Book Review: The Modern Know-It-All

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

A motivating practical philosophy for everyday life

We live in hard and complicated times, with the total amount of human knowledge exceeding any single individual’s reach and the sum of all right decisions being far beyond anyone’s comprehension. Recalling but not repeating the false cliché of the Renaissance Man, in The Modern Know-it-all, Brandon Wolfe agrees that knowing everything, or even a large fraction of everything, simply isn’t feasible. In its place, he presents a shortcut for always having the correct answer, as well as for achieving an assured and trouble-less life.

The trick to know it all, Wolfe says, lies in adopting a philosophy which allows you to see most questions as meaningless. So to begin with, he sets out to prove that that’s just what they are. He does it by focusing on the idea that everything that is not of nature is a human or social construct, which means that it has no intrinsic meaning.

Wolfe continues to run us through a swift view of intellectual history, characterized by humanity’s journey out of ignorance toward enlightenment. It is willful ignorance, he believes, that drives the modern world’s conflicts, as opposed to the naive ignorance of previous ages.

And so the way of thinking Wolfe suggests is based around a robust nihilism, which he says is the only logically infallible worldview. It is peppered with bits of other philosophies, most prominently stoicism, and made attractive by a healthy dose of hedonism. We should create our own meaning, Wolfe enthusiastically suggests, and finding pleasure in that meaning is what our actions should aim to maximize.

The notion of history the book presents rests on the idea of continual human progress, simply put that we are currently wiser than our ancestors, which for Wolfe means mainly that we now have more science and less religion. This is an arguable but certainly widely accepted point of view, as indeed is the general worldview that Wolfe proposes. What is original is his framing of this so-called constructive nihilism as a practical way for fulfilling our need to feel like we are the smartest person in any room, as the author phrases it.

In the beginning of the book, Wolfe declares that his work is light on facts and citations, urging the reader to follow through on their own, but that, at the same time, everything he conveys is accurate. It is not clear if that is said in jest, seeing how we read about human species having been around on the planet for billions of years, so readers should take the author’s advice to heart and not go into this book looking for a path to the finals of Jeopardy.

A great deal of what is in this book is, naturally, subjective. Wolfe, however, is absolutely correct in pointing out that some of the things that universally vex us, like the constant race against time, are largely conventions and, to an extent, avoidable.

Clear-eyed and confident, The Modern Know-It-All presents a complete approach to living the good life.

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