Knowledge
The fuel of modern times is knowledge, or more precisely the belief in knowledge. People always have known how to do things and passed on that lore but modern times represent a vast expansion of sheer knowing. The Internet with its endless amounts of information seems a natural outcome of that knowing. Such knowledge is two-faced. It enables people to feel that they can understand many things from how to cook pasta properly to how the universe came into being. It also can make people feel in control in ways they are not in control. It can make them feel more powerful than they are. It can make them credulous about the power of answers. It can curtail their feeling for the mystery of life or simply obliterate it.
Belief often presupposes credulity. The modern hunger for knowledge has spawned countless disciplines, each with its own specialized knowledge. These disciplines offer many cautionary tales including all manner of racist sociology (for instance the Nazis’ “scientific knowledge of Jews”). Since knowledge is wedded to progress—each generation improving on what the last one knew and also discarding—caution is often put aside. The basic impulse is that knowing is our prime endeavor on earth. It comes before love, devotion, and moral endeavor, to name three.
This may seem impossible since those three categories inform millions upon millions of lives. If one reflects on the occupations and attentions of modern times, however, one feels that the urge to know is paramount. Although the systems that have dictated how people live may seem irrational if not absurd, whether communism or finance capitalism—that has not prevented those systems from parading a notion of objectivity to silence all critics. “This is the way it is,” knowledge purports. That it may be class warfare or the right of corporations to endless profits but until the system fails no real arguing occurs. When it does fail, people are left staring at the ashes of knowledge—a heap of presumption.
Objectivity is god-like, though not in the pagan sense in which the gods interfered with human affairs and were passionately partisan. Rather, the god-like quality resides in the feeling that everything can be understood if it is studied more or less thoroughly. Everything makes sense one way or another. Modern times opened the door to this sense-making as a way of life. Previously human beings trusted to magic to explain what didn’t make sense. When someone suddenly fell ill and died, a supernatural cause was offered for the suddenness of that death. Life would be unbearable if there weren’t such a cause. With the decline of magic and rise of science, people stood before the world of phenomena—human, mechanical, and natural—with increasing confidence. The enormous harm all around us and within us could begin to be tamed.
This seems like a positive story and in some ways obviously is. People in modern times live longer (assuming they are born in the right parts of the modern world) and are not subject to fewer dire confusions about, for instance, medical phenomena. The downside is that the will to knowledge at once incites false hopes of understanding and turns people into puppets of knowingness, a condition that has bred the rabid consumerism that afflicts the planet.
Education, to cite one aspect of this knowingness, delights in this reductionism. For one, it must be purely practical and thus about getting a job—no art, no music, no poetry. Accordingly, education can be standardized; teachers are vending machines offering via textbooks and computer programs packaged information for mass consumption. Anything that cannot be objectively tested is worthless. Societies that have lore to pass on—this is why we do something the way we do it—agree on the worth of that lore. Societies that stake their identity on knowledge have only the idol of that knowledge to pass on. Unlike knowledge, lore does not become outdated. Little wonder that the federal government in the United States has resorted in recent decades to hollow sloganeering—“No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” Behind where and to what top? Education is one more hype.
The role of knowledge in human affairs comes with a crucial, if ancient, warning—eat of the tree of knowledge and suffer devastating consequences. No larger truth has been imparted to the human race. The terror of knowledge, and its understandable association with death (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” as J. Robert Oppenheimer put it), is that knowledge confuses and disorients people. This is not because ignorance is preferable but because knowledge enforces a terrible reductionism. Every large unspoken thing becomes a small assured thing. The consumer of knowledge is little more than that. It is not that our curiosity is boundless—most people want to be left alone to follow their habits and, beyond the realm of gossip, are very much incurious. Rather, within the precincts of knowledge, the human mind is eager to somehow measure human worth, by means of IQs, test results, and psychological designations. In a remarkable display of conceit, the human mind proposes itself as the standard for all life. No wonder God warned Adam and Eve. He saw how easy it would be to trample the fragile value of any life—human and otherwise. He saw how easily knowledge became specious, the stuff of smug numbers or murderous ideology.
And would you have us know nothing and sit in caves and vegetate? Hardly. The dilemma for modern times is similar to ancient times—avoiding idolatry. Belief in knowledge as some elixir that will solve all dilemmas is not merely preposterous but dangerous, breeding a frightening over-confidence. What God was asking of the human race was respect for the power of knowledge. If you touch it, beware. Unless a counter-force is present that speaks to all that isn’t known, knowledge becomes overbearing: everything can be known, a puerile belief but nonetheless potent. One sees the human race staring into an abyss and unable to draw back because knowledge is spurring it forward. Forward is not inevitably a wise direction.
This is wisdom speaking. Thank you.
That last sentence has become one of my favorite quotes.