Bacon, alone among his peers, envisioned how thoroughly society would become enmeshed in the fruits of science. Thus he emphasized the practical aspect of science by saying, “Knowledge is power.” This was, in Bacon’s day, an obscure outlook. It never really caught on until the Industrial Revolution — both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were largely free from this particular brand of Baconian nonsense.

Tonight, during the priesthood session, James Faust may just as well have come right out and said, “Knowledge is power.” Well, not really. But he did repeat the oft-heard admonition that we must obtain an education, and his justification was purely pragmatic. Training and education are needed to keep up.

“But No!” I said to myself in my initial reaction. Knowledge is no mere practical matter! Learning is about more than professional competence. Knowledge is serious stuff. It’s a gift. It’s something to rejoice (even sing) over. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s an essential piece of the divine. Isn’t that why we’re watching General Conference in the first place?

In his essay, “‘Useless’ Knowledge,” Bertrand Russell reminds us that,

The cultural element in the acquisition of knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill.

I realize that President Faust is absolutely correct to point out that we’re unlikely to find gainful employment without highly specialized skills and credentials. I realize that this was a small part of a larger point. I realize that the framework in which he delivered his talk presupposes the aspects of knowledge that I identify above. And I really enjoyed his talk, too. It was both inspired and inspiring.

Even so, I’m a bit sensitive to the way that people refer to knowledge. Perhaps it’s because I fancy myself an epistemologist. Or maybe it’s just because I have no marketable skills at all, so that I don’t know anything useful of the type that Faust describes.

In either case, I can’t help but come away from priesthood session with the vague feeling that, in our cut-throat world where the absolute reign of utility leads many to use it as the measure of morality itself, useless knowledge, that beleaguered oasis of rigor in the ever-encroaching desert of mechanized productivity and results, has come out at a bit of a disadvantage.

So I didn’t write this to be critical or to find fault, just to restore a bit of balance and to emphasize something that would very likely find favor with Faust himself.