First Paragraph Only: In the Know: Wieseltier

TNR//September 16, 2010

In Winesburg, Ohio, George Willard, “the Ohio village boy,” suddenly “crosses the line into manhood” when he is pierced by a sense of his own finitude. “The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.” Sherwood Anderson’s understanding of sophistication was nothing like our own. Like many habitudes in the past hundred years, this one has grown complicated and thin. Our sophistication bears no resemblance to wisdom and no sadness attaches to it. Our sophistication is merely a skill for many surfaces. It is anything but a consciousness of ultimate questions; it is, in fact, a flight from such a consciousness. Its objective is breadth, not depth. It is the talent for speaking confidently on subjects about which one knows very little, on subjects about which one has only heard—a social skill, an exhibition of virtuosity to others—the intellectual aspiration of a dinner guest. Above all, it is a way of avoiding embarrassment. There are people for whom nothing is more embarrassing than to be caught not in the know. To arm themselves against embarrassment, they choose knowingness, which is just ignorance hidden by information. (The electronic media are the supreme instruments of knowingness, of second-hand knowledge. The stench of Google is everywhere.) Of course there is a philosophical problem here: none of us can rely upon observation and experience and study for the entirety of our beliefs. Our lives are more restricted than our interests. We must depend on the reports of others who have covered the wars and witnessed the performances that we ardently discuss. With the past, certainly, there is no direct acquaintance; and very few of us can test the validity of what we assert as true about the natural world. So we turn to authorities, or to pseudo-authorities. And having satisfied ourselves that we have met the current requirements of well-roundedness, that we have gained the competence for the finest and most advanced platitudes, we enter the lists. We exchange, and congratulate ourselves on, the right signs and references. We teach ourselves to become even a little haughty about what we discovered the day before yesterday. (“What, you haven’t seen Osipova?”) And the victims of our intimidation go home to bone up in private, to remediate their out-of-the-loopness and prepare themselves for a role in the on dit—except of course the strong ones among them, who recognize this game for what it is, and prefer something better than sophistication, more specific and more substantive, a parcel of knowledge strenuously acquired and genuinely possessed. Sometimes they, the post-sophisticates, run the risk of being without an opinion, which is of course heroic.

Whole piece here:

Me:

How charming is this: a heavy dose of opinion on not needing to have them from the dude who has one on most things and as if this entire piece is not shot through with opinion. For what is judgment but an opinion, an assertion of something believed?