in defence of learning useless things

I can tell you everything there is to know about the formation of American English and why it differs from British English.

That doesn’t come up much in conversations, and isn’t quite deserving of a line in my resume, and yet I learned it. I spent maybe 10 hours researching over a few days.

As I was doing so, I occasionally heard a voice in my ear: what is this for?

The voice is polite. It is not hostile to learning; it merely wants to check the purpose of my learning. It asks what the knowledge will be converted into, and when, and it assumes, as naturally as breathing, that knowledge which converts into nothing is a kind of spoilage.

I want to argue that the voice is wrong; not wrong about the facts, for the linguistic trivialities will indeed never appear on my tax return, but wrong about the court in which the case is being heard.

And I want to do it properly, which means first dismantling the defence of ‘useless knowledge’ you were probably about to offer, because it is a bad defence, and it loses the argument in the act of making it.

The bad defence goes like this: useless knowledge is secretly useful. You know the genre. The calligraphy class that becomes the typography of a famous computer; the number theory that sat inert for centuries and then, one morning, became cryptography; the biologist’s idle curiosity that becomes the wonder drug.

Learn everything, this defence says, because you cannot know in advance which of it will pay. And all of this is true, and every word of it is a surrender; because it accepts that payment is the criterion, and merely pleads for a longer settlement window. It defends useless knowledge the way one defends a suspect: not guilty, your honor, or at least not yet proven guilty.

The utilitarian smiles and grants the extension, because the extension costs him nothing; the premise, which was the whole war, he has already won. If knowledge must eventually justify itself in use, then linguistic Americanisms are merely a debt you have not yet collected, and you are back to reading with a ledger open beside you, and the ledger is the problem.

So let us try the older arguments.

Aristotle, near the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, does something that somewhat startled me as a reader who arrived expecting a manual of practical virtue. Having spent ten books on courage and justice and friendship, on the whole apparatus of the active life, he turns and says that the highest human activity is none of these; it is contemplation: theoria, the beholding of things for the sake of beholding them.

His reasoning is worth your attention, reader, because it is almost mechanical. Every other activity, he observes, is done for the sake of something else.

We wage war for peace.

We work for leisure.

We practice politics so that politics might one day be unnecessary.

Each of these points beyond itself, which means each is, in the strict sense, servile; it serves. Only the act of understanding points at nothing beyond itself. You do not understand the orbit of a planet in order to do something further; the understanding is the terminus, the place where the chain of “for the sake of” finally rests.

And an activity that is its own end, Aristotle says, is the only kind that resembles freedom; everything else is a means, and a life made entirely of means is a corridor with no rooms to go into.

Twenty-two centuries later, John Henry Newman made the same argument in institutional form, and made it while the invoice-voice was already gaining its modern confidence. The Idea of a University is remembered as a defense of liberal education, but read closely and you find a refusal, repeated in a dozen keys, of the demand that knowledge show its papers.

Knowledge, Newman says, is capable of being its own end; the mind that possesses it is not richer in the banker’s sense but larger, and the largeness is the point.

He does not deny that educated people turn out to be useful; he denies that this is why you educate them, in the way one might concede that cathedrals attract tourism while denying that tourism is why they were built. To ask of every study “what does it produce” is, for Newman, to have already mistaken the mind for a machine tool; and a machine tool, note well, is never consulted about the work.

That last thought was given a more complete form by Josef Pieper, a German philosopher writing in the rubble of 1948, when his country was rebuilding post-war and the cult of total work had every possible excuse. Leisure: The Basis of Culture turns on a distinction the medievals took for granted and we have lost: the distinction between the servile arts, which are justified by their products, and the liberal arts, which are not; and Pieper’s claim is that a civilisation which recognises only the servile has redefined the human being.

In the world of total work, he says, the worker is not a person who happens to work; work becomes the definition, and everything in a life must present itself as work, or as recovery for work, or it is not permitted to exist. Rest becomes “recharging.” Reading becomes “professional development.” Even idleness must dress itself as strategy. You will recognise this world, reader, for you are living in it, and its most fluent language is the language of the voice behind your shoulder. Pieper’s word for what it destroys is leisure, but he does not mean vacation; he means the capacity to attend to something you do not intend to use.

Lose that capacity, he says, and you have not become more productive. You have become incapable of the one posture in which the world can be seen rather than handled.

If you want to know what the loss feels like from inside, there is a witness, and he is an unimpeachable one whose work first introduced me to political philosophy. John Stuart Mill was raised as perhaps the most deliberately useful mind ever constructed; his father built him, book by book and language by language, as an instrument for the improvement of mankind, and every acquisition was selected for its yield.

It worked; the instrument was superb. And at twenty, as Mill records in the Autobiography, the instrument asked itself a question: if every one of your goals were achieved tonight, would you be happy? And, as he writes, “an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, No.”

The machine had been given ends but no interior; it could pursue but not behold. What pulled him out, famously, was Wordsworth; poetry, the least convertible asset in the portfolio, and the one thing his education had classified as ornament. Mill is our controlled experiment, reader: a mind stocked exclusively with useful knowledge, and the deficiency it developed was a deficiency of reasons.

Usefulness can tell you how; it is constitutionally silent on the question of what for; and a person who has learned only useful things must borrow their ends from someone else, which is to say, must be used.

And there it is, the centre of the argument: a tool is a thing whose purpose lies outside itself.

To learn only what is useful is to shape yourself, deliberately and at some expense, into a tool; and the defining condition of a tool is that it does not get to ask what the work is for. The hammer is not consulted about the house.

If you keep no knowledge that is its own end, then you contain no ends; you are all means, all corridor; and whoever supplies your purposes, an employer, an algorithm, an age, will find you superbly equipped and perfectly compliant, because the faculty that asks “toward what?” was never furnished. It atrophied in the name of efficiency.

The Americanisms, then. The Byzantine postal system. The dead language, the pointless proof, the history of a place you will never visit. These are not investments awaiting maturity, and you should stop apologising for them in those terms; they are the oldest and least marketable of the freedoms.

So the next time the voice behind your shoulder asks what it is for, you may give it the only answer the whole tradition converges on, and give it without embarrassment: nothing.

It is for nothing.