Ultracrepidarian: Let the Cobbler Not Judge Above the Sandal

I love weird words, especially the ones with strange histories.

This one comes from Ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer who later died getting too close to Vesuvius, tells a story about Apelles, the most famous painter of his day, who liked to hide behind his paintings while they were on display and listen to what people said about them. A shoemaker walked by and pointed out that a sandal in one of the pictures had the wrong number of straps, and Apelles fixed it. The next day the shoemaker came back and started in on the leg. Apelles told him, from behind the painting, that a cobbler shouldn’t judge above the sandal.

The line became the maxim ne sutor ultra crepidam. Eighteen hundred years later, William Hazlitt wrote an open letter to William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, and called him an ultra-crepidarian critic. Gifford had been apprenticed to a shoemaker as a boy. This was Hazlitt using his knowledge of Latin to insult Gifford as just a shoemaker’s apprentice.

I know what it feels like to do this. In high school my hand went up before the question was finished. My reasoning was that either I knew the answer or nobody else did, so I may as well take the chance, because I might be right. I never thought about the rest of the class, that they might know it too, or that one of them might have an answer I didn’t.

I had opinions about foreign policy and the national debt, and I’d tell anyone who cared to listen and many who didn’t, even though I knew nothing about them.

I was the smart kid. I was the one with the answers. Even if I knew nothing about the topic.

I got to Yale and found out how much I didn’t know. In high school I’d always been the best in math. In college it was different. My uncle, who’d been a math major at the University at Albany, told me once that he was good at math until all the numbers went away, and I took it as a joke. It wasn’t a joke. In college there are classes like real analysis, complex analysis, and abstract algebra that don’t have numbers in them, and the people who could do them were so much better at math than I was.

Serge Lang taught analysis. He was one of the top professors in the department, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he’d written the textbooks these subjects were taught out of, more than forty books in all. His courses were understood to be incomprehensible to everyone but the true math people, and he was, by all accounts, very good at teaching them.

He also kept files. A friend of mine worked on them. I never knew what was in those files. I knew that she’d go, and that they worked hard, and that among the math people it was a prestigious thing to have been asked.

The file I knew about was from 1986. Lang had mounted what the Times called a one-man challenge to keep Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, out of the National Academy, on the grounds that Huntington dressed political opinions in equations. Lang called it pseudoscience, a language that gave “the illusion of science without any of its substance.” Huntington said the equations were shorthand. It didn’t matter. He was voted down twice, the second time on the floor in front of five hundred members.

All of this looked a little bit funky to me, but he’d written the books and won the prizes, and my friend was in the room, and I assumed a man that smart must be onto something.

A few years after I left, I was reading about Linus Pauling on the internet. My grandparents were always sucking on vitamin C drops, in the winter or whenever anybody had a cold, because of Linus Pauling.

He’d won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, the only person ever to win two on his own. In 1970 he published a book saying that large doses of vitamin C would prevent colds. Later he said it would treat cancer. The science didn’t back him up. Reading it as an adult, what he was proposing was a crackpot theory. Two Nobel Prizes, and the thing my family knew him for was wrong.

Lang seems to have done something similar. In the last twelve years of his life he’d decided that HIV hadn’t been proven to cause AIDS. He published articles saying so in Yale Scientific in 1994 and 1995, which means he was already writing them while my friend worked on the files. He protested Yale’s hiring of AIDS researchers and wrote letters to the administration about the university’s role in what he saw as a conspiracy. He died in 2005 still believing it.

Pauling and Lang weren’t stupid and they weren’t lying. They kept opining on topics well past where their knowledge ended. A chemist knows where chemistry stops. A man who’s been told for fifty years that he’s the smartest person in every room doesn’t have a stopping place, because being smart was never about any one thing. That was the identity I’d built too. Not a chemist, not a mathematician, just smart, and smart doesn’t come with a sandal.

It’s been a long time since I was the kid who put his hand up every time. Now I’ve learned that I can get more from listening to someone than from talking, because I already know everything I’m going to say. The other person is the only one in the room I might learn something from.

One of the most interesting ways I’ve approached this is in a group when they ask for questions. My first instinct is to raise my hand and ask something I want to know. What I try now is to ask a question I have that I also think most of the room wants answered.

Appendix

Here’s a weird appendix I just had to add. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx says:

“Ne sutor ultra crepidam.” This nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam engine, the barber Arkwright the throstle, and the working jeweler Fulton the steamship.

Kark Marx, Das Kapital

To explain this a bit, Marx is saying, “In our time, we don’t need to stay in our lane anymore. Look at the people who did great things out of their lane.” Watt trained as an instrument maker (though Marx called him a watchmaker), and was fixing a broken model steam engine for a university when he redesigned it and made it useful. Arkwright was a barber and wigmaker who built the throstle or water frame, the machine that mechanized spinning and made him one of the richest men in England. Fulton apprenticed to a jeweler as a teenager, painting miniature portraits for lockets, before he ever touched a steam engine, and he’s the one who made the commercial steamboat work.