Scholarrhea

As I struggle through learning the technical aspects of reading German -- the third language I've studied in the past 12 months -- it occurs to me that I'm fast reaching that point where the brain becomes so crowded with information that it actually knows less than it did before the acquisition of all that data.

To know something means -- well, wait: before I tell you what the word "know" means, I have to tell you that I went through three stages in my mind while preparing to write the definition: First, I figured I know what it means, so I began to fashion my own definition.

Then, my scholarly etiquette kicked in, and I remembered that I am not a definitive source on the meaning of the verb "to know," so I began to stand up and reach for my Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Finally, I realized I have access to numerous online dictionaries, so I went to the one that was top of mind, and retrieved these definitions, among others:

1.        to perceive or understand as fact or truth; to apprehend clearly and with certainty.

2.	to have established or fixed in the mind or memory: to know a poem by heart; Do you know the way to the park from here?

3.	to be cognizant or aware of: I know it.

4.	be acquainted with (a thing, place, person, etc.), as by sight, experience, or report: to know the mayor.

5.	to understand from experience or attainment (usually fol. by how before an infinitive): to know how to make gingerbread.

6.	to be able to distinguish, as one from another: to know right from wrong.

7.	Archaic. to have sexual intercourse with.

In order to retrieve this info, I didn't need to know anything, other than how to perform a very basic search (knowing how to spell the word "dictionary" helped). Having performed that basic task, I was provided with a wealth of information. I don't have to know it. I merely have to know how to get at it.

French was easier for me, because I had studied it (three decades ago) and I was able to dust off some dim memories: verb conjugation learned in language labs and from large textbooks with cracked spins and notes from girls scribbled in the margins. German, though, with its case system and its detachable prefixes and suffixes, its penchant for stringing words together to form new words, meant that learning vocabulary was going to be virtually impossible for my aging brain.

However, for the reading exam at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I'm told I'll be allowed to use an online dictionary. What a bonanza! All I have to do is be able to copy a word from the test into the online dictionary, and it will provide me with not only the definition of the word itself, but (perhaps) some variations of the word that may have very different meanings. This means I don't really have to learn the vocabulary, so much as I have to learn the rules of the grammatical road.

Welcome to the new knowledge.

Now that the Internet has become the most ubiquitous, most omnipotent research tool of all time, scholars (just to name one field of endeavor) are able to dig up much more information with much less work; they can access rare documents in far-flung libraries, all the scholarly research on those documents, footnotes and all; they can more easily create new interpretations, new articles, new online journals, new conferences; in short, they can bury us under heaps of new information, if not knowledge, as they forge their careers from the privacy of their darkened offices, between classes, before office hours, during exam periods, or while still in their robe and slippers at home.

Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but maybe not. The historian Y. H. Yerushalmi noted this in Zakhor, his great book on Jewish history and Jewish memory. Yerushalmi wrote, "the notion that everything in the past is worth knowing 'for its own sake' is a mythology of modern historians." And yet, there's hope: "Western man's discovery of history is not a mere interest in the past, which always existed,  but a new awareness, a perception of a fluid temporal dimension from which nothing is exempt."

Perhaps nothing is exempt because everything is available. And by everything being available, its value, and its meaning, have been radically altered.

If I pursue a PhD in the History of Judaism, at my relatively advanced age, I'll have to contend with a quantum shift in the nature of knowledge: everything is available, so everything is up for grabs. Everything is accessible, which makes everything open to interpretation. Radical interpretation is becoming conventional. Truly knowing something, in an area as subjective as the humanities, is not nearly as valuable as interpreting something in a new way.

The result, which Yerushalmi laments in his book, is that the profusion of scholarly texts (especially in the area of Jewish history) raises everything up for inspection but may actually obscure meaning, instead of enhancing it. "Delving into increasingly circumscribed yet complex areas of study," Yerushalmi wrote, "the contemporary Jewish historian often accomplishes prodigies of scholarship even as, concomitantly, he is inable to remove himself thereby from the 'large' issues that only the whole can pose with any urgency -- the uniqueness of Jewish historical experience (if not in a metaphysical than at least in an emporical sense); what was once called the "mystery" of Jewish survival through the ages; the relationship between Jews and Judaism (is all of history "Jewish"?); the value of Jewish history itself, not for the scholar, but for the Jewish people."

This is one small corner of the academy that is suffering, I fear, from the Scholarrhea virus: it spreads the inability to truly digest knowledge; the virus is spread through profuse explusion of information, and it has so far resisted all attempts at cure or vaccination.

--T.A.