The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Read Online Free Page B

something ennobling about reading lovely sentences that hang together because of poetry and penetrating thought. There is, too, genuine joy in noting the elegance of a mathematical equation. All of these good things need no justification outside of the fact of their existence; their goodness is the reason for their existence, and vice versa. But the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can only be a good thing when it is a possibility for everyone. Knowledge, after all, is not neutral, neither the getting of it nor the keeping of it, or even the uses of it.
    Besides the pleasures it brings, knowledge can also be dangerous, subversive, and liberating. That’s why slaves were legally prevented from reading; that’s also why tyrants and their governments are afraid of literate dissenters. Under tyranny, and in many ostensibly free societies, reading and writing always mean so much more than reading and writing. Even though, despite widespread misquotation, Foucault never said it, and in fact meant quite the opposite, knowledge is power, at least a kind of power that is instantly recognized, even when it’s in the hands of the dispossessed. Dictators and demagogues alike realize that knowledge for its own sake never manages to end there. When I get knowledge, I get desire: I get hungry for the same liberty I find in the books I read, the science I study, the music I hear. I want my society as eloquent as the poetry I memorize. I want my living conditions to match the beauty of the algebraic formula I work. I want my people as blissful and harmonious as the symphony I listen to. I may also want to stamp out the horrors I read about, put an end to the suffering I hear in the music of the desperate, or use what I know to help the subjugated. I might get inspired or enraged, mad or distraught, stumped or determined to act.
    Try as we might to quarantine knowledge, it invariably sneezes on us far beyond its imposed limits. Knowledge exists for a lot more than its own sake. The proponents of social injustice, whether in America or Eastern Europe, understand this all too well, but so do their victims. It’s where Langston Hughes reaches across space and time to embrace Vaclav Havel. It’s also why Frederick Douglass said that “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” Or, as George Clinton memorably phrased it, “free your mind, and your ass will follow.” As an end in itself, knowledge has much to recommend to the eager pursuer of truth, but even the questions one wants answered—what is truth? does God exist? how should I treat my fellow man? am I my neighbor’s keeper?—say as much about us as about the curiosity that drives us. We’ve got questions for reasons, and those reasons are often bigger than mere curiosity or knowledge for its own sake. What’s often at stake is our identity, our sanity, our souls, our survival.
    The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can only make sense in a society where knowledge, at least the ownership of it, makes no moral difference, and where learning and thinking lack political value. I’m not saying that we live in an Orwellian nightmare where free thought is corrupted and suppressed. Neither am I saying that we live in a nation where thinking is only politically useful if it supports the interests of the state. But the liberty to think out loud as one wishes to, without qualification or permission, is pretty rare, even in our society, and where such freedom exists, it’s the result of vigilant effort to unmask the official story, the enshrined truth. The freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads, at least in social and political terms, depends on where you stand in the culture and how much clout you have. A real freethinker can be shunned or silenced for straying too far from the nation’s political consensus. If, for example, one runs afoul of the attorney general’s pulverizing views of how terror should be defined and fought, he might be harassed, stigmatized, or arrested.