What if I get outed for who I am: an intellectual empty shell?

I started reading Cass Sunstein's essay in the New York Review of Books because it was about one of my all time favorites--Albert Hirschman.

In that essay, Sunstein writes:

Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong? Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? 

I ditched Sunstein and went after the Hirschman essay.

Wrong call!

It was a wrong call because the more I read Hirschman, the more I started feeling smaller and smaller and smaller ....

Let me explain.

It is a profound question that Hirschman asks: "Is it a good thing to have opinions?"

I have opinions on a whole bunch of ideas and people.  Sometimes I blog them.  And then there are times that I send my opinions across to newspaper editors.  As I noted in that post, I try keeping my opinions under wraps as much as possible.

But, throughout all these, there is always a nagging worry: what if people find out that I don't know?

So, when Hirschman put up that question on whether it is a good thing to have opinions, I started worrying.

In developing his arguments, Hirschman then quotes from Chekov, Humboldt, Dante, and more.  I have never read the Inferno, barely read and watched a couple of plays by Chekov, ... I realize, yet again, that I don't know a damn thing.

I suppose the hassle is that I have no idea what the measure is to be a small-time university professor.  In terms of intellectual content, I am confident that I have more to offer than a typical kindergarten or high school teacher might.  But, how much more than that average and how much less than a Hirschman am I supposed to know?

It will be wonderfully easy if there were something like how at Disneyland rides there is a board with a line across stating that one has to be at least that tall to be allowed to go on the ride.  Is the mere possession of PhD enough to make me taller than that line to be a university faculty?  What if my PhD itself was a sham?

Do other faculty walk around wondering about this?  Or, unlike me, are they confident that they know quite a bit.  Do they not feel thrown around for a loop when they read a Hirschman or watch a lecture by Feynman?  I wish we faculty talked about all these.  But, of course, we would never!

Is this how students feel in my classes? Do they worry and wonder that I might point out that they don't know, despite all my assurances to them that I don't expect them to know; after all, had they known the subject, they wouldn't have registered for my classes anyway.  In case any such student is reading this post, hey, in case you ever doubted it, now you know that I truly feel your pain.

So, what is Hirschman's answer to that question of whether it is good to have opinions?

Given the "basic need" for identity in our culture, the forming and acquiring of opinions yields considerable utility to the individual.  At the same time, if carried beyond a certain point, the process had dangerous side effects--it is hazardous for the functioning and stability of the democratic order.  Under present cultural values these side effects do not enter the individual calculus--they are like external diseconomies.  Hence there will be an overproduction of opinionated opinion.

Here is to hoping that I have opinions and that I am not opinionated.

And, a much bigger hope that nobody would ever find out that I don't know!