Let’s look at the prison piece,” said the professor. “What does the nut graph tell us?”
Around me rose a soft rustle as other students rifled knowledgeably through the photocopied news stories we’d been given at the start of class. I found the article on inmate crowding, but as I turned its pages, failed to spot anything that might fit the professor’s specification. I looked at first for something acorn-shaped, then for anything vaguely pictorial, but could find no pie chart, no bar graph, no pyramid diagram—nary an illustration in the entire piece. I glanced around. Everyone else seemed to have managed the task; they sat absorbedly regarding their copies of the article while the professor continued, parsing the information apparently contained within this elusive “nut graph.” What page were they all on? I strained to see, but couldn’t get an angle. How distinctly I remember growing damp then, my skin flocked with sweat.
I was twenty-two and in my first week of graduate school in journalism. I knew by their appearances that most of my classmates were older, just as I knew from the school’s brochure, which promised to provide journalists “a unique opportunity to hone and deepen their skills at any point in their careers,” that many of them already had experience working in the field, whereas I had never so much as written for my college newspaper. But until the moment I searched in vain for the devilish little entity called a nut graph, I’d been more thrilled than cowed, eagerly optimistic about joining their ranks.
Now I sat awash in shame. It wasn’t the shame of incompetence so much as the shame of hubris. To think I had dared imagine I could be a journalist! I couldn’t even keep up with the class in the very first week of instruction.
Did I raise my hand to ask for help? Turn to a neighbor with whispered appeal?
I did not. The cost felt too great. To confess my ignorance would be to expose my inadequacy; I would be cast off, dismissed from this world to which I craved entry. Such was my fear, and it was powerful enough to make stewing in the solitary confinement of my shame seem a preferable alternative.
In time I would learn that “nut graph” is, in fact, “nut graf” (graf being journalism slang for paragraph) and refers to that part of an article, usually following the lead, that gives a condensed overview of its news value. In time I would discover that I was, after all, up to the task of successfully completing the course of study. In time, as I incrementally proved my worth to myself and others, I would even find the courage to speak up, on occasion, when I came across something I did not understand.
But the memory of that first class more than two decades ago remains uncomfortably sharp. Its residue of fear and shame has never entirely dissipated. And I still sometimes struggle with saying “I don’t know.”
Fakery is a vital currency in our social intercourse. That’s not necessarily all bad. A lot of the time we pretend as a way of fortifying or easing connections. When we feign recognition, for example, or delight in seeing someone, or gladness to go out of our way, these are acts of goodwill. At best, pretense can be a form of kindness.
But the benign desire to spare ourselves and others embarrassment or disappointment or pain can lead to actions that engender greater falsehood, promulgate more fear. How easily we fall into the pattern of using deception as a shield against feeling uncomfortable. At worst, it can breed a habit of shirking responsibility and avoiding vulnerability—behaviors that ultimately distance us from the very prizes we crave: true connection with others and integrity within ourselves.
This book looks at two kinds of pretending: pretending to know stuff we don’t, and pretending not to know stuff we do—for just as we might avoid saying “I don’t know” for fear of being ridiculed or rejected, the flip can also be true: Sometimes we pretend ignorance of things we think might lower our cachet, whether to prove our membership in highbrow culture (“What’s a Kardashian?”) or to accommodate social pressures (as so many women of my mother’s generation were warned, “Boys aren’t attracted to smart girls”).
This book also looks at two kinds of fear: fear of estrangement and fear of stepping into the abyss—for as much as we might worry that saying “I don’t know” could cost us the human company we desire, evict us from our place around the hearth, there’s an even more primal fear associated with not knowing: that our inability to comprehend the universe might threaten our very survival. Our efforts to compensate for both social and psychic fears manifest in some pretty interesting ways.
Finally, this book looks at two kinds of hope: that which comes from opening ourselves up to a greater understanding of the world and ourselves and that which comes from making peace with all that must, in the end, remain unknown.
• • •
In August 2012, Harvard University announced it was investigating allegations that approximately 125 undergraduates taking an Introduction to Congress class had cheated on the take-home final the previous spring. In December 2012, the investigation concluded with more than half those students being forced to withdraw. The dean of undergraduate education described the case as “unprecedented in its scope and magnitude.” The press quickly dubbed it “the Harvard cheating scandal.”
A scandal is something that causes outrage and shock, reactions which in this case were likely exacerbated by a perceived discrepancy between the actors and the behavior. Those who succumbed to the temptation to cheat had already gained admittance to one of the most elite educational institutions in the world. The subtext of much of the resultant furor seemed to be, “But you guys are already in. You guys have it made. Of all people, why would you guys feel the need to cheat?”
This presupposes that the very smart are also the very emotionally secure—that they never feel intense pressure to prove their worth or to save face. But surely such weaknesses are human; who among us has never felt vulnerable to them? And I further wonder if those who have been granted the measure of approval signaled by acceptance into a competitive school might actually be more susceptible to certain anxieties. I’m thinking of the way college students sometimes contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound erudite. I’m thinking of the way junior faculty may blush pink to the rims of their ears as they struggle to cover for lack of familiarity with a text or theory mentioned by a senior scholar. I’m thinking of the subtly stratifying culture prevalent on many college campuses, not only in the classroom but at the water cooler and on the quad, a kind of endless cycle of proving and testing, of esoteric referencing and faked recognition, a game played out in grimaces and knowing nods belied by a look of vague panic in the eyes.
My friend Gary tells this joke:
A high school senior from the Bronx is visiting Harvard. Lost, he intercepts a young man striding across the Yard. “Excuse me,” he says, “could you please tell me where the library’s at?”
The young man peers down his nose. “Here at Harvard,” he edifies, “we never end our sentences with a preposition.”
The kid scrunches his brow, thinks earnestly a moment. “Excuse me,” he says, “could you please tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”
I don’t submit such snooty gatekeeping is either the norm or the whole story. But if there weren’t a crumb of truth in it, the joke wouldn’t exist.
People cheat when they are afraid. When there is no cost to being wrong or confessing ignorance, there is no reason to cheat or fake comprehension. During my first week of graduate school, fear kept me from asking what a nut graph is. As I grew more confident, both of my skills and of my relationships with classmates and professors, my fear diminished and, with it, the compulsion to pretend I understood.
When I heard about the Harvard cheating scandal, I cannot say I was particularly scandalized. It didn’t shock me to imagine students being afraid of getting it wrong, coming up short, revealing their weaknesses. So much of education is premised on the value of displaying knowledge. If a student displays well, she is rewarded—initially with grades and later with opportunities: promotion to the next level, acceptance to prestigious programs, and the promise of financial success, social capital, happiness. If a student displays inadequately, if she baldly confesses, “I don’t know,” she may find her access to these opportunities restricted. No wonder students are often fearful of acknowledging what they haven’t yet mastered—or simply don’t get.
Colleges realize that breaches of academic integrity present an important problem on campuses today. Many now require instructors to address the topic outright on the first day of class. I’ve taught at schools where I’ve been asked to do this. Dutifully, I’ve reviewed the handbook with students, rehearsing with them what constitutes plagiarism and cheating, and identifying the consequences of each. During this, the students’ eyes seem to flicker with resentment and anxiety: the former triggered by finding themselves subjected to disciplinary tskings before they so much as uncap their pens; the latter triggered by being asked to envision how easily, unless they maintain constant vigilance, they risk morphing into perpetrators of these crimes.
Talk about starting the semester on a high note. I didn’t like it any more than the students. And I couldn’t help feeling we were tiptoeing around the underlying issue. If cheating and plagiarism are caused by fear, wouldn’t it make sense to talk about that?
So I stopped going over the official policies with students and started telling them instead about my friend Mary.
“My friend Mary,” I say, “is the bravest person I know. She taught English for ages, three or four decades. She’s really well-read, incredibly smart. But what makes her so uncommonly brave is what she does when she’s having a conversation and the other person mentions a book or author in that way that assumes she’s familiar with the work.” I look around the classroom. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
They look back blankly.
“You know when you’re with people you want to impress, people you find a little intimidating? Maybe you’re feeling kind of dumb, like you don’t really belong with them. You’re worried you’ll be found out. And somebody mentions a writer or the title of a book in this tone like, Naahh-turally you know what I’m talking about. And even though you have no clue, you do that little thing where you narrow your eyes and purse your lips and give this thoughtful nod.”
By now some of the students are grinning; a few nod their own heads knowingly.
“You know what Mary does in that situation?”
They’re quiet, alert.
“She says, ‘I don’t know that book.’ She says, ‘I’ve never heard of that person.’”
Sometimes here one or two students will laugh—not so much because they find it funny, I think, as out of pure relief. Every shoulder in the room settles an inch.
“The first time I ever witnessed Mary do that,” I continue, “I swore to myself I’d follow her example, I’d be that brave. Guess how I’ve done?”
They raise their eyebrows, half hopeful, half leery.
“Not that great,” I confess. “It’s ridiculous! I still do it sometimes! Less often, but yes—from time to time, I still catch myself faking it!”
Then I ask them why they think this is.
And so we talk about fear—their fear, mine, all of ours. We lay it out on the seminar table: the big, heavy animal body of our collective fear. It’s usually sleeping by then, so we’re able to talk freely, prod it a little, rearrange its tail, even stroke its fur and comb out some of the mats. We talk about which environments tend to feed it, in which situations we feel most at its mercy. We notice that academia is one of its natural habitats, and we discuss what we can do to make our own environment less hospitable to it. We pledge to start by committing to bravery in the tradition of Mary; we pledge, at least within the enclosure of our classroom, to own our limits without apology, to be forthright about what knowledge we lack.
• • •
Whence this fear? Were we born with it?
Ashley Montagu, the twentieth-century anthropologist* and humanist, thought not. In Growing Young, his 1989 book on human development, he singled out curiosity as one of the most conspicuous traits of children, along with playfulness, candor, and a propensity to experiment and to try again upon failing. While celebrating children’s lack of fear, he made clear that knowledge gathering isn’t all fun and games. “The need to know,” he wrote, “is a first-order evolutionary drive—vital for survival and development.” Montagu saw this drive declaring itself within hours of birth, evident in the way an infant makes eye contact with his mother, scanning her face, already absorbing information by which to organize his raw sensations. This drive, he said, is what fuels children’s explorations and their endless, unabashed questions: “Why?” “What is it?” “What’s it for?”
Over time, he lamented, we lose our openness. Montagu attributed this in part to conventional schooling, which he blamed for squashing a love of knowledge. “School, instead of being a magic casement which opens on unending vistas of excitement, has become a restrictive, linear, one-dimensional, only too often narrowing, experience and to many a dead loss.” By the time formal education stops, around early adulthood for most people, “it is as though they believed that they had learned all they needed to know,” he wrote. “At this time they begin to grow a shell around this pitiful store of knowledge and wisdom; from then on they vigorously resist all attempts to pierce that shell with anything new.” Montagu called this process psychosclerosis, the hardening of the mind, and cited it as the reason that most adults “draw back from the unfamiliar, perhaps because they are reluctant to reveal ignorance.”
But might such reluctance actually start much earlier?
Just the other day my ten-year-old niece, Abby, shared an experience she had in school:
My math teacher asked me why I wasn’t raising my hand, so I admitted I didn’t know the answer. So then he pulled me out of the room and started yelling and screaming at me because I didn’t know the answer to a question. Then he started going on and on about how I am one of “the top kids in the class” and it lasted for about twenty minutes to half an hour. I went back into the class red-faced.
What kills me is the detail “it lasted for about twenty minutes to half an hour.” One suspects this may not be, strictly speaking, accurate. But what a wonderfully accurate representation of how it must have felt.
A week or so later, I asked Abby how things were going. She replied:
The bottom line is: MR. B HAS RUINED MATH FOR ME!!! I’m sick of it! I used to love math! But now it’s just another lousy school period.
After careful consideration, she has decided the best course of action henceforth is to conceal any confusion she might experience in class, instead taking her questions home to her mother (who, by a stroke of luck, happens to be a middle-school math teacher).
In this story, we see a ten-year-old receiving a clear message that openly confessing “I don’t know” carries the consequence of being actively shamed. But children are capable of grasping the disadvantages of not knowing even younger than this, and without such overt cues.
My partner, Mike, teaches kindergarten in a Boston public school. Part of his job involves evaluating each of his students’ early reading skills, specifically letter identification. Invariably, he gets one or two kids with whom the process goes like this:
Mike: I’m going to point to a letter of the alphabet, and if you know what it is, tell me. If you don’t, that’s fine—just say “I don’t know.” Okay?
Kid: (Nods.)
Mike: Okay. (Shows her a sheet printed with all the letters of the alphabet, out of sequence. He points to one.) You know what this is?
Kid: (Nods.)
Mike: What is it?
Kid: . . .
Mike: You don’t know? That’s okay. Remember, if you don’t know, just say “I don’t know.” Okay?
Kid: (Nods.)
Mike: Okay. (Points to another letter.) Do you know what this is?
Kid: (Nods.)
Mike: What is it?
Kid: . . .
Even when encouraged to tell the truth, even when given a demonstration of how to do it, some children just can’t shake the idea that admitting not knowing is bad. It seems we are capable, whether or not we’ve had a particular shaming experience, of incorporating this belief at a very young age. A childhood friend who excelled in school and always struck me as the quintessence of confidence recently told me he never learned to ride a bike. His parents tried to teach him when he was small. When he couldn’t get the hang of it right away, he rejected all further entreaties. Reflecting on it now, he gives a rueful laugh: “I was a child who hated to learn anything I didn’t already know.”
Another friend, a psychotherapist, recounts how her grandson would often cut in with “I know!” whenever she began to tell him something. “As a little boy,” she muses, “he was particularly sensitive to his lack of power vis-à-vis grown-ups.”
This seems right. Children are acutely attuned to power, the desire for which long precedes their ability to articulate it. I once witnessed the following interaction:
My daughter, not yet three, stood on the playground, wistfully eying a pair of metal climbing bars that, as she had just discovered, were not quite within her reach. She could run her fingers along them, but couldn’t manage a solid enough grip to hoist herself up. A taller boy wandered over. He watched as she made another futile attempt to grab on and then, with a degree of calculated insouciance I could not help but admire, raised himself onto the bars, where he swung pendulously a moment, as if making a point, before dropping back onto the wood chips.
“I’m four,” he boasted, casually wiping off his hands.
Unfazed, my daughter shot back: “I’m six.”
My jaw, as I recall, literally dropped. I’m not sure which surprised me more: the fact that she was sufficiently numerate, at age two, to have sussed out that six was greater than four, or the ease with which she’d dissimulated, as if she’d been lying all her life. I was also, perhaps perversely, rather proud, or at least gladdened to see that she was loath to accept a position of inferiority. But what strikes me most about the story now (Ashley Montagu’s belief in the receptivity and truthfulness of children notwithstanding) is that she had already, at such a tender age, developed a rudimentary awareness of the desirability of power and authority—for in laying claim to being six, wasn’t she countering the boy’s physical prowess by implying vast stores of knowledge she held over him?—as well as an instinct for using dishonesty as a means of asserting them.
• • •
That our aversion to not knowing is both age-old and primal seems borne out by a couple of fairy tales.
The first is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” originally published in Denmark in 1837, although it can be traced back as far as ancient Persia and appears in different versions all over the world, including in Sri Lanka, Turkey, India, Spain, Germany, and China. The story tells of a sartorially vain emperor who proves an easy target for two swindlers who promise to weave him the finest cloth imaginable—a material not only beautiful but magical, too, for it would be “invisible to anyone who was incompetent or stupid.” The swindlers set up their empty looms and pretend to get to work. The emperor, curious to know how things are coming along, but (presciently) wary of going to see for himself, sends his top minister to visit the workroom. Of course the minister cannot spot so much as a thread, but afraid of being exposed as stupid, he reports back to the emperor that the fabric is magnificent. Subsequently the emperor sends more officials to observe; each in turn expounds on the cloth’s glories. Plans are made to hold a grand procession so the entire city can view the emperor in his splendid new suit.
The day comes. The swindlers “dress” the emperor in the imaginary garments with great care and attention to detail, even indicating the long train that must be carried by his chamberlains. The emperor beholds his naked body in the mirror and expresses admiration of the nonexistent ensemble. The procession begins. People line the streets and lean out of their windows, all proclaiming loud words of praise as the emperor passes, lest they be thought stupid. At last a small child cries, “But he doesn’t have anything on!”
One by one, the people repeat the words of the child until they reach even the ears of the emperor, who shudders in recognition of their truth. We feel sorry for him, a little. But he has been so pompous and preening, and after all, he holds both power and wealth. When such a man loses face, it’s an occasion more for humor than pity. And as if to prove that he deserves our derision, the last we see of him he’s still stubbornly clinging to pretense. For he insists on continuing the parade—and charade. The story ends, “He carried himself even more proudly, and the chamberlains walked along behind carrying the train that wasn’t there.”
The second, much darker, tale is from Germany: the Grimm Brothers’ “Rumpelstiltskin,” originally published in 1812. This story, too, crops up in many different forms in many other countries, among them England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Hungary. And it begins, like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” with an act of vanity: A miller, wanting to make himself seem important, tells the king his daughter can spin straw into gold. But where the emperor’s vanity results in humiliation, the miller’s threatens consequences far more dire. The king promptly locks the girl in a room filled with straw and a spinning wheel, informing her the straw must be turned to gold by morning or her head will be chopped off.
Now lack of knowledge is a matter of life and death. She could choose to confess “I don’t know how,” but the cost would be her life. Hopeless, she begins to weep. When a strange little man appears, offering to complete the task for her, she has little choice but to agree—and to keep up the sham of false know-how when the king returns at dawn. This pattern is repeated the next night, and the next, and each time the miller’s daughter is forced not only to maintain the lie that it’s her own handiwork but also to succumb to the stranger’s demand for payment, which on the third night consists of the unthinkable: her firstborn child.
The king marries her. A year later she gives birth. Promptly the strange little man shows up, prepared to cart the baby off. The miller’s daughter protests so piteously that he relents: If she can find out his name, he will let her keep her infant. Once more, a seemingly impossible test. Once more, she is in frantic need of knowledge she does not possess. And where in the first instance her life was at stake, this time the cost is even higher.
Never mind that it ends happily for the miller’s daughter. “Rumpelstiltskin” is a chilling tale, not simply because it traffics in death threats and baby snatching, but because it so expertly evokes the terror of what it could mean to lack knowledge. In a sense, the two fairy tales illuminate the full spectrum of our fears about our own ignorance. On one end, Andersen shows us the relatively benign hazard of embarrassment, while on the other, the Grimms evoke the hellish specter of death and worse.
And they do more than illuminate: They inculcate. For these tales aren’t mere relics, reflective of the cultures in which they originated; they’re alive and well today, being handed down to new generations of children. It’s part of what we teach, right up there with “brush your teeth” and “say the pledge” and “know the multiplication tables”: We teach the fear of looking dumb.
• • •
One of our best defenses against fear is humor, and humor makes excellent fodder of our fear of not knowing. Little wonder, then, that two stock characters in comedy are the know-it-all and the fool. How we love to see the former brought low and the latter emerge triumphant! The beginnings of this cathartic tradition extend so far back as to be untraceable. Take the commedia dell’arte, for example, which originated in sixteenth-century Rome but may have antecedents in antiquity. It features a cast of stock characters, several of whom—the swaggering Capitano, the pompous Dottore, and Pantalone, the miserly merchant—fit the archetype of the powerful know-it-all lording it over the common folk, while their inevitable comeuppance is brought about by the deceptively hapless zanni, or servants: the fools.
The joke of the fool hinges on reversal. As Touchstone says in As You Like It, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” The point can be made subtly enough to elude notice of the king, his court—everyone but the grinning audience. Or the point can be deliciously crude. Think slapstick: banana peels underfoot, pies in the face. Think of the Keystone Kops, those fabulously incompetent bulwarks of society, forever getting knocked down by little dogs, dragged through the dirt, muddied in puddles. Think of classic comedy teams—Laurel and Hardy, say, or Abbott and Costello—who capitalized on the pleasurable anticipation of seeing a smug straight man lose his composure to an indefatigably bumbling clown. Think of Wallace Shawn’s self-described genius Vizzini in The Princess Bride, who utters a last, scathing, “You fool!” to the Man in Black moments before outsmarting himself to death, or André the Giant’s supposedly dim-witted Fezzik in the same movie, whose gentle dignity and resilience help save the day.
When we laugh at these situations where high status is exchanged for low, where pillars of confidence crumble and humble innocents prevail, are we merely experiencing schadenfreude, pleasure derived from the misfortune of others (albeit officious, even despotic others)? Surely that’s part of it, and it’s a little sobering to think our hilarity might be proportional to the degree of injury we carry around—that our delight in seeing the know-it-all fall might be commensurate with just how much we’ve felt kicked around by similar types.
But I believe something else is at work here as well, something that lifts our laughter beyond sadistic enjoyment and lends it a more generous, giddy dimension. To be toppled off the foundation of one’s certainties can be distressing. It can also be a gift. Think of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office, who manages to embody both know-it-all and fool in a single high-strung package. Regularly we see him—most often after a fall from dignity—experience flashes of insight and empathy, not infrequently accompanied by a smile of real sweetness, eyes sparkling with real tears. The fullness of our laughter in such cases may be an expression of this unspoken understanding: that to come into contact with a fool, whether in the person of another or the fool within, can be an opportunity for transcendence. “Shakespeare’s fools are subtle teachers,” writes the scholar Mark Edmundson. “They tickle, coax, and cajole their supposed betters into truth . . . To be assigned a fool in Shakespeare is often a sign that one is, potentially, wise.”
There’s an old story in my family about the halls of academe, in which an entire class, belittled for its ignorance, finds a way to transform stinging shame into freeing laughter:
My parents met as graduate students, training to become teachers of the deaf. Their course on language development was taught by a famously irascible professor. One day she was lecturing about various theorists and linguists; it was all Vygotsky-this and Chomsky-that, and then she made reference to Hayakawa. She must have sensed a shift in the air, a little vacuum of unrecognition, for she stopped lecturing and narrowed her eyes at the class.
“You all know Hayakawa.”
No response.
Again, more peevishly: “You all know Hayakawa.”
No response.
“Who doesn’t know Hayakawa?”
The class sat frozen, united in awkward ignorance.
“Well,” she said after a protracted silence, and clicked her tongue. “If you don’t know, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”
This became an oft-repeated punch line, first among the cohort of students, and later within our family. I grew up hearing my parents repeat it in plummy tones, and we kids savored the sheer absurdity of the line long before we learned the story that accompanied it. The professor had sought to shame her students (by repeating the question when the answer was obvious) and wielded her power to punish them (by refusing to elucidate, withholding her knowledge). Yet in time the students used humor to defang the incident. At the end of the year they put on a variety show. In one of the skits, my father, bewigged and in drag, played the role of the tetchy professor, in which he answered all manner of questions (“Where’s the bathroom?” “What time is it?” “How are you?”) with the inevitable, now comic, refrain.