The Amateur Scholar

from Richard Ostrofsky

of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)
www.secthoughts.com
quill@travel-net.com

October, 2010

Some years ago when I still had the bookstore (in December, 2005 to be
exact), OSCAR published a piece of mine called The Knowledge
Explosion, arguing the need for amateur scholarship and a well-informed
lay public. I had occasion to re-read that piece over the summer, and
would like to expand on it here – to take its thought in a different
direction.
What occurred to me as I re-read the column was that our universities,
extraordinarily good at producing specialized knowledge of every kind,
are rather poor at creating or encouraging the sort of educated lay public
that a democratic society requires. For this they are not entirely to blame:
First, to the extent that they rely for funding on government and corporate
contracts, they can scarcely avoid hiring and producing the kind of
specialists who produce and package the kind of knowledge that these
institutions are willing to pay for. And second, to the extent that young
people and their parents see the university degree primarily as a vehicle
for job prospects and upward mobility, they can scarcely avoid turning out
'alumni' who have been trained for competence in various fields rather
than truly illuminated or even educated. Still, the fact remains: We really
do need a lay public that is familiar and comfortable with "the state of the
art" not just in high-tech gadgetry, but in human thought. To this end, it
needs universities with programs in history, philosophy, literature and all
the humanities designed really to educate their students, at least as much
as to to turn out highly specialized papers for learned journals. My father,
who, for better and worse, was mostly self-educated, liked to quote
Russian proverbs; and one of his best, one that stuck with me, was that "A
trained horse is still a horse." From his perspective, our North American
schools and universities were producing well-trained horses, if that, but
conspicuously failing to produce educated men and women.
To repeat, this is not entirely the universities' fault. Training at the
expense of real education may be the best that any school system can do.
Teachers (and I have been one) always teach from their employer's and
their own agendas, and have to teach some trainable skills before they can
teach anything else. In the final reckoning, anyone who wants a real
education has to steal it for himself – as Prometheus was said to have
stolen fire from the gods. Still, if the schools really tried to educate their
customers and students about the scope, nature and limits of knowledge
itself, the results might be very different. As it is, much lip service is given
to the ideal of education without paying or grading for it, or putting much
effort into teaching for it. The premium is on research – more exactly, on
cited publications. Before it is a teaching institution, the modern university
is a factory for the production of knowledge (admittedly, quite an efficient
factory), and a bureaucracy for the classification, production, storage and
distribution of knowledge.
Accordingly, the world of the professional academic is necessarily a
bureaucratic one, even apart from the obvious facts that scholars make
work for each other by editing and commenting on each other's papers,
and that the university itself is a large corporation tasked with the
administration of substantial assets and thousands of people. These are its
strengths; and the amateur scholar, lacking access to them, is at a real
disadvantage. To compensate, however, he escapes the narrow
specialization of modern academia with its turf wars over jurisdictions, its
climate of risk avoidance and its cover-your-ass mentality. The
professional scholar is, and has to be, protective of his reputation. It's what
he sells to potential employers and customers, and is the only asset he has.
The amateur makes his living in some other way, and lacks access to the
knowledge market, and to most of the apparatus of scholarship; but to
compensate he has his freedom. Having no reputation to lose, he need
please only himself. He can enjoy the pleasures of puzzle-solving and
craftsmanship, researching and writing about whatever has caught his
interest, in his own good time and unconcerned with tenure. This makes a
great hobby in his working years, and makes retirement something to look
forward to.
Just because they are fruits of pleasure and leisure, the lucubrations of
the amateur have something to offer society as a whole, and even to the
professional sometimes – first, because they contribute to the formation of
the 'educated lay public' that I am calling for. Indeed, the amateur makes
such a contribution by his very existence, and through his circle of
friends. Amateur writings also supply much needed popularizations of the
current findings and thinking, and sometimes have a useful shaping
influence on the attentions of professionals – keeping really interesting,
but currently impossible questions before the professional's eye. . All
performers draw stimulation and direction from the responses of their
audience; and professional academics are performers – in the classroom, at
conferences and in their competition for grants. A well-informed, lively,
audience improves the quality of any performance, and can influence the
evolution of the show.
Admittedly, the amateur can accomplish much more in some fields
than others. We will not see amateurs doing experiments in high-energy
particle physics, for example, though great theoretical work has been, and
still can be done with just a pencil and paper. Einstein himself dropped out
of school (aged 16) in 1895 and did not get a proper teaching job until
1908, and thus did his first work as an amateur, earning his living in the
Swiss patent office. By contrast, fields like philosophy, history, and
anthropology were dominated by amateurs from their beginnings, and still
have areas where freedom and intellectual honesty count for more than the
scholarly assets and discipline of the professional.
How does one become an amateur scholar? Find a question that really
interests you, then read your way into it and live with it, until you discover
that you have something to write that someone else (or only you!) might
find worth reading. The greatest difficulty is with the first step: to admit to
yourself that you are ignorant of something that you believe would be
worth knowing. Very few people seem able to do this. Almost everyone
papers over the hard questions, rather than feel their bite – rather than let
themselves be driven by authentic ignorance and curiosity. Why does a
dropped coffee mug fall to the ground? Because of 'gravity' of course.
Everyone knows that! But no one knows exactly what 'gravity' is, and if
you can improve on our best available explanations of it you will deserve
the Nobel, no matter what you do for a living. The body of professionally
gathered and peer-reviewed knowledge that one can find in libraries and
on the Internet is a glory of our age, but you might be amazed how many
questions are still lying around, waiting for someone to ask them.