Sophistication

From The New Republic:

Sherwood Anderson’s understanding of sophistication was nothing like our own. Like many habitudes in the past hundred years, this one has grown complicated and thin. Our sophistication bears no resemblance to wisdom and no sadness attaches to it. Our sophistication is merely a skill for many surfaces. It is anything but a consciousness of ultimate questions; it is, in fact, a flight from such a consciousness. Its objective is breadth, not depth. It is the talent for speaking confidently on subjects about which one knows very little, on subjects about which one has only heard—a social skill, an exhibition of virtuosity to others—the intellectual aspiration of a dinner guest.