» Educated Man - acoustic

I wrote this song in my early twenties one summer day in the family room in the bottom of our townhouse in Richmond, Virginia. I was home from college and I was trying to emulate the Beatles. The first line of the song seemed to me to be something McCartney would have written.

The title and the song itself was inspired by my previous year's experience in a turn-of-the-century British literature course taught by John Crow (who in the second semester through an independent study on Joseph Conrad taught me most of what I know today about critical thinking and logical writing). We had studied Henry Adam's book The Education of Henry Adams, in which he argued that before the industrial age, an educated man could actually expect to know most things about everything. Adams was among the first to recognize that we were entering an age of specialization, in which it would no longer be possible to know almost everything. These thoughts together with Plato's famous quotation, "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing", inspired the song.

Note about the image from http://www.amazon.com/Monkey-Skull-Statue-1892-93-Rheinhold/dp/B002MFW3E2: "Monkey Holding Skull (Affe mit Schadel, 1892-93): The small, bronze sculpture 'Monkey with skull' or also known as 'Philosophizing Monkey' attracted a great deal of attention at the Berlin Art Exhibition in 1893. It was Rheinhold's first sculpture as a professional sculptor and was an immediate commercial success. The Berlin bronze foundry H. Gladenbeck & Sohn marketed various versions of the adorable monkey. A copy even graced Nikolai Lenin's desk at the Kremlin from 1922 onwards. One of the books the monkey is seated on bears the Biblical quote: Eritis Sicut Deus (Genesis III, 5). 'Thou shalt be as God' which paraphrases the words the serpent spoke to Eve to entice her to taste the apple. Another of the books has the name Darwin, presumably referencing the legendary study by Charles Darwin On the Origins of Species."