If All Privilege Is Abolished, Learning Is Abolished Too; a Society MUST Be Barbarously Ignorant If There Is No Privilege in It at All, Only Equality All Round

Are you an opponent of privilege? It is ten thousand to one you are. In that case you are, though you may not know it, an opponent of learning too. The reason is simple: leisure, quiet, and access to the learning of others are privileges, and they are also three things without which learning cannot exist.

No two of those three will do on their own. Leisure and quiet will not save learning if the learning of others is not also accessible to you—in short, if there are no libraries. If you have libraries and the leisure to use them, but every moment of waking life is filled with loud noise from Red Guards, rock music, or some other source, the libraries and leisure might as well not exist as far as learning is concerned. If you have the libraries and the quiet which learning requires, but no one has enough leisure to profit from them, then learning will be extinguished just as surely as if you simply shot every educated person in the head, Khmer-Rouge style.

So, if all privilege is abolished, learning is abolished with it. A society in which privilege exists may be a barbarously ignorant one; we all know many instances of that. But a society must be barbarously ignorant if there is no privilege in it at all, only equality all round.

Are you inclined to dismiss this proposition as belonging to the age of illuminated manuscripts? You should not, because it remains equally true in the age of word-processors. It is also true of every branch of learning indifferently: physics, history, philosophy, mathematics, or whatever. A life largely devoted to any of these things need not be privileged with respect to wealth or power, but it must  be privileged with respect to leisure, libraries, and quiet. This is simply a fact about Homo sapiens. It may be otherwise with some other species on another planet; but it is not otherwise with us.

--David Stove, On Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Irvine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 3-4.