Chris Blattman

Chris Blattman

Twitter Facebook-f Envelope Rss
Search
Close this search box.

“Knowledge is to information as art is to kitsch”

In the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of information. Who will any longer remember that knowledge is to information as art is to kitsch—that information is the most inferior kind of knowledge, because it is the most external?

A great Jewish thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it.

Knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method. And the devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in other ways: for example, they generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists, in which the ordeals of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control.  

An except from The New Republic‘s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, speaking at Brandeis.

His plea is for the study of literature and languages and art and music and philosophy and religion and history, and for encounters with art and literature.

I’ll admit that the volumes of information at hand are staggering and often distracting. And it would be a shame if people let data completely displace art or expression from their lives. It’s good to be reminded of this, some of us more than others.

The irony, however, is that technology has made knowledge cheaper and easier to acquire than ever before, and so literature is in the hands (literally) of a higher share of human society than ever before. I’d be willing to bet that a larger number and share of people have meditated on Shakespeare, published a novel, or appreciated a painting than at any time in human history.

Here’s a thought: is Wieseltier’s worry simply about the intellectual 1%? Surely only the educated elites are threatened by a distraction from the humanities.

He’s speaking to the 1%, of course. So do I, in my teaching at least. One of the reasons I blog is that it pushes ideas a little further outside the old circles of privilege. If democratizing knowledge sacrificed a little depth for breadth, it’s one I’d willingly make. Fortunately, I’m not convinced this is a trade-off we even need to make.

25 Responses

Why We Fight - Book Cover
Learn More
Subscribe to Blog

Recent Posts