Being Right of Being Good? Solesmes Benedictinism and the Ethics of Intellectual Work

What is intellectual work, and why do it? These are timely questions: as the contemporary university tends to prioritise an objectively quantifiable concept of social impact, alternative perspectives on knowledge, above all that it might exist "for its own sake", appear more and more difficult to sustain. But if knowledge cannot be quantified according to dominant contemporary metrics, is it useless? What social value might the production of knowledge for its own sake bring, and how might this be made visible?
An anthropological approach to the Benedictine monastic tradition can help us address these questions. For hundreds of years, it was monks, not academics, who were society's intellectual workers; but the ethics of intellectual practice was always controversial: should a monk gain knowledge to impart it to wider society, or to move closer to God? To help his fellows, or his own soul? These debates remain implicit in the Benedictine tradition of the French Solesmes Congregation, where monastic life has a particular emphasis on scholarship. In contrast to the widespread contemporary focus on "being right", my ethnographic-historical study of the Solesmes monastery will draw out the potentials of knowledge as a way of being good.
This ethical focus promises to yield fresh perspectives on knowledge that is apparently produced merely "for its own sake". What support might these perspectives offer to academics, policymakers and individuals to subvert the entrenched divisions between "right" and "wrong" that seem to be intensifying in contemporary globalised society?