Ego Boosters
In an e-mail exchange, the topic of Internet forums and discussion groups came up. It's part of the magic of the Net that it can bring together experts from the most diverse realms and put them, in effect, in the same room.
So why is the reality so often so bitter and personal? I've been involved over the years in a whole range of online discussions, from the free-for-all AOL Confederate battleflag messageboard to a very exclusive Listserv for people doing translations into Anglo-Saxon. The difference was that the AOL board was as noisy and dirty as a bus station, but you could still have a serious discussion there, and some of the most knowledgable people I've ever had the honor to communicate with were among the contributors.
The language Listserv, a classical history club, and a more exclusive Civil War e-mail forum I joined at various times, were quiet and studious. Yet they all dissolved sooner or later into bitter name-calling, tear-shedding personal feuds.
I don't think this is an Internet problem so much as a defect of people who have devoted themselves to being, in Raymond Chandler's phrease, "masters of arcane knowledge." We're used to being alone. We like that, in a way. We've purchased our learning at great cost -- sometimes in the investment in an education, but also in lives constrained by study, and the kind of insults that the world ties like tin cans to the tail of a bookworm.
We're not used to meeting others like us. At first, there's as rush of pleasure in it. Then there's the search for a hierarchy; and that's where it gets uncomfortable for some people. For them, the whole point of their devotion to learning was to be a hierarchy of one.
I'm trying to write this and avoid specific examples, because I don't take pleasure in poking sticks at sensitive people. But I wrote one book about a place that had its own self-appointed expert. Now dead, he was a single man in his 50s who lived in a small shed at the back of his mother's property, and he had filled it with books about his topic -- literally floor to ceiling. He had read them all, too, and he knew everything that was in them.
He didn't know anything that wasn't in them, however, or anything about people who don't want to live in a hive of books and not have children, so it might have been difficult for him to see his topic in a full-blooded way, despite all his learning. But that's a quibble. I aroused his ire by actually going into that topic on my own, without his guidance, and then writing a book about it that has become the standard work on it.
He could have written a book like that. He had 30 years or so to do it. But he didn't. And I can't help thinking that part of the reason he never did so was because the book would have replaced the man as "the source." He'd have been spending all his carefully accumulated ego-capital.
At any rate, he hated me from the point he discovered what I was doing, and never had anything good to say about my work (though he never found a serious flaw in it other than that he and I disagreed about how to spell something). And he's dead now and beyond libel or blame, so I intorduce him as an example.
There have been times, usually when researching a book, when I have immersed myself in study of something so intensely and for so long that I began to think of myself as the world's leading living expert on it. That sounds like braggadocio, but it never was anything but a trivial topic -- like I might say I'm the world's leading expert on left-handed slack-key guitar bluesmen in southwestern Ohio in the early 1950s. Or something.
But along the way I'd start to feel my ego investment in that knowledge, and the notion that my expertise was something that ought to be dispensed in a way that brings credit to me. That's the opposite of teaching. It treats knowledge, which is never the property of any one person, as a hoarde to be guarded. I peered over that abyss a time or two.
That's why I embrace the "sciolist" label. If you want to devote a large chunk of your libido to learning, and unless you're chasing a cure for cancer, much better to settle for knowing more than most about a lot of things. Don't put all your egos in one basket.
It can be more than just a "settling for." You'll have the delightful
experience of blundering into cross-references and mentally skipping stones across disciplines.
So why is the reality so often so bitter and personal? I've been involved over the years in a whole range of online discussions, from the free-for-all AOL Confederate battleflag messageboard to a very exclusive Listserv for people doing translations into Anglo-Saxon. The difference was that the AOL board was as noisy and dirty as a bus station, but you could still have a serious discussion there, and some of the most knowledgable people I've ever had the honor to communicate with were among the contributors.
The language Listserv, a classical history club, and a more exclusive Civil War e-mail forum I joined at various times, were quiet and studious. Yet they all dissolved sooner or later into bitter name-calling, tear-shedding personal feuds.
I don't think this is an Internet problem so much as a defect of people who have devoted themselves to being, in Raymond Chandler's phrease, "masters of arcane knowledge." We're used to being alone. We like that, in a way. We've purchased our learning at great cost -- sometimes in the investment in an education, but also in lives constrained by study, and the kind of insults that the world ties like tin cans to the tail of a bookworm.
We're not used to meeting others like us. At first, there's as rush of pleasure in it. Then there's the search for a hierarchy; and that's where it gets uncomfortable for some people. For them, the whole point of their devotion to learning was to be a hierarchy of one.
I'm trying to write this and avoid specific examples, because I don't take pleasure in poking sticks at sensitive people. But I wrote one book about a place that had its own self-appointed expert. Now dead, he was a single man in his 50s who lived in a small shed at the back of his mother's property, and he had filled it with books about his topic -- literally floor to ceiling. He had read them all, too, and he knew everything that was in them.
He didn't know anything that wasn't in them, however, or anything about people who don't want to live in a hive of books and not have children, so it might have been difficult for him to see his topic in a full-blooded way, despite all his learning. But that's a quibble. I aroused his ire by actually going into that topic on my own, without his guidance, and then writing a book about it that has become the standard work on it.
He could have written a book like that. He had 30 years or so to do it. But he didn't. And I can't help thinking that part of the reason he never did so was because the book would have replaced the man as "the source." He'd have been spending all his carefully accumulated ego-capital.
At any rate, he hated me from the point he discovered what I was doing, and never had anything good to say about my work (though he never found a serious flaw in it other than that he and I disagreed about how to spell something). And he's dead now and beyond libel or blame, so I intorduce him as an example.
There have been times, usually when researching a book, when I have immersed myself in study of something so intensely and for so long that I began to think of myself as the world's leading living expert on it. That sounds like braggadocio, but it never was anything but a trivial topic -- like I might say I'm the world's leading expert on left-handed slack-key guitar bluesmen in southwestern Ohio in the early 1950s. Or something.
But along the way I'd start to feel my ego investment in that knowledge, and the notion that my expertise was something that ought to be dispensed in a way that brings credit to me. That's the opposite of teaching. It treats knowledge, which is never the property of any one person, as a hoarde to be guarded. I peered over that abyss a time or two.
That's why I embrace the "sciolist" label. If you want to devote a large chunk of your libido to learning, and unless you're chasing a cure for cancer, much better to settle for knowing more than most about a lot of things. Don't put all your egos in one basket.
It can be more than just a "settling for." You'll have the delightful
experience of blundering into cross-references and mentally skipping stones across disciplines.
