Knowledge as Status

This kind of thing frustrates me:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303901504577460770904124192.html

Click the link and it'll take you to an article called "A House to Look Smart In: Old-School Reading Rooms Stage Grand Return; No Books? Firms Will Pick, Style"

It's an article about hedge-fund managers, Hollywood moguls, and technology executives spending a bunch of money to have someone design and stock old-fashioned reading rooms and libraries in their sparkling new houses. By a bunch I mean anything from $30,000 to $150,000 or more, even upwards of $20 million.

Here's my beef: It's openly and only a status symbol. One that suggests the presence of knowledge because it bears the accoutrements of knowledge.

It's a celebration of money and knowledge coming together, where Knowledge qua Knowledge is simply an ornament, or an affirmation of monetary success. Typically I'm all about affirmations. I love affirming things, especially difficult things like death and diversity of opinion.

This type of affirmation, however, burns me. My skin physically heats to the point of sweating, even in an air-conditioned building on a cool day.

And it's because of several things:

1. The clientele
2. The vendors (or rather, the enablers) 
3. It continues the same misunderstanding that's been rampant in quasi-intellectual society since that disastrous Cartesian Moment (I think therefore I am / Cogito ergo sum).

Allow me to explain these, in reverse order.

3.) The Cartesian Moment, a topic which Michel Foucault addresses in his 1981 lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, is a relic of 17th Century Moralism (or Rationalism, I'm not sure of the real genre). To steal Foucault's argument - which, if self-reflection achieves what it's supposed to, we would see is both true and rampantly ignored - the "Cartesian moment" obliterated the personal spiritual meaning of the "Delphic prescription of gnōthi seauton" or, rather "Know yourself." Foucault argues that "Know yourself" had two inherent meanings, both of which the Greeks understood, and which through the centuries came to mean less and less, until Descartes successfully eradicated the second. They are:

• Know who you are
• Care for who you are

By focusing only on "Knowing" who they are, people eventually come to rely on basic emotional responses to life events to inform their self-reflexive awareness. They become passionately attuned to fleeting social movements (a sense of belonging), aggressively invested in economic wealth (a sense of personal security), and catastrophically defensive when their ideas of happiness and security are challenged (a sense of longing accompanied by unhappiness). Those are my observations. I haven't read enough of Hermeneutics to know whether Foucault identifies similar traits, and I admit they are grossly over-generalized but that does not dismiss them. I call upon the reader to recall moments where he or she has encountered such people as above, and then recall whether or not that person 1.) had an emotional breakdown and 2.) learned from that emotional breakdown.

So, in other words, when people become obsessed with Knowledge qua Knowledge, they tend to ignore the more important and esoteric trait that comes from investigating, analyzing, and finding insight apart from knowledge: Wisdom. 

Their love of Knowledge dismisses the more difficult task of learning from it.

2.) The vendors, or rather the designers, thinkers and architects who specialize in providing these services. I'm angry at them out of a sense of loyalty. These people are supposed to uphold what they profess, and if they profess art, learning, insight, literature or even the belief that appearances reflect intentions, they should know better than to sell mere gestures to those things. 

Because to me, as I both admit and ignore the limitations of my authority, these libraries are simply gestures. They're suggestions. Decorations. Vestigial limbs of a neo-canonical past. They're the beacon of intent, looking to the fruits of emotional labor and relegating them to the loathsome position of the Artist in Supplication: begging for the approval of the rich and famous. They're the standing ovation to a one-way street where contemporary wealth deems itself entitled to share in legacies of greatness while forgoing the labors that founded those legacies.

An artist, philosopher, or artist-philosopher would know this, and would do one of the following three things, respectively: 

1. Reject it in form
2. Argue against it in prose
3. Both of the above, with varying degrees of success, usually posthumous

These vendors, as far as I can tell, do none of these things. They may find their work fulfilling, and for that I congratulate them. But I do not want to share their company. They are at least aware enough that they may, one day, want to share mine - and for that I also congratulate them - but the flattery will not be returned.

1.) The clientele. As far as the two former arguments have prepared you for my attack on the clientele, I'll say only this: By turning knowledge and wisdom into a status symbol, they respond to contemporary artists, philosophers and artist-philosophers in the best way they can: economically.

They have money, which means they have power. And when that power is applied to things like this, it convinces the broader public that you must have one to have the other.

It exhausts me to say it and so I say it wearily, but this is not the case.

Revelations and epiphanies - real ones - are not a privilege afforded to "wealth." They can come from anywhere and everywhere, and they usually come from gestures to something even broader than knowledge. 

They come from gestures toward Love. Real, undefinable love. It surprises and terrifies, comforts and admonishes. But it is constant, ethereal. It is, in almost every instance, the driving force behind the pages hidden in these libraries. 

I say that because I've learned to say it. And I've learned to say it because I've observed its interactions among the people whom I say I love. And when I write things like this, I see many of their faces behind my own words. 

It is because I love them that I write, so if they read my words and they take offense to them, I ask them to remember this, my exhortation:

gnōthi seauton

There is truth in these words. It does not come easily. Neither does Love. If you would fight for the love of another, fight for the love of yourself as well, and you will know truth.

-M.N. Shiplet

**Note:
For a great example of someone who understands both aspects of gnōthi seauton, see Anne-Marie Slaughter's recent article in The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All". Particularly her wholesome support for the finding in Bronnie Ware's book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, in which the most frequent regret was: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."


This, of course, on top of her adamant belief that leaving Washington for her family was the right choice, a choice for which I have the deepest admiration.