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community weblog
The distinction between "knowledge of" and "knowledge how"
This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of "balance" and "equilibrium." Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: 'Don't be safe, be competent." from The Last Useful Man [The Metropolitan Review]
posted by chavenet on Dec 07, 2025 at 2:07 AM
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Of course, one of the cultural-memetic purposes of these ridiculous action films is to reinforce the idea that violence isn't so bad! It's super cinematic and cool! And morally good and clean too. The good guys win!
YOU can be tom cruise, can dodge bullets, run from an explosion, could survive against the predations of a surprise attack in everyday life, an armed gang, or the deployment of state power.
The reality is everyone is Gabriel jumping out of a plane. Human Nature and Physics wins against all of us, unlike for the non-existent, hopewank hero.
posted by lalochezia at 5:44 AM
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Could just call it what it is, competence porn. It's a whole thing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:26 AM
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I agree that the writer recognizes that it's competence porn, but maybe they want us to be thoughtful about choosing competence over convenience.
(19 flaming parachutes? The director was right.)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:31 AM
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Meh.
The quest to '"know more than we can tell,"' as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: "Don't think. Just do."
In focusing on such extreme examples, with Tom Cruise movies, the author fails to step away from the Cartesian mind-body duality that he mentions and decries. He's just replacing supremacy of physical skill for supremacy of mental skill. As opposed to knowing how to do something and being able to explain why it works. Both parts have use or value, and both parts interact.
We see this in math and other technical/science education. There are these strawman sides of either pure rote instruction in following algorithms with no understanding (although, I have encountered such an approach in the wild, so it's rare but not fully a strawman) versus only being able to explain why the algorithms work but not being able to do the calculations. In reality, mathematic skill, like adeptness with language, involves both: it's quite difficult to gain understanding without practicing enough to gain some intuition that speeds up the reasoning process. But theoretical understanding gives a framework that helps people remember the technical steps and avoid errors (turns out purely rote calculation practice isn't actually very effective for that, unless you only measure on very short time scales).
Engineering and the trades are the same: yes, you can learn some processes with little understanding of how or why they work, but your going to be useless if you encounter even small variations in the conditions of your training (and prone to errors that you'll be unable to catch in time to fix) if you don't understand the how and why. The folks who fixed issues in the Apollo mission on the fly (both on the ground and in space)? They had that combination knowledge. The contractors who wouldn't listen to me about how to install a door on my corner cupboard when I was getting my kitchen re-done had only the procedural knowledge, but thought that their years of working construction was more useful than my basic experience with carpentry combined with understanding of geometry. Eventually they hit on the solution that I originally proposed, but it involved wasting some materials and making extra holes inside my new cabinet.
With Tom Cruise movies, any analysis that doesn't grapple with how inarticulate version of competence porn ties into and supports the rest of his ideology (which has some questionable aspects) is also quite incomplete. Which makes it not super useful....
posted by eviemath at 7:09 AM
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I did appreciate that the author understood that Frankenstein is not a simple anti-science parable, though!
posted by eviemath at 7:10 AM
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(My understanding of geometry certainly comes from embodied knowledge from an active childhood. But my ability to apply it in the relatively new-to-me domain of cabinetry to more useful effect than the guy who had been doing kitchen installations and other similar work for years came from connecting my embodied and theoretical understandings.)
posted by eviemath at 7:15 AM
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So many callouts to historical authors, historical thinkers and fictional characters that *might* have influenced Cruise, but no mention of Xenu or L Ron Hubbard, whom Cruise himself tells us are great influences. Seems like his worship of Hubbard as an infallible author could contribute to his love of hyper competent heroes.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 7:39 AM
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Of course, one of the cultural-memetic purposes of these ridiculous action films is to reinforce the idea that violence isn't so bad! It's super cinematic and cool! And morally good and clean too.
See also: Pretty much every AAA game released over the last 25-30 years or so. Violence is the way.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:24 AM
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Michael Polanyi very previously on MetaFilter. Boy, reading the names mentioned in the thread therein takes one back. Antonio Damasio, homunculus and Miguel Cardoso for three among others. A grove of dead links mostly but one led to Mars Hill Audio Search Results for: Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a very remarkable and insightful man. I can see Tom Cruise's interest in him and his work for all usual dubious and insufferable Tom Cruise related reasons that come to mind. Interest if not superhuman comprehension. Or so one would prefer to think.
posted by y2karl at 9:07 AM
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I was going to write up a long response but eviemath pretty much crushed it. As a construction/woodworking teacher, here is my tl/dr:
- Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge are two sides of the same coin.
- Acquisition of knowledge and skill both require the same thing: intentional practice.
- There is no knowledge that is universally more important than the others. Context matters.
- Related to above, knowledge is an interconnected web, where advancing understanding or skill in one area benefits other areas of understanding , as well.
- To make something with your hands requires you to first make it in your mind. So never stop making things!
posted by Big Al 8000 at 10:28 AM
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Start with mischief.
posted by y2karl at 10:57 AM
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ah, Errol Flynn.
posted by clavdivs at 2:31 PM
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I feel some uneasy resonance between this "it's good to do it the hard way" and the old conservative idea that the devil makes work for idle hands, so don't make stuff easier for the common types (tho it's long been considered fine for the ruling classes to be pretty helpless without servants - except in matters of war, which supports the first comment in this thread).
I'd like to know exactly what things the author believes we should do the hard way. People who are already doing life the hard way - the poor, the disabled, disfavored social, racial, religious and ethnic groups, many of whose members are run ragged for mere survival, are they allowed to just ask Google to tell them how to get to a new place, or do they have to own an atlas to be virtuous?
I don't deny there is deep inner satisfaction at being able to repair things, and build, and do it well. There IS confidence in knowing I can defend myself and others reasonably well. But as I can do less and less, physically, I already feel shame at having to increasingly rely on other people to be my hands and feet, and as eviemath noted above, people doing the work for you have their own ideas about how to get it done.
Add to that the fact that much of the machinery and tech we use daily has either been designed to be replaced rather than repaired, or the repair is often impossible without very expensive equipment and training. I grew up helping my dad fix his car. There are far fewer things you can fix on new cars at home, now. So I feel like a lot of this, let's call it 'perceived loss of competence' in society is systemic - some comes from planned obsolescence, some from increased technical intricacy, and some from stress and the increasingly harried pace of life.
If I'd been a millionaire for much of my life, with the commensurate health care and personal trainers and all that, maybe I'd be able to do stunts. I'd certainly have a lot more cognitive room to learn and retain new things - poverty is loud and big in your head, the stress of it takes away mental and physical resources. Someone like Cruise has just about every leg up on the vast majority of us, so using him OR the characters he plays (who are fictional after all) as a model we should aspire to just makes me resistant to the author's point.
I mean, yes, it's good to know how the things that you rely on work. But there are simply too many things for any one person to reasonably master even for people who are technically minded. And a person who cannot master the use of a hammer might be a brilliant psychotherapist or the best vet tech in three counties.
Of course, competence is good. But different people will have affinities for competence in different areas, and being able to hand-solder and do stupidly dangerous things with airplanes will not be MY aspiration.
posted by Vigilant at 7:02 AM
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