If you could take a pill that would make you 10 percent stupider but would make you appear 20 percent smarter, would you take it? Is the ability to pretend you know something more valuable than your ability to actually know it? That's the question posed by Chuck Klosterman in his last book.
It seems to me that the answer is a resounding yes. It's not about what you know-it's about what people think you know.
I first realized how overwhelming this phenomenon was at Duke's Career Fair (loyal readers will remember that I have already covered this in my previous column). But the event is not really an accurate representation of Duke life because attendants looking for a job only had a small window of time to make an impression. By the same token, the intellectual posturing that goes on in classes is understandable, if not always excusable. But it's not just superiors and potential employers whom we try to impress with big words and pretentious pronouncements-we do it to each other too.
In the wake of last month's economic implosion, for example, I must have overheard more than 10 amateur analyses of the banking crisis. Most often it was between students. It's generally considered a good thing to have students discussing current events, but that's based on the assumption that those conversations involve the free exchange of real ideas.
The debates I hear, however, are almost never substantive, and typically boil down to broad abstractions and generalizations. Someone says something meaningless like, "The market for derivatives was negatively impacted by the high price of oil," and nobody forces him to defend that claim. This kind of statement can never really be "wrong," because it's so vague and malleable, but it can also never be "right" for these same reasons. Nobody really cares if the statement is right or wrong, though, because you have successfully proved that you know how to use "derivatives" in a sentence and that you know gas is really expensive.
Replace the economy with the presidential election, or foreign affairs or the last reading you did for class. The subjects change but the formula remains the same: Connect a few buzzwords together with some fancy language, but be evasive enough to avoid being pinned down to a specific idea. We are all caught between constantly trying to impress each other and the deathly fear of being wrong, so we settle for a stream of worthless prattle.
It is easy and common to blame this on the level of Duke's intellectual discourse-to say something about the pre-professional atmosphere and "effortless perfection" and maybe toss some invectives at the Greek scene. The problem with this oversimplification is that it ignores how widespread the issue really is.
Everywhere I look-politics, the business world, academia, sports journalism-it seems to me that the most valuable asset you can have is the ability to equivocate and hedge, to use a lot of words to say nothing. In last week's vice presidential debate the moderator actually told the candidates, "Let's try to avoid nuance." The state of discourse at Duke is not really markedly different from the state of discourse in any other arena of life-if anything, Duke students have a remarkable ability to fit into the real world.
If, for one reason or another, you don't want to participate in this kind of real world-a world where style is valued over substance and intellectual frauds rule-then the only conceivable solution is to abstain.
First of all, start calling people out. If you make people back their points up, eventually you will poke a few holes in the pseudo-intellectual armor they've created. Secondly, don't do it yourself. It's incredibly easy, and tempting, to impress people with big words. But once you start, it's hard to stop. Trying to impress a professor or future employer with your vocabulary is just a short, slippery slope away from forgetting how to have a real conversation. It may be difficult to construct a cogent argument, and it may mean that, at times, you turn out to be wrong, but it's the only way to have a meaningful discussion.
If you can't do that, you might as well swallow the pill.
John Schneider is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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