalitarian rather than elitist:
To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science. It is by no means confined to “culture” narrowly understood as an acquaintance with the arts. Nor is it confined to one social class. Quite the contrary. Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. (xiii)
The premise of the book is simple. American educational theory, partly influenced by John Dewey, has been dominated by the wrongheaded notion that students should learn skills rather than content. Learning content, i.e., specific information, is mere rote learning. Not very many years ago, we were required to recast the Course Objectives part of our course syllabi. All objectives had to be stated in terms of what students would be able to “do” rather than what they might “know” at the end of the course. Acquiring important information about, say, Renaissance art was not acceptable. What can the students do, what kind of skills will they acquire by taking the course? Our administration is by no means crackpot: it was being driven by an anxiety over accreditation. It was the accrediting bodies that were pushing the “skills” approach.
In addition to the silly idea that “rote learning,” meaning memorization, is always wrong, the “skills” approach manages to fit the ideological agendas of both the right and the left. On the right, educators wanted to be able to reply to the know-nothing criticism of students, parents, and politicians, to the recurrent complaint that it is a waste of time and money studying liberal arts subjects. Knowing about Renaissance art, or metaphysics, or set theory in mathematics is a frivolous waste of time and money. Show us how students will ever use that knowledge in the job world. Such a complaint has always been with us, but it has become much more militant with the decline of middle class economic security and the ballooning of student debt. Now, however, there is a rebuttal: Oh, but it isn’t the knowledge: students are actually acquiring skills of some sort, often summed up in the hand-waving term “critical thinking,” which employers are said to want. On the left, the “skills” approach is convenient for those who would like to turn liberal education into ideological critique. In this course on American literature, or Shakespeare, students will learn the skill of analyzing texts for evidence of sexism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Texts become pretexts for social justice advocacy.
For the record, I wholeheartedly agree that liberal education has a secondary practical employment value in addition to its primary function of expanding students’ vision, and also agree that ideological critique must play a subordinate role in textual analysis, because all texts have their biases. However, students cannot become critical thinkers or social activists if they cannot read, and they cannot read anything of substance if they lack cultural literacy, which is simply a common vocabulary presupposed by educated writing everywhere, including on the Internet. “Educated” does not mean academic or high-culture except in the sense that school lays down the basis for it, a foundation built upon by a lifelong habit of reading. The hot-button aspect of Hirsch’s book was a 65-page appendix listing examples of vocabulary typical of cultural literacy. It is not at all a definitive list, just examples of the kind of thing that people need to have a basic recognition knowledge of in order to make sense of texts of any sophistication. Deep understanding is not necessary; when the term is a “great books” sort of title, Hirsch makes clear that it is not necessary to have read the book, merely to recognize the title and have a sense of what it is about and what its cultural importance is. His example is Das Kapital, which I myself have not read and which is not on my bucket list. And, yes, a good deal of the list is arbitrary, as much of our store of information is arbitrary, what we happen to remember from a class years ago or happen to have read about somewhere and it stuck with us. But an educated person (which is not the same as a degreed person) has to have a trove of knowledge to draw upon or an article in The Guardian or Time or a chapter in a book by Simon Winchester will have blank spots in it, places where lack of vocabulary limits understanding. If there are a sufficient number of blanks, the experience will be like trying to read “Madame Bovary” in the original with only a French I level of vocabulary.
Hirsch’s list begins with six dates, the first of which is 1066, which is on one of my study guides from the English Language course. Students have to know it was the Norman Conquest, that no one named Norman was involved, that it was the year the Norman (from Normandy) French conquered Anglo-Saxon England, so that the influence of French transformed Old English, the language of “Beowulf,” into Middle English, the language of Chaucer. The last date is 1939-1945, the period in which “The Star Spangled Banner” was not composed. The list is inevitably out of date: I doubt that “Anwar Sadat” and “synfuel” are items of cultural literacy any longer. Some strike me as arbitrary: why “Toledo, Ohio,” which is neither the capitol nor the most important city in the state? Mind you, it would be nice if at least native Ohioans recognized it. I remember years ago an adult student sputtering with exasperation in class discussion over a young co-worker at her job who kept referring to “Too-lee-doo,” until she finally realized he meant “Toledo.” A few I don’t know myself: “xylem”? (rings a dim bell from Bio class; doubtless a good Scrabble word). Probably no item on the list is absolutely essential: despite Hirsch’s misleading subtitle, that isn’t the point. Nor is the point snobbery: “You’re saying I’m stupid if I don’t know all this stuff.” The point is that these terms are representative: they are the kind of thing that our society presupposes that its members know, the kind of thing that is, whether people like it or not, necessary in order to participate in the social discourse by which democracy survives. Whether or not people “get their nose out of joint” (an entry on the list), this kind of knowledge is the entry into an ongoing social conversation that makes people connected in a community, that enables them to debate and argue and persuade, and thus vote in an informed manner. I would add that cultural literacy shades imperceptibly into plain old literacy: in the English Language course, I had to change the wording of an exam question that asked “which of the following espoused the Jacobite cause” because too many students didn’t know the word “espoused.” The same principle is involved: one unknown word is no big deal, but when students cannot read without encountering dozens if not hundreds of vocabulary terms unknown to them, they simply stop reading. Or, worse, they turn into Marjorie Taylor Greene and refer to the “gazpacho” police when they presumably mean Gestapo. Vocabulary terms may include whole phrases and proverbs. If you do not know a certain old saying (I cannot say “commonplace,” for that is the point), then you will not get it when Ms. Greene tells you that where there are Jewish space lasers, there must be fire.
The list is the most famous part of Hirsch’s book, but it is also its weakest link, making a false impression. The point is not to memorize words off a list: that is equivalent to the attempt of some people in the old days to become educated by reading through an encyclopedia, starting with the letter A. Each item on the list is part of a larger context, a webwork of other information that expands into an entire discipline of knowledge or cultural discourse. Students sometimes complain that their high school history teacher reduced history to a list of names and dates to be memorized without context. If so, that was indeed “rote learning” and bad teaching. That seems to be the gist of the complains about the Common Core, which sounds like an attempt to move in a Hirschean direction but reductively.
What students need, what we all need, is the context that not only makes a term meaningful but dramatizes for us why it matters. For example, “Oppenheimer, J. Robert” is on the list. Bare recognition knowledge of that name is something, but by itself all it might do is enable you to win at Trivial Pursuit (is that game still an item of cultural literacy?). For the real context of the name, we need something like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, or the historical biography on which that film is based, American Prometheus, though even reading the title of that work necessitates our knowing another reference. Who was Prometheus? Yes, there are too many things to know, and educators become obsessed with making their own lists of what is essential—hence the Common Core again. The appropriate response to this is a hilarious quotation from Samuel Johnson that Hirsch puts on his very first page so that we will not miss it:
There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn’t ‘em both. (xiii)
Some of these debates go way back.
At this point we have already arrived at a preliminary response to the question of why I need to know things when I can just look them up on my phone. The know-nothing attitude maintains a semblance of superficial plausibility only within certain confines. No one would argue that doctors do not need a reservoir of prior knowledge. They cannot begin looking up the whole field of medicine when a patient comes in with symptoms. Moreover, their knowledge is not merely of facts and terms comparable to Hirsch’s list. They need to know how the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, how organs of the body act together as whole systems according to certain principles. In other words, they need not only the information, but the meaningful patterns formed by the information. They need to understand systems, and ultimately the human body as a system made of systems, a total system. They need such knowledge “at their fingertips,” not in the new sense of tapping keys on a phone or computer but in the old sense of having internalized it until it is native to them, as scales are to a guitar soloist.
Winchester organizes his discussion according to a paradigm he abbreviates as DIKW (20): data, information, knowledge, wisdom. True thinking is, first, an act of interpretation that sees patterns in data: information is interpreted data. But information forms larger patterns and relationships that we call knowledge. It is only at that point that we can speak of understanding. Whether there is a Big Picture of which all knowledge forms part must be the subject of next week’s newsletter. I will only say that, the more information you have in your head when you try to think, the more patterns you are likely to see, those patterns in turn suggesting larger patterns, exfoliating into larger and larger dimensions. At a certain pitch of intensity, this sense of interconnection may become ecstatic, resulting in the epiphany that we call wisdom. But, in good medical fashion, such thinking should come with a warning label about side effects, one of which is, “May cause flatulence”—it can make you, well, just a bit long winded. As my students, and readers of this newsletter, have come to see.
References
Hirsch, E.D., Jr. “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Winchester, Simon. “Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.” Barnhill Press/Harper Collins, 2023.
Very interesting post, Michael! I met Winchester when he spoke in Tucson about his book "Krakatoa" on a book tour in 2003 or 2004. I knew about him from his book on the Oxford English Dictionary and its most prolific contributor, "The Professor and the Madman" (1998), later made into a movie worth watching, in 2019, though based on a single paragraph in Elisabeth Murray’s "Caught in the Web of Words" (1979). The lecture was sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa chapter here, when I was President of the group, and faculty members among the dinner guests afterward seemed frankly shocked by the range of his interests. A sociologist wanted to discuss the Troubles in Ireland, which Winchester wrote about in "Bloody Sunday" (1974).
I found myself thinking afterward about the demise of the “man of letters” in the U.S., perhaps more than in other counties—figures like Van Wick Brooks and Edmund Wilson, along with female contemporaries like Mary McCarthy. In our generation, such people all became caught up in academia without managing to save the Liberal Arts. Writing to me in 1978, Frye lamented the "perpetual crisis" in the Liberal Arts.
I have sometimes wondered what his career would have been had he not had the support of people like Pelham Edgar and institutions like Victoria College. Would he have become a novelist of ideas, or would he always have been a cultural critic with a focus on Canada?
I was glad you mentioned Havelock Ellis, who gets overshadowed by Walter Ong and others he influenced. Again, thanks for the good posting.