I talked briefly with the pariah Notch on the hellsite the other day, thanking him for writing Minecraft. He mentioned that he enjoyed reading Knuth; one of his followers asked if Notch had left Knuth’s work TAOCP unopened when Notch learned that Knuth was opposed to some of Bush’s policies, including the US invading Iraq.
This seemed sad to me. What would it take for a person to not read Knuth for such a reason? Not only would they have to belong to Bush’s faction, they would have to consider it more important that Knuth belonged to an opposing faction than what Knuth knew or didn’t know about computer programming.
It seemed to me that this follower was arrogating to themself the right to judge Knuth’s worth, on the basis that Knuth belonged to the other faction, the inferior faction. I have no reason to believe that the follower was a person of significant intellectual achievements themself, much less a scholar of Knuth’s stature, but they seemed to consider this irrelevant; for them, dismissing Knuth’s work as worthless, even repugnant, was their prerogative for belonging to the correct faction of the culture war.
In this sense, the elevation of factional alignment over scholarly achievement necessarily implies the elevation of ignorant and foolish thugs over scholars — not, perhaps, all scholars, but at least scholars of opposing factions. Moreover, the assignment of a scholar to a faction depends not on scholarly criteria but on thug criteria. This is the principle by which Archimedes was struck down in Syracuse by a Roman soldier, by which Sulla burned the Academy, by which Nazi ruffians burned the books of Jewish scholars who were their superiors in every way, and by which Qin Shi Huang burned the books and buried the scholars. This is the principle by which the Boxers burned the Yongle Encyclopedia, the greatest encyclopedia the world knew before Wikipedia, and by which Mossad thugs assassinated the Iranian nuclear scientists. And this is the reasoning behind the prosecution of my friend Aaron Swartz.
Such an inversion of priorities is inevitable in wartime — when Julius Caesar set fire to the Library of Alexandria, he had intended only to set fire to his ships, not to the library. A human will do nearly anything in their futile effort to secure their own survival, even if it puts at risk values much more precious.
Subjugating the wise to the foolish and ignorant leads invariably to tragedy. The ruler who listens to the counsel of fools brings waste to their land and poverty to their people. And this is what we do when we prize ideology and factional loyalty over wisdom and learning.
Yet are we to honor learning even in the service of evil? Should the Iranian nuclear scientists be permitted to put the fire of the stars in the hands of the mullahs who rule their land with such cruelty and injustice?
These problems arise when the scholars accept this perversion of harmonious order, willingly serving as mere instruments of ignorant and foolish people. By pledging their loyalty to those who follow not truth and prudence but domination and power, those whose position owes not to wisdom and learning but to brutality and intimidation, they abdicate their responsibility to speak the truth and serve the well-being not of one faction but of the world.
True scholars serve a master higher than any government or movement, as exemplified by Socrates’s suicide, by the defensive fortifications of the Mohists, and by the false legend of Galileo’s defiant “Eppur si muove.” This is the reason for the principles of academic freedom. Scholars who speak their minds even when it is unpopular, who act in the service of truth and benevolence as they understand it, these scholars are the noblest and best of humanity. Even their enemies should honor them. But servile scholars who allow themselves to be employed by other people, as if they were pieces of equipment; who obey rather than choosing; who lie and who remain silent in the face of injustice in order to help their own government or faction; those are no scholars at all but mere pedants.