Background Knowledge and its Importance

Every kind of writing is full of allusions or references. As in the above Dostoyevsky piece, we saw how the author referenced a biblical event to draw on a deeper meaning about the relationship between the characters.

Pieces you encounter for the SAT may not be quite so explicitly referential to background knowledge. In fact, the piece from Bogard we saw in the beginning barely referenced any literary work. But we do see that Bogard referenced Van Gogh' s Starry Night by name—a famous piece of art deep-seated within the Western cultural psyche. A reference to that painting would lose all its meaning to people who have no understanding of, or indeed engagement with, Van Gogh' s Starry Night.

Therefore, the implication in this could not be more evident. It is necessary that readers have a wide background knowledge on the literary world. At the very least, one should be familiar with novels like Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, plays like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, and a wide assortment of poetry. Do not misconstrue this as merely name-dropping famous works of literature; many“famous”works deserve very little of their popular acclaim, and I am certain you can think of some books or other works that deserve that description.

Along the same train of thought, the SAT, being an American test, is certainly written from an American perspective and, of course, contains very American biases. This is not an objectively bad thing, but it does mean the SAT assumes its takers have a certain degree of familiarity with American culture, common knowledge, and customs commensurate with the high-school age of takers. And even though the SAT essay, in particular, directs students to write an analytical piece on a passage alone, it does not hurt to understand, perhaps, why that passage might be making the arguments it does. Reading some texts important to the Western—American—cultural ethos will certainly help with that. It will, certainly, also help to watch American TV shows and follow American political trends. In essence, the SAT is not only a test of a student' s reasoning ability—it would be universally comprehensible even to those students without knowledge of English if it were—but it is also an assessment of a student's compatibility with the environment in which they hope to study. That is why, for example, articles about baseball or American football will appear in the SAT reading sections, as opposed to articles about sports less associated with the United States, such as association football (soccer)or badminton.

So it is hardly a superficial precaution:students unfamiliar with American culture and literature should do a moderate amount of research before taking the SAT. Beyond being a part of the necessary preparations and study a student undergoes before taking a test, it will also help students avoid being caught unawares by references to Americanisms that may appear in texts(baseball references in a nonfiction piece about economics, for example).

The most important thing to strong background knowledge is an insatiable appetite for reading. The more you read, the more you will find that the accumulation of ideas, thought processes, and writing styles in your mind have contributed and surely will contribute to how you construct your own writing. Here is a suggested reading list：

These books are almost exclusively of a literary background. That is, their authors wrote them to be works of literature as opposed to, perhaps, philosophical treatises or political polemics. Modern scholarship perceives books like these to have their greatest worth in demonstrating how their authors use the English language, and as a result you can learn how to write in English from them. Of course, that is not to say they have no merit beyond exhibitions of words. However, that was most likely not their authors' main intention.

Compare them to purely philosophical works. Books like The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli or The Republic by Plato are, yes, works of literature in that they exhibit styles of writing or command of a particular language. But, since we are discussing such books in an English-speaking context and not, say, Italian or ancient Greek, we value such works as extra-literary, that is, more for their messages than for how the authors convey those messages. The long heritage of Western philosophical thought traces itself through such works, and that is why we see entire governments and nations founded on idealistic concepts like the social contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. In fact, understanding these extra-literary concepts may help you form a deeper, more thoughtful analysis of SAT essay prompt pieces.

I recall a recent sample SAT essay prompt that featured a speech on climate change from Al Gore. It would be no great leap of logic to suggest that one of Gore's motivations for promoting a higher awareness of the environment arises from the idea of the social contract, in which the members of a society limit their personal freedoms—in this case, the freedom to use carbon-emitting devices—for the better of the society as a whole. Closer reading of such texts will certainly also aid in your understanding the new“Great Global Conversation”texts that may arise on the new SAT reading tests. In fact, the social contract, as both Rousseau and Hobbes conceived, forms an important part of the theoretical basis for Western governments. Among such Western governments is that of the United States, which you will be required to understand in some level of detail for the new SAT. As a result, you should familiarize yourself, at least to some extent, with Western philosophical ideas. This will allow you to understand the texts on the Great Global Conversation aspect of the new SAT English sections in a more meaningful way.

Obviously, an issue that arises here is the question of political indoctrination. I won't discuss this to a great extent because this is a problem somewhat beyond the scope of this book, but remember that the SAT is, again, an American test. In some way or another, the contents of the test reflect an American cultural bias that you should not, by any means, accept as a singular“truth”. The American perspective that you may find yourself adopting in preparing for the new SAT is not necessarily“good”or“bad”but merely one of many perspectives you can or will have throughout the course of your life. Do not let your study of philosophical texts or ideas distract you from the main purpose of your preparations, which is, as you should always keep in mind, to achieve a high score on the SAT Test.

And, although it is rare, you may come across prompts discussing economic issues. They are rare because they demand a certain level of technical understanding that some might consider unnecessary for a test of English-language writing and comprehension. However, the history of the world is as much—or more—an economic tale as it is a political one. As a result, I do suggest you have some knowledge about basic economics as well.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the texts you might find useful in understanding Western philosophical ideas. Keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list, and feel free to look for more sources on your own.

Let's look at some of the ideas in these books. Of course, this isn't a book on political philosophy, but diving right into that material may be a little difficult. Note that most of those books are in the public domain because of their age.

Since you'll encounter works from a variety of fields as you prepare for and write the new SAT, it will serve an important purpose to understand these works a bit more thoroughly. The ideas in them are very influential in Western thought, and the history of literature is thoroughly intertwined with that of philosophy. Therefore, it will certainly prove useful to consider these works in the context of the SAT essay. Specifically speaking, the Analysis section of the mark scheme—which accounts for a third of the overall essay score—demands an“insightful analysis”of the text and a“sophisticated understanding”of the writing task. Being able to relate prompt pieces to ideationally related, external writings is one aspect of what many would call“insightful”.

So with that said, here's a brief overview of the ideas in the preceding list of texts. Note that this is not a book about philosophy, so I may be a little imprecise in describing these concepts, but that is where the wonder of reading lies:you are free to read the texts yourself to gain a better understanding.

●Critique of Practical Reason

○Kant's primary philosophical concern here is the distinction between practical and theoretical reason. Practical reason refers to the human ability to reason and thereby know things in the world with which we interact and in which we live; theoretical reason refers to the understanding of the noumenon, a philosophical concept that refers to a“thing”that exists outside of perception.

○A very influential idea in this book is the idea of the categorical imperative. There is a very long philosophical justification of this idea, but it essentially refers to what you might consider“the golden rule”. A common formulation of the categorical imperative is as follows:“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

○This essentially means that a person should not do anything unless they see no problem with other people doing that thing. The categorical imperative, then, is a moral law, and one that Kant uses as the basis of his moral philosophy.

●Democracy in America

○de Tocqueville's purpose was mostly to analyze the reasons for the success of democracy in the United States. Since democracy was something of a novelty when Tocqueville first wrote the book, the book served an important purpose in understanding the American approach to it and how that might influence future democracies.

○This book is one of the earliest that discusses democracy as it exists—rather than how it might or should exist. As aresult, it is an influential book in terms of political thought. It would not be surprising to find an excerpt from this book as an essay prompt, or in a Reading or Writing section.

●Leviathan

○Written in the wake of the devastating English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan deviated from previous thought and broke with the concept of“highest good” (summum bonum)in asserting that communities, societies, and governments arise because of a common fear:the fear of violent death. The chaotic“state of nature”, as Hobbes puts it, occurs when there is no authority to govern the interactions between human beings. If there is no such authority, Hobbes argues, how would conflicts between two people—or groups of people—resolve? Violently and bitterly, because people cannot reconcile their converging interests.

○Hobbes states that, in any society, the governing power must be a so-called“Leviathan”, a ruler of absolute power. This ruler would wield his absolute power in the service of societal order above all else, and thus prevent such horrific events like the English Civil War.

○In this book, Hobbes presents the idea of the“social contract”—that all members of society should subordinate themselves to the ruler, because that would be the only way for the ruler to preserve order.

●Nineteen Eighty-Four

○The only outright novel on this list, Nineteen Eighty-Four is the story of Winston Smith, a bureaucrat in a fictional future London under the rule of the Ingsoc Party.

○In the interest of not spoiling the plot, I will only assert that this book does very well in demonstrating its writer's opposition to totalitarian, authoritarian forms of government, no matter what sort of ideology they might claim as their justification.

●The Economic Consequences of the Peace

○This book's author, John Maynard Keynes, was a key participant at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that marked the conclusion of the First World War. This book is his attempt to air some of his frustrations with the peace-making process, especially in regards to the reparations the victorious Allies forced onto Germany and the other Central Powers.

○One of the key take aways from the entire peace process is that the Versailles treaty—and other treaties produced at the Paris conference-marked a punitive approach to peace. Many considered the penalties far too harsh for a defeated nation to pay. Keynes himself argued for more generous terms, which he hoped would be both more practical and less cause for bitterness in the defeated countries. In fact, Keynes' predictions—that the stringency of the Versailles treaty might lead to a resurgence of militarism in the near future—proved to be correct, as Adolf Hitler was able to use the penalties imposed by Versailles to ignite public opinion in Germany and ride that wave of nationalistic sentiment to power.

○This book is important both for its economic aspects—Keynes literally redefined the field of economics, and his ideas are codified in what economists known as Keynesianism—and for its historical relevance. Since Keynes was an active participant in the Paris conference, this book gives readers an insight into the decision-making process at Paris. American policies, in particular the refusal to ratify the League of Nations charter and the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, owed much of their theoretical justification to Keynes' ideas.

●The Prince

○A possibly apocryphal story sums up the controversy this book generated when it first became famous:a nickname for the Devil, “Old Nick”,actually came from the name of The Prince's author, Niccolò Machiavelli! Contemporaries of Machiavelli thought the ideas in the book were so horrific and immoral that they claimed Machiavelli was the Devil in human form... or so the story goes.

○This book changed the Western conception of politics, in that Machiavelli described real historical and contemporary situations in which political leaders took less-than-scrupulous actions, in a break with the historical conception of politics as something absolutely moral or ideal. In fact, the next book in the list, The Republic, is actually one of the works to which The Prince is a response.

○The ideas in this book have influenced—either explicitly or not—many political leaders, and certainly changed the field of political study forever. Essentially, the book is an“instruction manual”for a ruler on how to maintain power. Machiavelli uses Cesare Borgia as his model in the book, and claims that Borgia was very close to the“ideal prince”in how he used and kept power. Machiavelli maintains that Borgia's inability to plan for his own illness is what led to his downfall.

○Note, however, that some modern scholarship claims that The Prince is actually a satirical piece written specifically to appease the then ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici. Thinkers as early as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in the mid-1700s, considered Machiavelli a republican, and indicated a later work, the Discourses on Livy, as evidence of this.

●The Republic

○First-year university students of almost any major—and perhaps even high school students, depending on their program—will have read at least part of this seminal work by Plato. The Republic is a dialogue, in which the main character Socrates(based on the real Socrates, who was Plato's teacher)presents philosophical ideas and debates them with the scholars of Athens.

○The famous Allegory of the Cave appears in this dialogue. It is one of the best-known philosophical ideas in common discourse, and serves as a useful introduction to the Platonic theory of“forms”, in which Plato asserts that unknowable“ideas”or“forms”represent the truest nature of reality and that everything human experience can interact with is only a shadow of the forms. This becomes a driving force in Western philosophy, and is one of the influences on Kant's idea of the noumenon.

●The Social Contract

○Writing almost a century after Hobbes, Rousseau used the terms“state of nature”and“social contract”like Hobbes, but Rousseau had entirely different conceptions of both terms. Rousseau asserted that people, without a government to rule them, would live in a harmonious and peaceful“state of nature”.

○The“social contract”, Rousseau argues, is actually the condition in which all members of a society find themselves. Rousseau asserts that the government only has as much power as the people, whom Rousseau characterizes as sovereign, wish to forfeit. The idea of the people being virtuous and the government only having power because the people give it up are two concepts in this book that strongly influenced the theoretical foundation of the United States government.

○In particular, Thomas Jefferson believed strongly in both of these principles(as they applied to white men of property, of course). The theoretical Jeffersonian democracy finds its ideological roots unabashedly in Rousseau's writing.

○In fact, the idea of the“social contract”—the idea and not necessarily the book—is a very prevalent idea in the theoretical justifications for many Western governments. Most relevant to the SAT is, of course, the government of the United States. As we saw earlier in this book, the argument for the regulation of light pollution may well come back to Rousseau's conception of the social contract.

●The Wealth of Nations

○Even though Adam Smith considered himself a moral philosopher, his enduring legacy is as the father of the modern study of economics. Those with any understanding of economics at all know about Smith's idea of the“invisible hand”, which is the theoretical justification for free-market capitalism. Essentially, Smith's argument is that free markets, in which buyers and sellers exchange goods and services with total liberty, produce the best possible outcomes for not only buyers and sellers but also society as a whole.

○This position forms the cornerstone of what we now call“classical economics”. The movement that Keynes began after the First World War was primarily in response to what Keynes thought problematic in Smith's theory of classical economics.

○If you've watched the film A Beautiful Mind about the economist John Nash, you'll know the famous quote:“Individual ambition serves the common good”. This book provides the origins of that quote.

●Two Treatises of Government

○John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is another important text in the founding of the United States. Locke, too, contends with the idea of a“state of nature”and his conception thereof is much more similar to Rousseau's than it is to Hobbes'.

○The first treatise is a refutation against the idea of the“divine right of kings”. Essentially, Locke argues that a government founded on religious principles—even those almost universally accepted at the time—is illegitimate.

○The second treatise is a critique of the Hobbesian state of nature. Even though it is lawless and chaotic, Locke argues, that people in the state of nature are free is something any government should seek to emulate. Essentially, this treatise is a foundational text of the position known as classical liberalism. Locke, like Rousseau (who actually wrote after Locke)argues that governments only have the powers that people choose to surrender to them. Locke argues that the natural rights (that is, the rights that people under enjoy under the state of nature)are inviolable aspects of human existence. They are the rights to life, liberty and private property.

○One important part of the second treatise is Locke's discussion on slavery. Even though Locke personally profited from the Atlantic slave trade in England, most scholars argue that no part of the Two Treatises can justify the idea of one man holding absolute power over another. As a result, many scholars agree that Locke is a hypocrite in his arguments for inviolable liberty while profiting from the violation of liberty.

●Utilitarianism

○Utilitarianism, the moral theory, is the subject of Utilitarianism, the book. John Stuart Mill takes a decidedly different approach to moral principles than Kant. Whereas Kant argued that people should obey the categorical imperative as an absolute moral law, no matter the consequences, Mill contends that actions are morally“right”if they cause happiness, and“wrong”if they cause suffering.

○Following the tradition of Jeremy Bentham, who was essentially the forerunner of the utilitarian philosophical tradition, Mill argues that utilitarianism seeks to bring the most happiness (that is, pleasure or utility)to the greatest number of people.

○This moral position obviously raises far more questions than Kant's,such as:is the quality of utility equal? To avoid misinterpreting the ideas of utilitarianism, you should read this book with particular attention to detail. Otherwise, you may have a distorted view of Mill's ideas—which may make your analysis in an essay either similarly distorted or outright wrong.

○The main idea of utilitarianism (the moral theory)is somewhat intuitive:of course we should do what gives us pleasure and mitigates our pain. But taken to a further extent, this idea takes on some important implications. These implications, and how to address them, have motivated many other authors to explore the idea of utilitarianism.

Admittedly, these ideas are a little difficult to digest at first glance. That is why it is worth reading the texts above:if you approach them with a critical mindset and a willingness to learn, reading them will not only help you with writing the SAT essay but also improve your ability to understand more complex concepts. None of the above ideas are very easy to understand; you would find it understandably difficult to grasp why anyone would want an all-powerful ruler as the ultimate authority in a country. But, in terms of the historical context of Leviathan, you may better grasp why Hobbes advocated such extreme measures. After all, he bore firsthand witness to the horrors of the English Civil War.

A commentary that delves into a deeper level of analysis, showing the writer' s ability to connect one idea with other, similar ideas she encountered elsewhere, will certainly turn heads for its level of insight. That is why it is imperative to build up a strong“library of the mind”, with collections related to every subject imaginable. It may sound as if I am exhorting you to create this“library”for a very vain or superficial purpose, but rest assured:that is not my intention, for reading is something to be enjoyed and learned from, rather than something through which we keep up“appearances”or achieve high marks on a test. After all, all writing must draw upon previous experience and knowledge; empty writing is unreadable writing. And what becomes of the purpose of writing if it is unreadable?

Reading for background knowledge will also help you build a better writing style. Especially if modern writers read older writings—say, from the 1800s or so—one of the most important lessons they can learn is how not to write. Two hundred years ago, it was very in vogue to express oneself using language we'd consider roundabout and confusing today. Even writers as recent (and as renowned! )as Charles Dickens resort to overly long sentences and paragraphs upon paragraphs of description.

One might argue that Dickens needed long descriptions and convoluted sentences to reflect some deeper aspect of his writing. Perhaps he wrote such long sentences to mirror the contrived nature of the reality reflected in his book. But for modern readers—and one might easily imagine, readers in Dickens' time—such sentences may simply be too long for readers to understand. In such a situation, even if they conveyed great cosmic or universal truths or played important literary roles in the development of the story, if the reader cannot understand them, any literary purpose they might have had is entirely useless. Likewise, even an insightful analytical essay becomes a flow of literary vomit if it conveys no discernible meaning. The best way to understand how to convey ideas through writing is, then, by approaching the material you read with a critical mind such that you can determine which writing styles are effective and which are not. This, then, is evidently another benefit of reading.

Another excellent piece to read is George Orwell' s Politics and the English Language, written in 1947. Orwell' s most important message is that writers should be careful when they write, and writing is not something we should approach with carelessness or heavy-handedness. Of course, reproducing the entirety of that text here would be somewhat inappropriate, but read the following text that captures almost perfectly the gist of Orwell' s message：

So, in terms of reading and writing alike, remember to pay attention to the message. Do not take up writing or reading as inane, mindless activities-time-consuming though they may often be, that does not mean you should not think critically about what you read or write. We will discuss this further when we come to writing.

As you can see, reading should not be a passive activity. It is inappropriate to read and only absorb the words on the page. You can ask yourself—does merely ingesting words like that count for anything? Are you truly learning anything if all you do is look at the words? The answers should be self-evident. So it is critical that you, being a critical and responsible reader, should take concrete measures to fully comprehend the works you read. This begins with, as one might suspect, developing a better way of reading.

So, with that said, background knowledge is only one aspect of the essay writing process. Therefore, let us move on with the next step.