Collateral Acquisition

The acquisition of knowledge is work. It is a quest to find out what is true, what is real, what actually happened, and what all that means. Information can be wrapped in many disguises. It can be put forward as truth when it is just an opinion, defended vigorously when it is nothing more than faith-based belief, and presented in very official form when it is nothing more than conjecture and speculation. Information is given but knowledge is acquired.

Early in the educational journey, children are given the tools of learning. The basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught and honed so that they can begin to understand theories and concepts. As children become young adults and progress up the ladder of education the teachers are replaced by professors and the interactive dialogue becomes more transactional. Professors lecture and students take notes, read and discuss the theories put forth in the class. Sometime later the mentored are then asked to regurgitate the information that the professor imparted to them. In this transaction those who are able to mimic the professor words the best will get the highest grades. The strange thing is that years later, when asked, most people remember very little of the substance of their education. The reason is simple; the students were given information but for the most part they did not acquire knowledge. I know that most of the knowledge I now possess was acquired conjunctively while being informed in classrooms and lecture halls and abstractly while navigating life.

My first attempts at research involved spelling. When I was a child, in order to find the correct spelling of a word I had to look it up in a dictionary. Sometimes that would be easy if the word was spelled as it sounded and impossible without clues for words like xylophone or psychology. I was always dismayed by the concept of phonetics. At times being told to sound out words to spell them seemed like an evil trick. After all, shouldn’t the word “phonics” start with an “f”? However, invariably in my search for the spelling of a particular word I would discover other words and their meanings. The search not only rendered the answer to my original inquiry but yielded other forms of knowledge. To this day I am a terrible speller but the search for the right spelling of words did wonders for my vocabulary.

As I got older research assignments were topic driven. The assignments all started with the encyclopedia. The research would once again, as with the dictionary, render ancillary discoveries and knowledge. I recall a time while doing a report that had something to do with butterflies stumbling across the architectural concept of a buttress. I was surprised to find that there was such a thing as a flying buttress. As I read further, I learned what a buttress was and that, unlike butterflies, the flying kind did not actually fly. Knowledge was gained while in search of an unrelated specific answer.

My last foray into the academic world was to attend Law School.  The first time I walked into the law library I was overwhelmed by the number of books dedicated to the law. It was quite intimidating to think of all the knowledge in the building and the sheer gravity of the task to find a particular answer regarding a very specific legal issue. However, I soon found out that a high percentage of the information in all those books was obsolete and for the most part useless. Finding answers that were applicable to an issue and valid in the moment was more of a treasure hunt than a methodical search. And in the end, all of the conclusions and theories that formed precedence, the basis of the law, had to be seriously vetted. In other words, just because you read it in one of those big leather-bound books did not guarantee that it was accurate in the moment. As students we were required to acquire the knowledge from the mountains of given information. It was the work itself that was the basis of knowledge gain not the answer found.

Today, we have the internet which places answers at one’s fingertips; no one could rationally argue that the it is inherently bad. However, in many instances the information put forth with a polished look is based on irrational conspiracy theories and the lies that support them. People rely on this fast source of answers to form opinions and make decisions. But they bypass the journey to the true acquiring of knowledge and this is a dangerous road for it leaves one open to the manipulation of others while robbing them of collateral intellectual discovery.

It is not my assertion that we should all retreat to the library and manually do research. The internet provides a multitude of ways to learn new things and share ideas. I am not anti-technology but as it removes work the internet also severely limits the possibility of unforeseen discovery. If we all just search on the computer for things we want or in some cases that which only supports what we initially believe then we are headed for a world of unresolvable discourse based on alternative facts. This is how people come to believe that the Holocaust never happened, that elections were stolen, and that the Earth is actually flat. Simply put the internet is a dispensary of boundless and instantaneous information not a direct portal to knowledge. It takes a questioning mind and an inquisitive nature to really find out the truth. If the journey to knowledge is taken with honesty and diligence as a guide instead of a quick search for instant gratification then the truth will be unveiled. It is then and only then that one can know as with the butterfly and the flying buttress what flies and what doesn’t.