Feeling smart

Acquiring a book is not the same thing as reading the book. That is obvious, of course. And yet, I confess, I sometimes feel smarter just by owning certain books.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, expressed this thought very well. "To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them," he said. "As it is, the act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their content."

Is this why people used to purchase encyclopedia sets? Did just owning the books make them feel smarter? Medical books, how-to books of all kinds and even cookbooks can have the same effect. We have the knowledge close at hand, so why do we have to actually know it? It's so close that we feel we already know it.

Much has been said about how little young adults of today, including college graduates, actually know about history or much of anything else.  They may know little, yet they feel intelligent and well-informed because they have so much information at their fingertips. The knowledge is on their phones if they ever need it, so why store it in their brains?

To some extent, this makes sense. None of us can possibly know everything. Nor does any of us need to know everything. Yet we cannot speak intelligently about anything important unless we take the time to actually learn something about what we are talking about. And unless we know something, we lack the curiosity to learn more. We are gullible, willing to believe whatever those we admire tell us.

College students protest Israel while knowing little of Israel's history. Or its geography. Or the intentions of the countries that surround it. Voters believe ridiculous things because they don't take the trouble to learn the truth.

Just having the knowledge on our phones or in books on our shelf doesn't make us authorities on anything.