What's it worth?

Recently I was kicking around some ideas with my daughter who is working on her literature dissertation on the 'lost generation'. One of the topics we were wrestling with was what does or does not belong to the field of literary inquiry or literary scholarship. A day or so later I found myself trying to help my nephew with an assignment from his undergraduate micro-economics course and was vainly coming to terms with the real purpose of the exercise. It was after this that I realized that in both cases, the actual subject of the discussion was the same: what does it mean?

Meaning is one of those words that is some people use too much and others too rarely. For some, it is an ambiguous, not-very-helpful category. For others it is the central issue in their lives. That's quite a range to cover, that's for sure, and is so often the case, the truth most likely lies somewhere in-between.

One point that came up in the literature discussion is that the discipline itself is not really concerned with whether the world is a better place or whether we, as individuals, are any smarter as a result of our pursuing it. Why an author writes something -- so the theory goes -- is irrelevant. All we have is the text in its historical context and we have to deal with what we find. The only meaning worth anything is the textual meaning, that is, the meaning we find in the words as they are strung together in that particular place at that particular time, and perhaps under those particular conditions. It is, let us say, a rather focused view of meaning.

In the economics discussion, it became clear that my nephew isn't studying business and economics so that the world will become a better place. In fact, it became clear to me that the search for and discovery of the so-called 'laws' of economic activity do not concern themselves for any given state of the world. We only have the slope of a given curve, that occurs at a particular place at a particular time, and under a certain set of conditions. The question of meaning ... what does that mean? ... is never even asked.

The philosopher Günther Anders once noted, ""Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made." It would seem that literary theorists and economists are ashamed to be only scholars, not scientists. The analogy is not as far-fetched as one might think. Science, in the sense of counting, measuring, and standardizing, but also in the sense of discovering, researching, and studying has become the non plus ultra of intellectual striving. Only what can be counted counts, is the watchword of the day. We find this approach at the heart of most academic disciplines these days, from astrophysics to accounting (whereby I am still having trouble conceiving of accounting as an academic discipline, but that's another story). The human and social sciences have made themselves no exception. They wanted to be sciences, too. The English language, however, keeps them out, for we have taken the word 'science' from its original meaning in Latin and made it into something that it isn't: a way of life. Science, as a term, derives from the Latin sciro, 'I know'. Yes, we've turned a way of knowing into a way of life. The only problem is, what do we know any more?

What we know ... and if you don't believe me, just ask those bright young guys who own Google ... is merely information. We have tons and tons of information, but do we have any knowledge? I can't help but think of Eliot's "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (from The Rock, 1934) T.S. was onto something there. (Well, actually, he was on to much, much more, for the line preceding those two is "Where is the Life we have lost in living?", and that puts it all into a much more existential context, but that, too, is a matter for another time). Information is just information. May 8 is just May 8, no more, no less. Even May 8, 1945 is just another day that slipped by in history unless I know (and here is where we come closer to the issue) that it was on that particular day that Germany surrendered ending World War II in Europe. It's still not knowledge, it's just a fact, but it is a piece of knowledge when we use it to make clear to another that terror and fascism of one type was bid halt by its successor. We need to think about what we mean when we use the term 'knowledge'. After all, it is more than just information, it is information in service of a purpose greater than itself.

That terror and fascism were bid halt is obviously a good thing. The part of that sentence about its successor will make some readers uneasy. And that's the very reason that it was added. This isn't a test, don't get me wrong, but while most of us agree on the first part of the statement, there are more than just a few who would accept the second part. Why is that? To me, it is clear: because it expresses a value that some folks may or may not agree is truly a value. The implication in the sentence is that that which followed wasn't all that much better than what came before. How could I possibly compare democracy with fascism? Well, I'm not really. When we consider that fascism is a type of economic organization, then its successor, that is, the system which we chose to replace it was either communism in the East bloc or capitalism in the West. The fact that those eastern economies called themselves democratic this or that has nothing to do with ignorance on their part, rather ignorance on ours, in the West. Democracy can be defined in any number of ways. There is no one, accepted, valid definition of what the term may mean. There are variations on the others (fascism, capitalism and communism), to be sure, but the span of variation is much smaller.

My point is that it is only now that we find ourselves in the sphere of 'knowledge'. Up until now, everything was just information, and it was all stuff that is more or less 'who cares'. The Soviet Union was communist. The United States was capitalist. The fascists had been defeated so we imposed our respective form of economic organization upon the losers (capitalism in West Germany, and communism in East Germany). That is as far as information gets us. The real question is, however, what difference does it make. In reality, not very much at all. For what we have are merely facts. Pure, simple, objective, indisputable, non-arguable facts. When we move to the next level, if you will, to knowledge, we start entering the realm of meaning, the realm where subtle, but important differences are important. Some think communism was a good thing. Some think capitalism is the best thing. In both cases, however, it is a value (judgment) that we have placed upon the fact that makes all the difference. In other words, when it comes to knowledge, values matter.

And here we have the rub. Knowledge is never value-free. Facts are. Knowledge isn't. What makes the difference is the values we associate with what we know. And that brings us full circle to science once again. Science and our modern worldview would like us to think that things are just the way they are, but for all the objectivity that science would like to impose (and other disciplines would like to embrace) in the end, it just isn't there, for science's own view of its non-valueness is, at bottom, just another value. We can't escape values. That things should have not meaning other than their own description is a value. Not wanting to deal with the messiness and fuzziness that values bring with them is something science would like to avoid. It doesn't like it, it avoids it, it thinks it just complicates things ... there are so many ways to describe it ... but in the end, they are just values.

Science, in its desire to free itself of values has really only driven out the Devil with Beelzebub. Their view of the world has brought us a heap of information. There's no question about that at all. But it cannot be the final arbiter of things, for to say it should or it shouldn't requires that one have values. To determine what is preferable or not preferable, what we desire or what we abhor, what is good or what is bad requires us to have values. Describing the world in such an objective way is perhaps value-free, but in the end, it is really just of no value at all: it is worthless.