Once upon a time, a Russian empress (Catherine II) had to journey across her country. To keep her from realizing just how poorly that country was faring, one of her ministers (Grigory Potemkin) arranged to have a portable false village constructed, consisting only of facades, like a Hollywood film lot. After she would pass through the village, it would be disassembled, moved ahead of her, and reassembled. This allowed her to believe that she was passing through a whole series of apparently prosperous towns.
Over time, the term Potemkin village has come to mean, in a general sense, something that is impressive enough on its surface to distract you from the fact that there is nothing behind that surface. It’s the illusion of a depth that isn’t really there.
A while back, we binge-watched Elementary, featuring Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes. Near the end of the series, Sherlock inherits some money that he doesn’t want (because he thinks its origins are tainted), and is puzzling over what to do with it. He decides to give the money to ‘charities’, including the NYPD to fund gun buyback programs. Why? Because ‘gun buyback programs have reduced the number of firearms fatalities everywhere they’ve been attempted’.
I know, right?
How could a character who is supposed to be so astute and well-informed say something so patently stupid? At the time, I just chalked it up to bad writing by uninformed Hollywood writers. Only later did it occur to me that it wasn’t an accident, but rather represented a strategy.
Driving between locations in New Hampshire, there’s not much to listen to on the radio, so from time to time I find myself listening to various game shows on NPR, like Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! It’s kind of like listening to other people play Trivial Pursuit.
Over time, it was the ads for these shows that really caught my attention. They were nearly always variations on a single theme:
You should listen to us play these games because we’re so smart, and listening will make you smarter too.
But those shows aren’t about being smart. They’re about appearing smart. They’re about Potemkin knowledge.
In Elementary, you assume that Sherlock is smart because he always seems to have, at his fingertips, an encyclopedic collection of random facts. There’s nothing you can mention that he doesn’t already know something about. He’s like a walking Google. Who would be like that, except some super-genius?
The work that goes into establishing the credibility of a fictional character like Sherlock turns him into a spokesman for whatever ideas the writers, or the producers, or the Hollywood establishment, feel like promoting.
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of people running around right now thinking that ‘gun buyback programs have reduced the number of firearms fatalities everywhere they’ve been attempted’. And while they probably couldn’t tell you just where they picked up that dreamy piece of misinformation, they know in their hearts that they heard it from ‘a really smart guy’.
Prediction: It won’t be long before you see ‘genius’ characters in TV shows and movies handing out advice about the benefits of masks, vaccines, social tracing apps, universal basic incomes, a cashless society, and so on.
The flip side of Potemkin knowledge is that, if knowing a lot of trivia makes you credible, not knowing some trivia can be used to dismiss you as unworthy of attention.
Remember Gary Johnson’s ‘Aleppo’ moment? Slipping up on one obscure question gave the media permission to ignore his policy positions, his records as a businessman and as a governor, and pretty much every substantive thing about him, because… well, he didn’t know where Aleppo was, or what was going on there! Who would be like that, except some clueless schlub?
Potemkin knowledge is about keeping factoids and figures flying, so people will assume you’re well-informed, and even wise. It doesn’t matter whether the factoids or true, or whether the figures contradict each other. What matters is that there are lots of them, and that the new ones come out faster than people have time to think about the old ones, so that ‘keeping up’ fills the time that would otherwise be available for ‘thinking through’. As Emerson said, when skating over thin ice, your safety is in your speed.
Stanford Professor Donald Knuth, one of the greatest, most versatile intellects that America has ever produced, gave up email in 1990 because it was filling his time with too much stuff of too little importance. If you want to contact him, you have to write him a letter.
A lot of people were confused when he did this. Wouldn’t he be missing out on… well, everything that was happening in the world? Wasn’t he making himself irrelevant? Without email — to say nothing of Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram — how could he possibly keep up?
His response was telling: ‘Email is great’, he said, ‘for staying on top of things. But my role is to get to the bottom of things.’
Can we have more of that, please?
