Once upon a time a man decided to write an article. He wasn't sure what it would be about or where the knowledge it contained would come from. Neither was he certain where he would place the article or what title it might be given. Nor was he convinced that, after he'd had it published, he'd recall what the article was called or when it was published. But then – all was well – he knew that Google would provide all the answers. So he went ahead and, in his own small way, became quite famous.
A short anecdote about what medieval writers on spirituality used to call the circumambience of the numinous. We can't see it but know it's there, supporting us every moment. A source of help in a crisis, a place of truth in a shifting world of transience, reliably there like prayer in an instant, reassuring and confirming, befriending and informing, reminding and amending. With such a ready source of help, our brains are barely necessary any more. We're so near all the information and knowledge we think we need that we really don't need to know anything at all.
Perhaps, then, it's possible that we all suffer from digital amnesia. The symptoms are well known: tip-of-tongue forgetting becomes a thing of the past, disputes between friends are quickly resolved, chunks of ready-made knowledge can be relocated into a student essay, one's IQ can easily be wiki-ly burnished, copy delivered on time, and we know we always have a friend in the clouds.
If this is really the case, and knowledge is being outsourced so passively and universally, then surely what we think of as knowledge is being devalued. After all, traditionally what we think of as the knowledge we have acquired over the years is something we think is the result of hard work and attentive experience: not something to be dismissed, a key component of the know-how we draw on to get through life, to make sense of things and provide meaningful context, to enable informed choices and interactions, to allow us to discriminate between truth and lies and to examine what indeed it is to think about thinking and ponder differences between knowledge and wisdom.
Not something, then, to be dismissed, outsourced, delegated or devalued. Yet knowledge is hard work: we all know that from being students. It's hard to be told you're wrong, especially about things you think everyone else believes you should already know. It's impossible always to ponder the implications of the simple choices we make – like choosing a Coke from the cabin crew. Is it because, in a moment of self-indulgence, we unthinkingly (ie not thinking that we're thinking) are engaged in a search for pleasure?
And, by that token, has our search for and use of knowledge become like the Coke – always there, reassuringly available, relatively cheap as a mass-market product, and commodified to our convenience? And, unlike prayer, able to deliver? There are plenty of people out there only too willing and able to deliver for you – the digital corporates, the data providers and packagers who will offer personalised knowledge to you with one click (and – danger alert! – payment). Is such reliance then on knowledge suppliers not only devaluing the knowledge we already have but devaluing knowledge itself?
Turning it into a mere commodity, one that can rapidly (and had rapidly) led to monopoly and concentration in the market to the disadvantage of access, truth and democracy? This is a question Richard Ovenden discusses in the final chapters of his delightful book
Burning the Books: a History of Knowledge under Attack (John Murray, 2020). Knowledge abundance, he says, leads to knowledge concentration, like that of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That in turn creates and legitimates power structures, along the lines that Foucault famously explored, who can not only offer the best digital deals but also monopolise the digital sphere and by that the public sphere itself. Ovenden, as Bodley's Librarian, unsurprisingly argues that libraries and archives provide a counter-balance to the privatisation of knowledge by digital superpowers.
Unless we're highly ethically attuned, or hyper-aware of price differentials between Lidl and Asda, or an accredited expert in one field or another, we're unlikely to examine the subtle implications of what we know and why. Inflation might explain price rises and supply-chain blockages explain delays, but there are limits to the time we have to examine such things further than we need.
We choose a Coke and move on. We check a fact on Google and move on. We read a text, respond and move on. Eats, shoots and leaves. It may be that we're mercurially clever people like Stephen Fry or Richard Feynman or Benjamin Franklin, like bees plucking the nectar of knowledge as we speed on through life. After all, we're all told that life has sped up and that you're either quick or dead. Even if you're not one of those clever people (ie held back by your own modesty), like the amazingly self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan or the Chinese sage Shen Gua (11th century, the guy who 'discovered' magnetism), then at least you can appear clever. The compromise sometimes is to accept the role of the knowledge dwarf on the giant's wisdom-laden shoulders.
Ramanujan and Shen Gua are two of the examples cited by Simon Winchester in his book
Knowing What We Know (Collins, 2023). Its sub-title is: 'The transmission of knowledge from ancient wisdom to modern magic'. It's interesting how this seems to turn upside-down the conventional view that, as the centuries pass, knowledge gets deeper and better. Winchester, known for books such as
The Meaning of Everything,
The Professor and the Madman, and
Krakatoa, has turned in
Knowing What We Know (a book written largely during Covid) to the field of knowledge itself.
As a writer, he always manages to blend factual narrative with fascinating anecdotes, and he does this here. In a wide-ranging study of knowledge from ancient scripts and writing to modern social media and AI, he brings together plenty of insights into a readable text for the general reader. Inevitably perhaps, it's chronological, yet stops along the way are well worth the detour – the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for instance, the way in which people navigated the Pacific long ago, the impact of Macaulay's history on how India learnt English, and the destruction of libraries during wartime.
Most fascinating of all perhaps are the attempts to gather and codify all knowledge in one place – not only the Library at Alexandria but more recent efforts like the ill-fated Mundaneum (all card-catalogued, now defunct), the more robust Dewey Classification Scheme, and the resilient
Encyclopedia Britannica. Knowledge, as Ovenden knows, can be manipulated – think Tiananmen Square, propaganda about the Falklands War, adverts for Lucky Strike cigarettes, and today distorted versions of the so-called truth (US philosopher, Frankfurt, would call it 'bullshit') on social media. Winchester suggests that Wikipedia, in being publicly edited, is for all its imperfections a good counter-weight to current commerce-driven trends.
Winchester's
Knowing What We Know reminds us just how interesting and important are issues about knowledge. He also encourages us to ask questions about knowledge, just as Socrates did in Plato's famous dialogue
Theatetus, that discussion of what knowledge really is, why it is more than belief, and why it needs to be justified. Knowledge is often not spread around fairly, all too much of it is unreliable (can we always tell the difference?), embodiments of knowledge in libraries and archives can easily be destroyed, and knowledge can become contested territory for the truth and turned into commercial capital.
Maybe, he asks, there is too much knowledge. If everything knowable becomes available (a big IF), then does that change the nature of the knower? Do our brains learn to function in different ways because of dependence on outside devices and sources? To what extent does the availability of knowledge make 'experts' and knowledge expertise redundant?
To what extent are we too dependent already on social media for our news, the internet for medical information, AI for our call centres, and the truthfulness of an oligarchical knowledge industry? If we want to sit back and let it happen, let the machines do the work, then one day the machines will also do the thinking too, Winchester argues.
E M Forster's
The Machine Stops reminds us that supply-chains can break down. H G Wells's
The Time Machine has Morlocks doing all the work so that Eloi can eat their lotus leaves. At last I've completed this article: now for all the spell-checking, online sourcing, citation indexing and presence in the impressive personal website that I don't have. Or at least I thought I didn't have – have to check.
Dr Stuart Hannabuss is a writer and reviewer based in Scotland
