An education, if it is to impart sophistication, obliges students and faculty to train and exercise the pursuit of knowledge and moral example together in cadence – not dissonance.

With regard to students, it is held that sophistication is a virtuous quality that can be obtained as one of the residual effects of a university education. Students leaving university are assumed to have a sharper and broader edge than those who enter their respective occupations directly. Aside from the technical skills learned, we hope that students, upon graduation, will undergo a transformation of self – a transformation from the uneducated concept of self as center of the world and constructor of reality to a more fully mature, erudite self as a being amongst the world and an agent for positive change. As skills alone cannot guide one in this direction, faculties in the humanities make it their purview to draw from the lessons of the classics and the canonical literature of the humanities, which balances the vocation with the education. In the words of Jorge Dominguez, formerly of Harvard University: “A liberal education is what remains after you have forgotten the facts that you learned while becoming educated.” It is this which provides one with a level of sophistication.

The word comes from the Greek σοφιστής or sophist, a skillful man; σοφίζειν, to instruct; and σοφος, wise. It is cognate with the Latin word sapient. A sophist was (and still is) a captious reasoner; thus, he is sly, cunning, wily, slick – the idea being artful or skillful “reasoning-around” – compare our modern English use of “wise” as in wise-guy or smart-ass. (A wiseacre is really a “wise-sayer” – wijs-segger in the old tongue and taken from the Dutch.). The negative nuance in “sophist” is best known from Socrates’ disparagement of them and the unscrupulous means by which they held persuasion to be of greater importance than the truth of an issue. This range of meaning from a positive to negative nuance of SOPH- by the Greeks is indicative of various cultures’ estimation of just how much knowledge tends to corruption. The instrument necessary to harness and exercise control over one’s application of his knowledge can be seen to be something apart from sophistication as understood; there is something more to it.

The word can be used negatively for some evil or wrongdoing: “The terrorists employed a very sophisticated tactic” is the crafty deceiver use; “He is a very sophisticated young man” is the positive use. If it is to be used in a positive sense, I want to focus this meditation on just what it is that differentiates the two terms rather than what is common to the two senses. It should not be the case that the quality which makes the term bad can be the same which allows it to be good. Something is lacking.

What it is

We talk about sophistication in many ways. In the case of our university students, some adjectives used to describe quality in the way of sophistication in their work and academic reputation include:

• Economical – much information in a short space or amount of time; concise.

• Salient – profitable, beneficial, of worth.

• Erudite – learned, mastery of subject area, deep.

• Objective – open, not dogmatic or subjective, not biased or partial.

• Probing – penetrating, beyond the obvious.

• Insightful – finds and establishes connections and implications.

• Unique/original – does not follow what others are saying or how they say it; does not try to be a writer by imitation of the status quo.

I would offer that “sophisticated” signifies a variety of the above in combination under the commitment to truth. A student essay, for example, does not have to be long to be sophisticated. The ability of an author to make connections, uncover hidden assumptions and biases or motives, to make analogies, and his manner of expression with exacting and colorful turns of phrase are what counts. But is this an innate talent or can it be learned?

Certain people, of course, are gifted in certain areas. However, if the talents which comprise being sophisticated could not be learned, we would be helpless to try to improve our students’ skills in analysis and critical inquiry. We could no longer talk about any transformation of self. Professors have an obligation to provide students with access to what counts as sophisticated work and to make explicit why it may be deemed so, and in what way it is not in evidence in a student’s own work. There arises after some time in the course of one’s studies a sense of quality, of being in league with the big shots. This is the kind of learning which signals a transformation in self or character; the absorption of factual data for the professions would not alone induce this effect.

If someone wishes to become sophisticated, it must be done somewhere – and today this is done mostly at university. Depending on the era, sophistication has been taught in many different places over the centuries: the monastery/university, the king’s court, the military, secular colleges, or whichever institution has currency as being of the αριστος or the cream of what a culture has for itself in the way of sophistication. Let us skip the question of whether sophistication is qualitatively the same in each of these institutions just mentioned since we are concerned with the student of today’s university. What is of issue is the point that sophistication in a good sense involves possessing a particular style, an additional ingredient more than mere data.

Sophistication implies style, and style implies measure or proportion, notes Richard M. Weaver in his book Ideas Have Consequences. It is for this reason that sophistication, like society, he argues, is hierarchic in essence. It is no coincidence that societies which impose by force an absence of hierarchic measure in the name of equality or fraternity always suffer a subsequent loss in style and sophistication in the social fabric.

Sophistication and flair

Creativity (and the cornucopia of individual selves that manifests its variety) is, in our cultural heritage, held to be a key factor for success. We hear talk all the time about creativity being an essential quality for the job market. We hear of schools and colleges promising that they can instill creativity in their pupils and students. Creativity is looked upon as a quality that does not present a threat to the fabric and cohesion of society, but is rather one of its necessary ingredients. Students hoping to become seen as sophisticated instantly recognize the need for individuality and uniqueness. Unfortunately, they tend to place too much emphasis on this aspect.

Anybody can produce flair because it is nothing more than a “shining out” from the rest. But this does not tell us much other than that a person is unlike others. Being different for the sake of being different is counterfeit individualism. It means being different as an end in itself rather than being different as the means to some end. Flair which is unprincipled and unguided this way leads to flamboyance. With these rogue colors and no principle to fly them, flair can be judged only by the whim and caprice of the status quo. Hence the dry, arid, silly MTV-claims to individualism, consumer individualism, or conformist individualism.

Sophistication and knowledge

Sophisticated could indicate erudition, cleverness, depth, insight, creativity, and any combination thereof, as listed already. Prior to these designations, however, we must assume that there is a knowledge about which one is sophisticated – that is, knowledge of what one is talking about. For it is on the basis of knowledge that one can say anything at all about a topic. The “how you say it” must come after the “what you have to say.” Even with limited resources or command of vocabulary, one must still possess some measure of knowledge and thus one’s opinions/judgments about an issue can go only as far as one’s knowledge about it.

The qualities pertaining to sophistication listed above become meaningful only in proportion to competence in factual knowledge; for we would not likely esteem a person as sophisticated if he spoke eloquently of nonsense or basics only, no matter how much flair he spoke with. If sophistication depended totally on style in absence of factual knowledge, then the egalitarians would be correct in saying that no view or interpretation is better than any other; all are equal, just different. Sophistication then has an epistemic base.

Now we can see sophistication as being limited by one’s knowledge yet improvable by one’s craft and style – one’s flair. But this is still an inadequate conception of sophistication and one which is common amongst students today. In this way, Socrates despised the sophists of his time, for they practiced and taught in their schools these means of flair for persuading in the very absence of knowledge. Their clients paid them so handsomely not because the sophists had knowledge but because they, the clients, lacked it. Thus did Goethe’s Mephistopheles pay the Supreme Sophist for knowledge – but it was not knowledge of facts and languages and the mysteries of nature that he wanted; as one scholar put it, “Mephistopheles merely sought the gold, guns, and girls.” What the Evil One could not have provided Mephistopheles with, at any bargain, would have been sophistication. Sophistication in the rhetorical sense of being a sophist is not craft and skill in any positive sense at all but a beguiling pose, a charade, a charlatan.

There is a moral basis to being sophisticated

If we admit that sophistication involves accumulated knowledge and creative flair, it must have something else which sets it apart from its negative cousin. Many evil people possess knowledge and creativity.

I propose that our third and sufficient quality is a moral basis and that it works concurrently with a commitment to truth. One central feature of the Western Greco-Christian heritage, indeed its foundational paradigm, is the equation of morality with truth. Without an honest commitment to objective truth, style and creativity and inquiry all become subjugated to personal motives and agendas; and personal agendas, when rational (i.e., honest) debate fails them, entail the use of coercion, and intimidation – this is the tyranny of sophism in practice.

Sophistication without morality puts man against man in the pursuit to outdo the Other. “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man” (Henri de Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism). It may be suggested, with some measure of confidence and justification, that Western culture is largely becoming more and more un-sophisticated, judging from the point of view of its bizarre adamancy that morality hinders the gratification of one’s desires and career attainments. In order to be successful consumers of sex and gadgets, we must be good sophists, clever at their procurement.

I believe that students can restore or at least maintain positive sophistication by reflecting on this significance of morality to a “sophisticated society.” Said scholar George Weigel, in his analysis of the European Union’s priorities regarding culture in The Cube and the Cathedral, “European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences for European public life and European culture. Indeed, that conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale.” If we allow morality to be tossed out of the picture of education, then true, genuine, authentic sophistication goes along with it. Rather than rely on our own imagination and confidence in moral fortitude, we are beginning to prefer what Weigel calls the “dubious international security” of the kind of global mass society envisioned by many educationalists today and accepted by students on account of its attractive omission of any moral dimension to the concept of sophistication.

Sophistication which concerns merely the practical and expedient is negative – that which men can accomplish in order to “get the job done” in courts and civic debate for either putting forth or discarding some matter of legislature or group action. The expedient, however, characterizes the purview of the hoi-polloi, the din and rabble of the Tribes. Whereas expediency might be the heart of advertising or marketing or ceremony, it is not so for intellectual inquiry if this inquiry is to be free of the tyranny of the sophist and the agenda-monger. But positive sophistication need not be confined to the academic sphere. A sophisticated businessman is an example of what used to be conducted as a “Gentleman’s agreement” – and it held binding between the two parties more than did recourse to law. As most students are headed for careers in the world of commerce, which by definition means constant interaction with others, the issue of morality cannot be reasonably dismissed from any notion of keeping a sophisticated community.

Education means one who has been “led out,” i.e., of the masses: from ex ducare to ē ducatus and is allied to those leaders “duke” and “duchess.” This transcends the verb σοφίζειν as teaching or better “making wise” because there is an ultimate moral principle towards which logos is deployed. Those in the Marketplace, who are not ex ducatus, are characterized, amongst other things, by their lack of patience for nuances and distinctions (i.e., of proportions and measures, or sophistication); however, their un-sophistication is all-too-frequently sneered at by society’s culture-elites primarily on account of their moral disposition, not one of knowledge or skill or wile. An education then, if it is to impart sophistication, obliges us, students and faculty both, to train and exercise the pursuit of knowledge and moral example together in cadence – not dissonance.

The immorality of sophistic relativism (sophistos in the negative sense) depends on guile and emotivism and can emerge on top only when it displaces truth as a “social construction” or subjectively biased “narrative” of an individual or particular culture, or when it equates morality with expediency. The axioms which sophistication (sophistos in the positive sense) requires then are (1) knowledge of one’s subject, (2) moral disposition, and (3) creative, vibrant self-expression or flair. Without all three together we would do just as well to educate our students with roaming, peripatetic schools consisting of a teacher or guru and his handful of followers instead of any system of higher education which promises to produce sophisticated young citizens. Universities will fare better in their mission to create sensitive, intelligent communities by considering the importance of including, in their required liberal arts curricula, the classic texts of Greco-Christian morality, upon which this noble institution stands or falls.