[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] Knowingness
Terry W. Colvin
fortean1 at mindspring.com
Sat Jan 29 21:08:13 UTC 2005
A discussions of Israel, anti-Semitism (real or imagined),
and Middle East politics on another list a few years ago made me think
about an attitude I call "knowingness." I'm also often reminded of
"knowingness" when I hear or read about so-called "political
correctness." This "knowingness" was hinted at, though not really
discussed in depth, in a 1951 article by sociologist David Rieman on
American attitudes toward Jews that I posted in the course of that
discussion on that list. I would like to examine this concept of
"knowingness," and how it affects (or afflicts) social & political
discussions--in areas going far beyond just attitudes specifically
toward Israel or the Jews.
_Webster's Third New International Dictionary_ defines
"knowingness" as "the quality or state of being knowing," citing a
phrase attributed to one C.J. Rolo, "the brisk knowingness of a
competent journalist." It defines "knowing" in turn as "having or
reflecting the keen awareness and insight and power of discernment
typical of the specialist or expert: highly perceptive esp. in a
specialized or exclusive field," as in "a knowing collector of rare
books," but also as "that indicates and is marked by awareness of and
careful conformity to what is chic and currently in style" (synonym:
SMART) and also as "marked by sophistication or snobbishness"--for which
_Webster's Third International_ cites Sir Herbert Read, "a distasteful
air of pretentious smartness, of being altogether too knowing."
_Webster's Third International_ also defines "knowing," moreover, as
"that reflects or is designed to indicate possession of confidential,
secret, or otherwise exclusive inside knowledge or information," as in
Louis Bromfield's "poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look."
Similarly, _Webster's_ defines it as"that indicates an insight or
awareness not generally shared," as in William Makepeace Thackeray's
"the two young officers exchanged knowing glances."
My own understanding of "knowing" and "knowingness" has
always been in the senses of "awareness of and careful conformity to
what is chic and currently in style,""marked by sophistication or
snobbishness,""a distasteful air of pretentious smartness, of being
altogether too knowing," and "possession of confidential, secret, or
otherwise exclusive inside knowledge or information." I see
"knowingness," in the sense I see it as applying to social and political
attitudes, as an attitude somewhat related to both cynicism and
"machismo" though not quite identical to them. It's an attitude or
mind-set hinted at though not explicitly described in the discussion I
posted a few years ago on the four levels of American talk about Jews
from David Riesman's 1951 _Commentary_ article on "The 'militant' Fight
Against Anti-Semitism," reprinted in his 1954 book _Individualism
Reconsidered and Other Essays_ [David Riesman, "The 'Militant' Fight
Against Anti-Semitism," from _Commentary_, 11:11-19 (1951), on
pp.139-152, David Riesman, _Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays_
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1954), pp. 145-147]
In his article, Riesman began with the thoughtful "top
level" of the "intellectual and artistic circles, of Jews and non-Jews,
where there is at the same time curiosity and matter-of-factness about
things Jewish." (David Riesman, "The 'Militant' Fight Against
Anti-Semitism," _Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays_ , p.
145). He then discussed the "politically correct (as we would now say)
philo-Semitic "piety" of his "second level" of American talk about the
Jews, and the "tough" pose of the "terribly dashing and bold and
'militant'." rebels against such "piety." Riesman's "second level" was
that of "the liberal middle class, both Jewish and non-Jewish," the
"class" responsible for public service advertisements and posters about
"brotherhood." Its "chief quality" was "a kind of dreary piety, filled
with platitudes about unity, amity, democracy, and so on." In "obedient
circles" in churches, schools, and voluntary and civic associations, it
tended "to stultify observation and thought." On the other hand, it also
enabled "those rebellious souls who refuse to subscribe to it" to"
appear as terribly dashing and bold and 'militant'" with a pose of
"toughness" (Riesman, pp. 145-146).
Riesman also described (pp. 146-147) an openly bigoted
"fourth level"of discourse, located "primarily in the working class,
but with ramifications in the lower-middle-class," among people with
"little opportunity to express their own attitudes except through
conversation--on the workbench, in the bar, on the street corner." The
"walls of toilets" were their main or only "medium of publication."
These "toilet walls," Riesman felt, were "the distorted reflection
of--and rebellion against--middle-class piety in respect to the two
things, race and sex, that so many in America find both indecent and
alluring." If this level was "reached at all by the propaganda of the
dreary pietists," Riesman feared, the "principal effect" might only be
"to make Jews even more mysterious than before--and official culture
more mendacious and mealy-mouthed." Working-class anti-Semitism was
"very strong indeed," Riesman judged from "recent" (as of 1951) studies
of prejudice sponsored by the Scientific Department of the American
Jewish Committee. "Whether much of it is anti-Semitism that yearns for
action or just big talk and griping, " Riesman did not profess to know.
The third of Riesman's four levels, by the way, was what he called (p.
146) the "Catskill-Broadway plane" of "a form of culture spread
throughout America by the press, film, and radio." It began, he thought,
with _Abie's Irish Rose_, followed more recently by Danny Kaye, the
Goldbergs, Eddie Cantor, Billy Rose, Milton Berle, and Walter Winchell,
continually "exploit[ing] aspects of Jewish life and Jewish character"
in American popular entertainment.
Riesman, I think, here put his finger on, without quite
explicitly naming or describing, an important factor in much discussion
of contentious, emotion-charged social and political issues. It's the
factor I call "knowingness," after the definitions of "knowing" and
"knowingness" I've quoted from _Webster's_, for lack of any better or
more "scientific" name. I use it in the senses given by _Webster's_ of
"awareness of and careful conformity to what is chic and currently in
style,""marked by sophistication or snobbishness,""a distasteful air of
pretentious smartness, of being altogether too knowing,"and "possession
of confidential, secret, or otherwise exclusive inside knowledge or
information." It is a quality or attitude that I've learned to isolate
as a definite factor over the years because I myself seem to be a bit
"tone-deaf," "color-blind," or "developmentally challenged" with respect
to it, and have been ridiculed, teased, rebuked, and "put down" all my
life for my own lack of it by those who seem to revel in flaunting it
and considering me somehow defective or "out of it" for lacking it! It's
something I've learned to identify, isolate, and name because, quite
frankly, I personally consider it very much a piece of "enemy culture."
If I myself had not been mercilessly "put down" all my life because of
my own lack of it, I might have never even learned to notice it as a
"problem." I myself certainly consider it very much a "distasteful air"!
"Knowingness," as I call it, is a cocksure, supercilious
attitude of "knowing the score" by virtue of one's "hard-knocks"
experience, wide travels, or "familiarity with men and things," in
scornful dismissive opposition to "book-learning," "theory," and
"idealism." It is fundamentally anti-intellectual, and anti-idealistic.
It scornfully dismisses any humane insights gained from one's reading in
the literary, philosophic, and ethical traditions and historical,
sociological, and scientific discourses of the Western world. The
eminent English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), himself
one of the most erudite, bookish, speculative, and metaphysical highbrow
intellectuals of the 20th century, expressed the "knowingness" critique
of "book-larnin'" and "theory" in an exceptionally gentle, genial, and
amicable fashion in his discussion of "Youth" in Chapter XX, "Peace," of
_Adventures of Ideas_ (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 370:
<<The short-sightedness of youth matches the scantiness of
its experience. The issues of its action are beyond its ken~perhaps with
literature supplying a delusory sense of knowledge. Thus generosity and
cruelty are equally natural, by reason of the fact that their full
effects lie beyond conscious anticipation.
<<All this is the veriest commonplace in the
characterization of Youth. Nor does the modern wealth of social
literature in any fundamental way alter the case. The reason for its
statement here is to note that these features of character belong to all
animals at all ages, including human beings at every stage of their
lives. The differences only lie in relative proportions. Also the
success of language in conveying information is vastly over-rated,
especially in learned circles. Not only is language highly elliptical,
but also nothing can supply the defect of first-hand experience of types
cognate to the things explicitly mentioned. The general truth of Hume's
doctrine as to the necessity of first-hand impressions is inexorable.>>
Typically, however, "knowingness" with its deprecation of
"literature" and "language" is expressed in a far more harshly
contemptuous or archly dismissive tone than Whitehead's, far less
amicable and sweetly-reasonable than that philosopher's. Typically,
"knowingness" revels in either an "Archie Bunkerish," "Joe Six-Pack"
barroom-proletarian working-class or an arch, precious drawing-room
upper-middle-class or pseudo-aristocratic endorsement of traditional
national, ethnic, and religious stereotypes. It sanctifies a snide,
arch, superior, "oh, don't be so naïve and sentimental!," "isn't your
virtuous well-meaning political correctness so dull and boring?," "we
know better, don't we?" put-down of humane, inclusive, peaceful,
anti-racist ideals, whether Judaeo-Christian, secular, Muslim, Hindu, or
Buddhist. Ultimately, "knowingness" is a fundamental rejection alike of
Christian and Jewish moral ideals, American democratic ideals, and
Enlightenment & post-Enlightenment liberal, democratic-socialist, and
"secular humanist" ideals.
As I've said, "knowingness" has both working-class and
upper-class, both barroom and drawing-room, both "Joe Six-Pack" and
country-club wings. However, in both its "sports-bar" and its
"debutante-ball" wings, among both its "trailer-park" and its "preppie"
devotees, it expresses a fear and resentment alike of religion and
intellect, of spirit and reason. It excuses and blesses the harassment
and put-down of gentle, un-"macho" souls, of so-called "geeks" and
"nerds," of the "clumsy, awkward kids with glasses," of the serious
grade-school, high-school, or college students, of the dreamers and
idealists. It ratifies and sanctifies the harassment, ridicule, and
put-down of the (allegedly) "impractical," "dreamy," "idealistic," or
"ivory-tower" types by their more "practical," "real-world,"
"brass-tacks," "feet on the ground," "hard knocks" classmates,
neighbors, and colleagues. I can confidently speak here from first-hand
"hard-knocks" experience from my own childhood and school days, as well
as from many years of working in a rather anti-intellectual library
where I was continually "put down" as a head-in-the-clouds scholarly
bookworm who read eight languages but had trouble (and totally hated!)
unjamming the copy machine or straightening tangled microfilm rolls!
"Knowingness," ultimately, is a tragic by-product of the
social, economic, and cultural changes of the last few centuries. The
explosive growth of scientific, scholarly, and historical knowledge, the
development of very specialized advanced technologies, the growth and
elaboration of formal elementary, secondary, and higher education, and
the industrial capitalist distinction of "workers" and "bourgeoisie"
have all lead to a widespread compensatory "backlash" distrust and
resentment of formal education, "book-learning," and "official" idealism
by people from all social classes who feel "left out" or "left behind."
The "left out" and "left behind" include the poor and the working
classes, and literary humanists and "country club" types "left behind"
by scientists, sociologists, and social reformers. They include
old-fashioned parents both rich and poor "left behind" by their children
exposed in school and college to evolution, "secular humanism,"
religious tolerance, "politically correct" ethnic & racial amity and
"brotherhood," "permissive" sexual mores, and inter-ethnic dating.
Parents feel "left out" and "left behind" when their children come home
from school with a boy-friend or girl-friend from a "wrong" ethnic or
religious background, and start "talking back" to their dinner-table
grumblings about the Blacks, Jews, gays,"draft-dodgers," or"peaceniks."
All such people learn to resent and distrust "book-learning,"
scholarship, history, science, humane liberal idealism, religious and
ethnic tolerance, and formal thought (as opposed to cynical folkish
"saws" of the "you can't fight city hall," "nothing is sure but death
and taxes," "boys will be boys" type) as "the enemy" and "the Devil."
"Knowingness" is the left-behinds' panicky refuge against a
dizzily changing modern world, where even their own children and even
the priests, pastors, or bishops of their own churches seem to be
abandoning the old prejudices and the old certainties. It is the
defensive last hurrah of both the barroom and the drawing-room, of both
the trailer-camp and the country-club, against the heresies and
skepticisms of the classroom, the library, the pulpit, and the
picket-line. It is an attempt to hold on to the old prejudices, whether
proletarian or preppie, by claiming that through one's "hard knocks"
experience or wide travels one has learned inconvenient, unpleasant,
"politically incorrect" facts about various groups of people that
academics, the "respectable" media, and starry-eyed "why can't all the
world's children dance together" idealists have ignored or covered up.
It's a way to be dismissively "one up" against people who "only" have
academic or scholarly knowledge but supposedly lack "street smarts" or
drawing-room "man of the world" savoir-faire. It's a way of asserting
that knowledge outside formal academic education and scholarly discourse
does have a value, after all. About that last point, by the way, I'd say
that non-academic knowledge can indeed have real value and validity--but
that a grumbling or airy dismissal of formal knowledge is not the right
way to assert it!
Peace,
T. Peter <tpeterpark at erols.com>
David Riesman, "The 'Militant' Fight Against Anti-Semitism," from
_Commentary_, 11:11-19 (1951), pp.139-152, reprinted in David Riesman,
_Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays_ (Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press, 1954), pp. 145-147:
At present we may distinguish four levels of talk about Jews
in America, four levels that hardly mix or meet. At the top level are
the intellectual and artistic circles, of Jews and non-Jews, where there
is at the same time curiosity and matter-of-factness about things
Jewish. The pages of _Commentary_ are an excellent illustration of this
kind of discussion. There one finds reporting on Jewish life without a
fearful concern for public relations; philosophic and sociological
debate about what, if anything, it means to be a Jew; and, in the
department "From the American Scene," occasional pictures of the
fabulously interesting, rich, and varied life of Jews in America. On
this level, one can also find literature that is not a tract against
anti-Semitism but an exploration of Jewish consciousness and
unconsciousness; there comes to mind Saul Bellow's fine novel, _The Victim_.
Our second level of discussion is the liberal middle class,
both Jewish and non-Jewish, the class responsible for putting car cards
about brotherhood in the New York subways. A friend of mine claims to
have heard a radio jingle over a New York station, "He's no Jew, he's
like you." I suspect him of satire. But if it didn't actually happen it
might well have, given the notion of "defense" prevailing in many
advertising minds. It is here that a mythical world is constructed in
which Negroes and whites, Jews and non-Jews--and, for that matter, men
and women, are "really" alike; such differences as there still are,
being expected to wither away like the Marxist state. On this level Jews
fail to see that it is their very difference which may be both
worthwhile and appealing. This insistence on denying differences, or on
seeking to eradicate them, identifies "American" with
"Americanization"--and insists that for people to be treated as equals
they must have more than their humanity in common.
The chief quality I sense in discussion about Jews on this
second level is piety, a kind of dreary piety, filled with platitudes
about unity, amity, democracy, and so on. This piety, it seems to me, as
it spreads throughout "official" culture, throughout our churches,
schools, and [pp. 145/146] many voluntary associations, has two
consequences. On the one hand, in the obedient circles it tends to
stultify observation and thought. On the other hand, it enables those
rebellious souls who refuse to subscribe to it to appear as terribly
dashing and bold and "militant." The violent anti-Semites and those Jews
who throw eggs at Bevin [Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), British Labour
politician, Clement Attlee's Foreign Secretary 1945-1950, unsuccessful
advocate in 1947-1948 of a federal Jewish-Arab nation rejected by both
Jewish and Arab zealots--TPP], both achieve an easy victory for their
image of the Jew over the official picture. Just this appearance of
toughness is, I think, one of the great attractions of the Chicago
_Tribune_ and even more of the New York _Daily News_: such organs appear
to monopolize daring and impiety. [In more recent times, this tough,
"piety"-free, "terribly dashing and bold and 'militant,'" "politically
incorrect" attitude has been expressed by supermarket tabloids, Rush
Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, among
others, in general politics and culture, though they HAVEN'T discussed
the "Jewish question" aside from automatic support for Israel--TPP] The
only way to combat this is by open and honest discussion about Jews, to
make people aware that Jews are real, and to make an effort to talk
about them as they are.
The third level of discourse about Jews is on what we might
call the Catskill-Broadway plane, in which there thrives a form of
culture spread throughout America by the press, film, and radio. Perhaps
we find its beginnings in _Abie's Irish Rose_. Danny Kaye, the
Goldbergs, Eddie Cantor, Billy Rose--day by day and night after night
they exploit aspects of Jewish life and Jewish character. [since 1951
when Riesman wrote the essay, we could add to this list Sam Levinson,
Harry Golden, Lenny Bruce, _Exodus_, _Fiddler on the Roof_, Woody Allen,
Barbra Streisand, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.--TPP] Many non-Jewish comedians
play the same circuit; perhaps they have Jewish gag-writers. I wish I
knew what Billy Rose's readers in Dubuque and Dallas, Charleston and
Seattle, have made of his accounts of life and love at Lindy's, and I
wish I knew what America makes of Milton Berle. Does this add to that
identification of Jews with big-city life which--as Arnold Rose has
observed--is so powerful an element in modern Anti-Semitism? Do the
lower-middle-class non-Jewish audiences of this Catskill culture have
personal contacts with Jews of their own and other social levels, or is
their only "contact" through these images of stage and screen? What is
the attitude of these audiences toward the Jewish comic or, for that
matter, the Jewish Winchell--are these performers patronized as
something exotic and foreign? Are they felt to be Jews at all? I expect
we would find a good deal of ambivalence, a mixture of emotions, both
towards the performer and the aspect of Jewish culture that he
symbolizes. The same listener, for instance, may both despise and be
fascinated by Winchell. I would like to know a lot more about this whole
area for the sake of the light it would shed on both the myths of the
Americans and the myths of and about the Jews.
The fourth level of discussion about Jews I would locate
primarily in the working class, but with ramifications in the
lower-middle-class. These people have little opportunity to express
their own attitudes except through conversation--on the workbench, in
the bar, on the street corner. The only medium of publication available
[pp. 146/147] is the walls of toilets. Even apart from the question of
interstate commerce, group-libel laws--such as those being pushed by the
Commission on Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress--can
hardly be effective here! These toilet walls, indeed, are the distorted
reflection of--and rebellion against--middle-class piety in respect to
the two things, race and sex, that so many in America find both indecent
and alluring. If this level is reached at all by the propaganda of the
dreary pietists, the principal effect might be only to make Jews even
more mysterious than before--and official culture more mendacious and
mealy-mouthed. Working-class anti-Semitism is very strong indeed, if I
may judge from recent studies of prejudice conducted under the auspices
of the Scientific Department of the American Jewish Committee [Theodor
W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik et al., _The Authoritarian Personality_
(New York: American Jewish Committee/Harper & Row, 1950)]. Whether much
of it is anti-Semitism that yearns for action or just big talk and
griping, I do not know....
--
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
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