[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] Knowingness

[Terry W. Colvin]

            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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