NOVEMBER 29, 2019 – When I first heard Art Garfunkel’s song, “(What a) Wonderful World,” I thought the lyrics were kind of dumb. Now that the aging process has introduced me to my own (multiple forms of) dumbness, I realize that in a back-handed, unintentional way, the song serves as a kind of paean to the liberal arts. I think the smartest line of the whole song is drawn from the philosophy department: “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’ at all.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about that line. In this paradoxical age in which facts and fakery appear in equal proportions and ignorance and knowledge abound in offsetting quantities, I’m tempted to cry out the lyrics to “(What a) Wonderful World.”
As “Don’t know nothin’ . . .” reverberates inside my skull, I do wonder, “What do I know, and what do I need to know?” As I think about this two-part question, it becomes all too complicated. I mean, for starters, how do I vet my own knowledge for accuracy, materiality, inclusivity?
Then there’s the “black hole” of knowledge, described best by Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense in the Ford Administration from 1975 to 1977 and under Bush W. from 2001 to 2006. In a speech in 2002 he famously said, “But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” He was talking about the (fabricated?) crisis of the day—weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein (remember him?), strongman of Iraq. But when I orbit that black hole, as it were, I think about everything from the economy to the state of the world in 2027 to the laws of physics in any one of multiple alternative universes beyond our own.
And at the end of the analysis, I have no clue as to how I identify fully “what I know.”
Now let’s shift to what I need to know. In some contexts this is easy. To get myself to work by bus, I need to know (a) the closest bus route from home to office; (b) the bus fare; (c) the bus schedule; (d) my current state of readiness; and (e) the time it will take me to get myself from my current state of readiness to the bus stop. A more challenging proposition is what information do I need to gather, organize, and act upon in order to add sufficient credits to the proverbial till so that a portion can be transferred in adequate quantities to third party tills to ensure that my wife and I will remain warm, dry, and well fed and supplied with creature comforts in quantities necessary and desirable for people of our age, station, and custom?
Maybe the better question is, “Given the current Age of Information Chaos, what do I need to know in order to express a fact-based, objective, and reasonable opinion about . . . oh, let me pick a topic . . . Okay! Got one: national politics?”
“Don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’ at all!”
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
