“But there is no precise rule: it depends on the individuals, on the circumstances. This holds true also for the secular lords. Sometimes the city magistrates encourage the heretics to translate the Gospel into the vernacular: the vernacular by now is the language of the cities, Latin the language of Rome and the monasteries. And sometimes the magistrates support the Waldensians, because they declare that all, men and women, lowly and mighty, can teach and preach, and the worker who is a disciple after ten days hunts for another whose teacher he can become.”
“And so they eliminate the distinction that makes clerics irreplaceable!”

That’s from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and we can see a similar situation happening now among many professional, privileged, and credentialed classes: with the Internet, the cost of being able to “teach and preach” goes down; anyone motivated can learn, or start to learn almost anything, and anyone inclined to teach can start writing or videoing on whatever topic they believe themselves to be an expert in. The key of course is motivation, which is in scant supply now and probably always will be.

Whether the existing power structures want to encourage self-learning, like many of the “secular lords” and “city magistrates,” or want to preserve existing institutions, depends on the person speaking and their aims. But “the distinction that makes clerics irreplaceable” is similar to the one that makes professors or other professional teachers irreplaceable. It’s a distinction that’s less important than the knowledge and skill underlying the distinction. Some with the distinction are not very good at their jobs and some without distinction are incredibly skilled. Those lines are blurring. Blurring slowly, to be sure. The language of knowledge is spreading. The issue of credentialing remains, but the number of jobs in which work product is a better examination than formal credentials is probably growing.

Does the average software startup want a famous degree, or an extensive Github repository? Right now I’m sifting through freelance fiction editors, and I’ve asked zero of them where they got their degrees or if they have any. I’m very interested in their sample edits and other novels they’ve edited. Clients almost never ask Seliger + Associates about formal degrees—they want to know if we can get the job done.

In writing this post, I am also conforming to the second of Umberto Eco’s “three ways” of reading The Name of the Rose:

The first category of readers will be taken by the plot and the coupes de scene, and will accept even the long bookish discussions and the philosophical dialogues, because it will sense that the signs, the traces and the revelatory symptoms are nesting precisely in those inattentive pages. The second category will be impassioned by the debate of ideas, and will attempt to establish connections (which the author refuses to authorize) with the present. The third will realize that this text is a textile of other texts, a ‘whodunnit’ of quotations, a book built of books.

Eco published this novel in 1980, around the dawn of the personal computer age and long before the consumer Internet. Whatever connections existed in the 1970s between The Name of the Rose and that era—the ones Eco presumably had in mind, whatever his view of authorization—are not the ones I most notice. That the novel’s correspondences can grow and change with decades make it so powerful and deep. Few works of art transcend their immediate context. This one does. It deals with the eternities much more than the news, though the author has demonstrated in essays his interest in the daily news.

If someone had told me before I read The Name of the Rose that a novel set in 1327 and utterly enmeshed in the recondite politics of Christianity would be one of my favorite novels, I would’ve scoffed. Religion as a subject is of little interest to me, except in meta sense. But sufficiently great novels transcend their context, even as they adapt the language, rhetoric, and world of their context. As Eco’s third category of reader indicates, the novel is composed of many other novels, books, articles, and speech. He has, it seems, 800 years of literary history composted into a single work. Few novels do, and fewer still do so in a novel with an actual plot.