Why it’s important to know things

Paul Tankard writes in praise of general knowledge.

SAMUEL Johnson famously observed that there are two kinds of knowledge: knowing something yourself, and knowing where to find out. He made this comment in 1775, at a time of rapid proliferation of print culture, and it has remained a powerful insight.

Now that pretty much all human knowledge has been sucked into the vortex of the internet, the second kind of knowledge has only one source, and the first kind of knowledge seems not only troublesome but unnecessary.

Many people — students but also teachers — now seem to think: why bother learning anything when you can find out random facts — or as people sometimes say contemptuously, ‘‘factoids’’ or ‘‘trivia’’ — when and if you need to?

This attitude reduces knowledge to one of its functions, the purely instrumental. Yes, we can now ‘‘access’’ within seconds instructions for appliances, or recipes for lasagne, or the words to a song, or the solutions to maths problems, or how to ask directions in Spanish. But this overlooks how knowledge contributes to social and personal formation.

Lots of things contain potential information: the growth rings of an ancient tree, the DNA in our cells, blood spatters at a crime scene, the layers of soil in a ruined city. So, too, do books, and the bits and bytes of our devices. But data is not information unless it informs someone; facts that are not known to a human knower cannot be said to be knowledge. Stored data has no meaning.

It’s only when data is known — when humans think, read, listen, remember and interpret it — that it can equip us for living in and contributing to the real world.

As a scholar and teacher, I find ignorance disturbing, but I don’t find it surprising. What is new and surprising are the ideologues for whom reality matters less than dogma, and for whom ignorance is a matter of principle. In Nineteen EightyFour, George Orwell saw it coming: ‘‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’’

Ideologues of this kind are everywhere: religious fundamentalists, of course, but also rightwing climate change deniers, and even loopier leftwing gender deniers. They also share the belief that traditional knowledge is a conspiracy, ‘‘constructed’’ by mythical forces, such as ‘‘political correctness’’ or ‘‘the patriarchy’’.

Their agendas have been given a rocket by the latest threat to knowledge, its digital outsourcing. Many young people seem to know little beyond how to operate their devices.

How is general knowledge useful? Consider such (literally) oldschool mental constructs as capital cities, the kings and queens of England, the multiplication tables, and the periodic table. Or practices such as identifying plants, parsing sentences, or learning poems.

These are all burdensome, and ‘‘looking it up’’ has never been easier. So, why bother? But what we are overlooking is that having in our heads the broad structures of these bodies of human knowledge makes us more at home in the world, able to assimilate new information, to sort sense from nonsense.

Knowing the capital of Serbia, who was monarch when Shakespeare was born, what’s seven times eight, the structure of the hydrogen atom, or what Tennyson said he would find after having ‘‘crossed the bar,’’ might not be of vital importance, in terms of anything you need to do in the next seven minutes. But learning or attempting to learn them, in the context of the intellectual constructs of which they are elements, is the only way to meaningfully appreciate the size of the world, the extent of history, the variety of peoples and cultures, the complexity of the material universe, and the continuities and divergences of politics and philosophy.

An executive of the Ford Motor Company asserted, ‘‘If you’re not replacing everything you know every three years, then your career is going to turn sour’’ and thought he was making a serious contribution to the debate about the public funding of higher education. But what he failed to realise is that if you do replace your knowledge every three years, you remain forever a 3yearold.

In the life of individuals and of societies, knowledge accumulates in layers. If everything that Isaac Newton discovered were to vanish, so would everything built upon it, and the modern world would disappear. If everything you or I learnt prior to three years ago were to disappear, we’d not even be back in kindergarten.

Much formal education in the humanities delivers ideology instead of information, and we see the results every day. People behaving like 3yearolds: the smart ones throwing tantrums because the world doesn’t suit their prejudices, or the less articulate ones who take drugs to deal with the disconnect between the world and what little they know.

I find that the more I learn or the more I figure out, the more curious I become, the more interested in and amazed by the world and people, and the more engaged and committed beyond my own interests. In an advanced society, general knowledge is our tribal knowledge: it bonds us to reality, and extends the limits of what we can love.

❛ In the life of individuals and of societies, knowledge accumulates in layers