I'm an Idiot Too!

From Front Porch Republic, my favorite author therein. Jason Peters on Majoring in Idiocy.  This is a great post on college education.  Read it all and behold the witty satire of the idiot.

An “idiot,” from the Greek idios (“private,” “own,” “peculiar”), is someone who is peculiar because he is closed in on himself or separated or cut off. In short, he is a specialist. If he knows anything, he knows one thing.

It was in anticipation of this idiot that Newman said, “Knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular, ceases to be Knowledge.” Likewise, Emerson (to compare small men to great) said that “the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet”; “I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details,” he said, “so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts. . . .” And Pope, in his indefatigable effort to remind us that we were made to walk upright and to contemplate the heavens, asked, 

Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.

Higher education lives in contempt of such writers and such notions. It prefers its specialists. It is itself an utterly idiosyncratic specialist specializing in specialists—in idiots. It advises students to borrow lots of money and recommends that they major in idiocy...

The idiot may have extensive knowledge of a given thing, but to the extent that he has no sense of where to place that knowledge in the larger context of what is known and knowable, and to the extent that he doesn’t know that the context for the known and the knowable is the unknown and the unknowable—to that extent his knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes a collection of mere facts, which, as Cervantes said, are the enemy of truth.

Again, I would not be misunderstood. In a manner of speaking we are all idiots, and anyone impertinent enough to get a Ph.D. flirts with idiocy every day of his life by virtue of the requisite and necessary specialization that attends the enterprise. That there are benefits to such specialization is, I think, unquestionable. It took a specialist to operate on my knee. It takes a specialist to make a fine cabinet or a good bookcase. But specialization is a limited, not an absolute, good, and it should never mistake itself for true intelligence. You may be an eminent Harvard biologist who knows a great deal about ants; you may be a brilliant if wheel-chair-bound British physicist who knows a great deal about string theory. But no amount of ants or strings or knowledge of how many ants can dance on the head of a string qualifies you to say that God is a delusion or human love a brain state. The world, said Thoreau, and rightly he said it (playing a variation on Hamlet’s theme), is bigger than our ideas of it.

We idiots, so closed in on ourselves, will more often than not fail to notice that ignorance is our default condition, that ignorance will always be our element, that knowledge is but a small blue patch in the cloud of unknowing, a tiny clearing in the vast forest of ignorance.

Being an idiot of the first order myself, I recommend as a precautionary measure “driving knowledge out of its categories,” as Wes Jackson and Bill Vitek say in The Virtues of Ignorance. I recommend as a second precautionary measure thinking of knowledge as a tool and of ignorance as a perspective. Such, at any rate, is the advice of one contributor to this fine book. By such measures and by the careful and humble discipline of broad learning we might arrive at the great Socratic conclusion...

But a great scam is being perpetuated against a lot of suspecting victims as well. They are being told to borrow a lot of money for the privilege of majoring in idiocy. They are actually paying people to make them into idiots. The consequences are playing out before us. Everywhere you turn, an idiot is in charge. Not a stupid person, mind you, but an idiot. Look, for example, at the President’s economic advisors. Look, for example, at the deans and presidents of our colleges and universities. Look, indeed, at the professors of these august institutions. You will find scientists who have never read the Bible–and who could not tell you what kind of book it is; you will find Biblical scholars who have never read Darwin–and who also couldn’t tell you what kind of book the Bible is. (The Origin they take on faith.)