Starter for Ten

Brian Jackson is a working-class boy from Southend about to embark on a new life at university and absolutely desperate for knowledge. It may be the result of his obsession with University Challenge – or the other way round. He’s going to university because, ‘As Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is power”, which is why I want to know everything.’ He says, ‘I need to be in a place where people have a passion for knowledge, think it’s important – sacred, even.’ And, of course, he wants to join the University Challenge team.

This is the scenario of Starter For Ten written by David Nicholls based on his own novel. Brian (James McAvoy) is both idealistic and naïve. The problem, he discovers, is that there is a world of difference between having a head stuffed full of facts and knowing how to live. Wisdom is not the same as knowledge. Brian’s problems start with the University Challenge team: how to cope with the snobbish team captain Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch) and how to develop a relationship with beautiful team-mate Alice (Alice Eve). His eagerness to hook up with her gives him tunnel vision, and soon all of life is unravelling. Brian realises that fantastic general knowledge isn’t much good for negotiating relationships – or the rest of life.

I meet few students who are quite as motivated as Brian by the prospect of knowledge for its own sake. They’re more likely to be impelled by the economic realities of getting qualifications for a decent career – or to just drift into higher education because it’s what everyone else does. Things seemed different in the mid-eighties when Starter For Ten is set. It was, in some respects, a more idealistic age, with extremely active student politics and a greater confidence in what the future would bring (although style, it seems with twenty years’ worth of hindsight, was scarce).

We live in a more cynical age, now. Graduates don’t always get great jobs, but they generally have huge debts. Our media-saturated society overwhelms us with entertainment options, but we feel numbed by it all. We have so much stuff, but we feel empty. We have almost instant access to apparently limitless information, but we no longer know what to believe. It seems that in a society that puts so much emphasis on material things, wisdom is in shorter supply than ever.

Ours may be a more cynical age, but many people in our knowledge-based society still imagine that knowing things equates with being wise. People have always confused the two, but the more information-rich we become, the more our poverty of wisdom is apparent. Cynicism may show up the inadequacy of knowledge on its own, but it is ultimately destructive. Cynicism devalues knowledge – even truth – but has no alternative. It doesn’t lead to wisdom. However, wisdom for living is what most of us are desperate for, deep down. We may, like Brian, pursue knowledge or crave a relationship with someone beautiful because we think they will make us happy. It is easy for us to get into a cycle of accumulating more and more stuff, or ever more intense experiences. Or we may let the cynicism overtake us and resort to alcohol or drugs to blot out the meaninglessness of life. But ultimately, wouldn’t we all love to be able to negotiate life well – to find wisdom?

The Bible’s perspective is that we are made in God’s image to be in a relationship with him – and only through this is true wisdom to be found. Here’s the writer of Proverbs pleading with us to realise this:

Tune your ears to wisdom, and concentrate on understanding. Cry out for insight and understanding. Search for them as you would for lost money or hidden treasure. Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord, and you will gain knowledge of God. For the Lord grants wisdom! From his mouth come knowledge and understanding. (Proverbs 2:2–6, NLT)

With so much information bombarding us about various worldviews, it is no surprise – though tragic nonetheless – that many people in western society believe that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, whereas the reality is that it has barely been tried. Instead, around and around go woefully inadequate arguments against Christian truth (such as those advanced by Richard Dawkins in his recent book The God Delusion) and misrepresentations of what Christians do think and believe. Sadly, so few people in Britain have bothered to stop and consider as an open-minded adult what really can be known about the Christian message – so they never discover just how life-transforming an encounter with Jesus Christ is. Like Brian, we can get so caught up with pursuing what we want out of life that we become blind to the things which matter most.

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