"Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture"
About this Quote
Nock lands his punch with a sly reversal: everyone praises learning, but we treat forgetting as a moral failure. That asymmetry, he argues, quietly rigs the whole game. If forgetting is “deprecated,” then the safest social posture is hoarding facts, keeping receipts, never letting go. From there, pedantry doesn’t just creep in; it becomes a rational adaptation. You gain status by being able to cite, correct, and accumulate, not by showing taste, judgment, or proportion.
The subtext is an attack on modern respectability itself. “Learning” is the approved virtue because it looks measurable and industrious; it flatters institutions that certify knowledge and people who want proof of their seriousness. “Forgetting,” by contrast, is essential to culture because culture isn’t a warehouse. It’s selection. It requires pruning the trivial, discarding what doesn’t bear weight, and allowing certain details to die so meaning can live. Nock’s word choice matters: “established itself” makes pedantry sound like a regime, not a quirk. And “at the expense of culture” frames the loss as economic: attention is finite, and when it’s spent on mere accumulation, it can’t be spent on synthesis.
Contextually, Nock is writing from a moment when professionalized expertise, credentialing, and mass education were hardening into the dominant civic religion. His complaint isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-clerical in the secular sense. He’s warning that when a society prizes information without granting permission to forget, it breeds a class of knowledge-police - and calls that “education” while culture, the harder art of knowing what to ignore, withers.
The subtext is an attack on modern respectability itself. “Learning” is the approved virtue because it looks measurable and industrious; it flatters institutions that certify knowledge and people who want proof of their seriousness. “Forgetting,” by contrast, is essential to culture because culture isn’t a warehouse. It’s selection. It requires pruning the trivial, discarding what doesn’t bear weight, and allowing certain details to die so meaning can live. Nock’s word choice matters: “established itself” makes pedantry sound like a regime, not a quirk. And “at the expense of culture” frames the loss as economic: attention is finite, and when it’s spent on mere accumulation, it can’t be spent on synthesis.
Contextually, Nock is writing from a moment when professionalized expertise, credentialing, and mass education were hardening into the dominant civic religion. His complaint isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-clerical in the secular sense. He’s warning that when a society prizes information without granting permission to forget, it breeds a class of knowledge-police - and calls that “education” while culture, the harder art of knowing what to ignore, withers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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