Here's an article I wrote that isn't going to be published now due to a disagreement over the definition of the term 'dilettante'. Ah, the complex intellectual tugs of war that characterize the writer's life. What can you do, eh? (Kick a chair, laugh, move on would be my advice.)
All the gold/glitter stuff is in there because the theme of the issue was "All that Glitters is/not Gold". (Actually, the original saying, taken from Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice, is "all that
glisters is not gold", if anyone's interested.)
I was considering submitting it elsewhere but it was written with that particular theme in mind, so I don't feel it would work in another publication. So, lucky people,
you get it.
***
"There is no wealth like knowledge", declared Ali ibn Abi Talib, the successor to the prophet Muhammed. The message here is unmistakable: knowledge is the ultimate of riches, something so valuable that one could, perhaps, liken it to gold. A person who is learned is often referred to as "the fount of all knowledge", and similarly, it's easy to imagine that fount as being golden, precious.
We all want to convey the impression that we are knowledgeable. Convey the impression is the key phrase here, for how many subjects could we say we are truly, genuinely expert in? In many cases, our so-called knowledge is just so much surface glitter attempting to convince others that it is in fact gold; that it is actual knowledge.
There is a name for having a superficial interest in a subject or affecting knowledge of it: dilettantism. For the purposes of this article, I wanted to refresh the concept and etymology of dilettantism in my own mind, so I turned to the number one tool of the dilettante – Wikipedia, of course.
Please don't judge me too harshly. In a culture in which we are expected to be "across" so many different things, right now, the internet is our handiest source of information – and it has the power to make unwitting dilettantes of us all.
In fact, the internet is possibly the greatest manifestation and perpetuator of dilettantism there is. We go to it to discover new information, we take a second to ingest this information, then we quickly re-use it for our own ends. The same process occurs again and again with a range of different topics. The information we are gleaning is for the most part in highly digestible (read: superficial) form, and wherever it goes, it tends to stay in this form. This phenomenon almost has the properties of a meme, albeit one of which the hallmark is exact replication rather than mutation.
For the regular internet user, the desire for new information can quickly turn into obsession. Then, at various junctures, our rampant dilettantism escapes from the suffocating screen-brain vortex into the 'real' world of social interaction, where being seen as 'onto it' confers status and respect.
In the social sphere, dilettantism comes to serve a purpose as a kind of cultural pheromone. Namecheck particular aspects of culture when you are out, and you will attract the "right" kind of person. It doesn't really matter if neither party can elaborate on the topic at hand: you have established that you are both dealing in the same cultural currency; the appropriate reference points are there. If this sounds vaguely competitive, well, it is. Nobody wants to be left behind, left out of the great namechecking game.
So what becomes of real knowledge? Does it still have a place in a world where many of us are apparently content to just skim the surface? Books are the traditional repository of true knowledge, but even they seem to have been affected by the culture of dilettantism. Publisher Orion has recently released a series of "cut down classics" – truncated versions of classic novels like
Moby Dick and
Anna Karenina. As one disgusted viewer of the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club said on the ABC website, it seems that "the idea is to help poseurs to fake erudition".
While such phenomena are only occurring in pockets of the publishing world, they still suggest a general shift in the priorities of the populace, and the top priority seems to be to get in and get out again just as quickly when it comes to knowledge. The desire to explore, to truly revel in knowledge, is disappearing.
So what is the answer? Do we take a stand, take some time to go away and explore one or two subjects in depth? The thing is, if no-one else is willing to take the time, you probably can't afford to either. Because when you come back with your new found, real knowledge, your precious nugget of gold, you'll most likely find that you've been left behind in the glittering wake of the dilettantism juggernaut.