The Difference Between ‘Know-How’ and ‘Know-What’
Why did Kurt Vonnegut choose the title Player Piano?
Although I first picked up the book 15 or 20 years ago, I never gave the question much thought. There are a couple of scenes with a player piano in the bar in Homestead, but they seem to serve a supporting role. Of course, the symbolism of the player piano fits the book’s theme—a machine taking something fundamentally human, music, away from people. Nice ideas but nothing too meaningful, I thought. I put it down to a book needing a title and Player Piano being a decently creative one. (Certainly better than Utopia 14.)
But when I was preparing for this summer’s book club, I unexpectedly stumbled upon the answer to “Why Player Piano?”, and it turned out to be more interesting, and meaningful, than I suspected.
I found the answer in The Vonnegut Encyclopedia under the entry for “Wiener, Norbert” on page 703. Wiener, the entry tells me, was an MIT mathematician whose book, The Human Use of Human Beings, helped inspire the theme and title for Player Piano.
The entry includes a choice quote from The Human Use of Human Beings that articulates the difference between “know-how” and “know-what.” Wiener writes:
“Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than know-how and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is ‘know-what’: by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. I can distinguish between the two by an example.
“Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player-piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not correspond to any particular interest in the music played by the piano. It corresponded rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism. For this gentleman, the player-piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving some inventor the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music.
“This is an estimable attitude in a second-year high-school student. How estimable it is in one of those on whom the whole cultural future of the country depends, I leave to the reader.”
More on know-how vs. know-what
In my research for this book club, I also came across a 1995 article in Inc., which juxtaposed Vonnegut’s thoughts on technology with those of thriller-novelist, Tom Clancy. The authors of the article managed to get both Vonnegut and Clancy to share their thoughts on the impact of technology capturing people’s attention at the moment—the internet, automation, global communications, and more.
The full interview is worth a read (it's really good). But most relevant, and revealing, for the discussion of know-how vs. know-what are the following selections from Vonnegut and Clancy’s answers. I find the contrast terrific.
Kurt Vonnegut on employment:
“I believe half of the duty of every inventor is to make a product that is better and cheaper, and the other half is to create a job that is more satisfying. We do only half of it. People are never mentioned, as though they don't figure in the equation at all. Technocrats don't give a damn about anything but the machines. They're rational enough to know that there is no afterlife, and so they settle for the benefits they can get now, and they don't care what happens to the world afterwards.
“We're always trying to replace jobs. Keeping lists, taking inventory, those are all things to do with life. And then somebody comes along and says, 'Hey, you don't need to do that anymore.' Well, thanks, but how the hell am I supposed to support my family? You, you silly fool, you've still got a job, sure. There's this great word that the British use all the time: redundant. Workers are declared redundant. How'd you like to come into this world and be told you're redundant?
"Built into human beings is a need, which nobody bothers to even acknowledge, to do something useful. But instead of worrying about what human beings need, we worry about what machines need. There's no talk at all about what human beings are deprived of; all the talk is about what industries are being deprived of.”
Tom Clancy on the impact of technology on society:
“Look, this is simple. The good old days are now. OK? The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that. Do you own a TV set? Do you have CNN? Do you think you know better what's going on around the world than you did 15 years ago? You answered your own question."
Tom Clancy on the availability of technology to the underclass:
"What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?"
An observation, an epitaph
For what it’s worth, titling his book Player Piano may have meant something more to Vonnegut personally than it initially appears. (I am speculating, and I can't be sure if it was a something Vonnegut expressed at the time of writing Player Piano or if it was a feeling that developed later.) In A Man Without a Country, published in 2005, he writes: "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
If Vonnegut equates music with the divine, then rendering music a mechanical, know-how problem, rather than a human, know-what problem would represent one of the gravest sins of all.
