Jonah Goldberg and thresholds of knowledge

Today, Jonah Goldberg at The Corner mentions that a recent survey shows that “Half of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz”. Before we tut-tut about that too much, it probably wouldn’t hurt to open our eyes and get a good, hard look at reality. Those of us with inquisitive or educated minds get all upset when we see surveys that show that a lot of people do not know about something we think they should. That’s valiant, in and of itself, because we want all people to share in the knowledge we have. There have been times in human history where those who had knowledge knew that knowledge meant power, and did not encourage the accumulation of knowledge amongst the masses. Today we demand that everyone have a certain base level of knowledge. As much as the world has changed, however, it still has stayed a little bit the same. There are a good many people who only care, or who only can care, about the details of day to day life. Their world is this moment and the next. They do not invest much of their time or energies into matters of importance to the masses, they trust others to do that for them. They invest their time and energies into the minutiae of daily life, either because they choose to or because life requires that of them.

Our Founding Fathers understood that there will always be this class of people who do not have voluminous knowledge on matters of importance to humanity. This is in part why many of them feared direct, pure, free for all democracy, and why they supported a representative system so strongly. They trusted that the people could choose a representative who did have a lot of knowledge, and who would look out for their interests, to a point (their system actually had more layers for the choice of representatives than our system today does). Today we have somewhat forgotten this, and we expect the impossible, that everyone have the burning desire and the capability to learn.

Now, having said that, I’m going to contradict myself a bit. It is most desirable that a society has as large an educated populace as possible. Over time, the bar for that term “educated populace” gets higher, and that too is good for a society. At one time, the ability to read was the standard for whether you were educated or not. Now it is, among other things, whether you know what Auschwitz is. It is in our best interest for all us that we have as large of a percentage of people who know basic history as possible, and high expectations like those of Goldberg are good things to pull societies collective education forward. Education and knowledge are the gears that drive humanity forward, and the better our gears, the more quickly we can progress. I applaud Jonah for his high expectations, I just don’t think this is a matter worthy of depression over. He does concede that many more people are aware of the Holocaust, and it is from the Holocaust that we learn the biggest lesson. While as a society some of the details of the Holocaust may have become fuzzy in the last 60 years, especially for younger people, it is the larger lesson that is important that we hold onto and spread to new generations.