What Do You Know?

About halfway through last spring, I began to wonder if my students’ brains operated as repositories of knowledge in the same way mine did. I’d just demonstrated a form of autobiography for them: how I began in childhood to acquire an understanding of the artistic tradition I work in. Smart creative artists all, they had a hard time doing the same. Part of that has got to be the way the culture has fragmented since I was a child. How can you follow any artistic tradition through the endlessly branching and intersecting lines of the post-post-modern world? But I did wonder if part of it was how they’re storing knowledge, how we’re storing knowledge. These days we have outsourced knowledge storage to the devices in our hands. Why keep knowledge in your head if infinite amounts of it are there at your fingertips?

The answer is that knowledge is not about what you can store; it’s about what you can build. Knowledge is constructed by putting facts in relation to each other. We come to understand the world by testing and weighing the significance of the relations we discover. And for that, you need to store stuff in your head where it can keep forming and reforming those significant relations.

So one way knowledge is now being attacked is by the flood of information that poses as knowledge but that doesn’t require any of the slow careful frustrating work of actually building an understanding. Taking full advantage of that is a political movement determined to keep us from putting things in relation.

There may be a difference between how that movement’s founder and how his followers attack knowledge. Trump is, in philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s term, a bullshitter. The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is “an indifference to how things really are.” While some of his followers lie about or reject how things really are, Trump doesn’t care. In Trump I, he was restrained by people for whom knowledge mattered. For this go-round, he has surrounded himself with people who either have contempt for knowledge or angrily fear it.

The most spectacular example of the first category was Elon Musk and his DOGE team. Musk and a bunch of random twenty-somethings charged into the federal government, broke a lot of stuff, and then retreated in boredom and frustration, leaving disrupted lives and a lot of dead African children in their wake. What made the spectacle dizzying was the sense that these people didn’t think they needed to know anything. What was there to know?

A good example of the angry fear of knowledge might be the guy Trump plucked from Fox News, where the house tone is angry fear, to run the Department of Defense. I don’t know much about Pete Hegseth, though he strikes me as having the handsome man’s pugnacious anxiety that he’s not being taken as seriously as his looks and physique entitle him to be. At the DoD podium, he speaks with the manic certainty of a man afraid someone’s going to dispute him. Sartre captured the type in Anti-Semite and Jew: “We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation.”

Around the time Hegseth was nominated, Jonathan Chait wrote an analysis in *The Atlantic* of the three books Hegseth published in four years (because lack of knowledge never stopped anyone from writing a book). In Chait’s account, Hegseth comes across as an unhinged conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theories are, of course, the opposite of knowledge, ditching Sartre’s “thing of indefinite approximation” in favor of bonfires of fantasy that can be fed with facts ripped free from relation, the better to make them burn.

We have become a nation of unhinged conspiracy theorists, unwilling to put facts into any relations that don’t flatter our own fears and anger. If Hegseth’s example is any guide, much of this refusal of knowledge comes from ego-threat. In Sartre’s words, “But there are people who are attracted to the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them?”

Even Musk’s contempt for knowledge is essentially narcissistic. It’s contempt for other people’s knowledge. One of the scarier aspects of the knowledge crisis is the rise of rich and powerful men who think their ability to make cool digital stuff gives them special insight into the analog world.

Watching the spectacle from a distance, it’s hard to know how much of what we’re seeing is cynical mendacity and how much is bone-headed egoism. But the crisis of knowledge is real. We’re seeing what happens when the decisions that affect our lives are not based in knowledge, but made in rebellion against it, as if knowledge were just another form of constraint to be shaken off.

Which brings me back to my students who have come of age in the crisis and will live with its consequences. I don’t know what to do for them except to continue to do what we’ve always done, what any decent college education needs to do: to keep giving them opportunities to create knowledge, which we might define as facts put in correct relation. They will need to understand that those correct relations aren’t arrived at except through difficult and confusing work, and even then they’re only kinda sorta correct. And you’ll never be able to do even that much if you’re not willing to challenge what you know — and yourself. Knowledge is a threat — and the only thing that will save them.

Summer 2025