Knowing What We Know
“Knowing What We Know:The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic” is a particularly ambitious work both for this professional writer, Simon Winchester, as it would be for any other author.
For me this history of knowledge from creation, through transmission to storage was a particularly compelling read. His background in Asian studies lends a surprising east-west balance in his account. The history, presented in a compelling and readable way, is the basis from which the author approaches his essential concern and question.
And that is what effect the ease of access and transmission of most knowledge made possible in the last three or four decades will effect human civilization going forward.
For most of the 5,000-plus years of civilization, technology was about facilitating, enhancing and easing physical exertion. Most easily rendered as labour saving devices.
But now technology, through computerization and the internet has made a huge jump into saving and relieving people from mental efforts.
He sums up this quandary right at the end of the book asking two profound questions. Will “all these wondrous machines that, in one way or another, now allow us to avoid overworking our brains, somehow diminish our capacity for thought, in much the same way that underused muscles will tend to atrophy, and stop working in the absence of need.”
And the other, providing intellectual balance, somewhat surprised me given the tenor of the book “What if the mind does not work at all like a muscle? What if not having to tax our minds with such tedious matters as arithmetic and geography and spelling and memorizing so many facts actually free parts of the mind? What if mental leisure gives it the time and space to suppose, ponder, ruminate, consider, assess, wonder, contemplate, imagine, dream? What if removing the storm and stress of daily mental need, lowering the mind’s noise-to-signal ratio, instead clear the mind and allow it, now less clouded, taxed and troubled to seek out the potential it always had?”
While Winchester allows this latter fulsome question, the book does not suggest he subscribes to it.
Early on he introduces us to a word that crops up throughout and completely in his sixth, and last chapter, which is devoted to it, the “polymath”.
For those who may not have encountered the term, it refers to somebody, invariably highly intelligent, but differentiated by a huge range of interests of which he/she has a vast knowledge in many. By no means extensive, examples from western civilization could include Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Bertrand Russel.
From China, Kung Fu Tse (Confucius) and Sung dynasty philosopher, Shen Gua fit the definition..
So much knowledge, coupled with need to specialize, may make such ‘know-it-alls’ impossible going forward. The author, asks the question, but seems to suggest it will be a loss. Perhaps he regards them as civilizational heroes.
Sally Adee in her book ‘We Are Electric’ says modern polymorphs are needed to bring cohesion to different perspectives within a field, where the tunnel knowledge of specialization creates barriers and insularities.
But while Winchester leads up to these concerns, he presents an interesting history of knowledge often crediting ideas to people that other historians have been ignorant of, ignored or dismissed. So there are lots of little revelations.
Early in the transmission of knowledge segment, he contrasts the historically rigorous examination of students in China with the laughably simple challenges given to American students, such as SATs. One is invited to wonder whether all that Chinese effort will continue to be relevant going forward.
He has segments on the rise of libraries as a way of storing knowledge.
What seems to have been saved in the world’s first library, is in cuneiform on clay tablets and mundane in content. It was in Mesopotamia, more specifically the civilization of Nineveh about 1,500 B.C. near the present day city of Mosul in Iraq.
But the grandest of the ancients was the library in Cairo during the latter Athenian period. Although past cuneiform, its media was in the form of copied scrolls on papyrus and vellum (animal skin). The author briefly discusses the invention of paper, most likely in China. Wood block printing came along in the first few hundred years AD, also likely in China, with one of the great extant collections, from the 13th century, now in a Korean monastery.
Winchester moves forward with the invention of moveable metal type, credited by Europeans and the West to Gutenberg in Germany, but at least as likely to have started in the far east in Korea or China slightly earlier.
Sixteenth century English philosopher Francis Bacon once claimed the greatest technological achievements were printing, gunpowder and the compass, believing all were European, when in fact none were, says Winchester.
The author also has large segments on the part played by museums in storing knowledge. The first ever may have been in Babylon, Iraq.
He also portrays the initiations and growth of the encyclopaedia as a source for knowledge and follows that right up to and including Wikipedia and internet search.
The author effectively uses one of his own experiences to illustrate where a whole group of refined skills, requiring intelligence and knowledge are suddenly made unnecessary.
He is on a small boat in the western Indian Ocean travelling south along the coast of Africa toward South Africa, with a small crew, in the 1980s. “Ruth” a skilled boat navigator uses several hallowed mechanical instruments evolved over thousands of years to determine, speed, direction and position of the boat in open water. It seems to be an analog procedure that gets approximate enough results for the task. Then all are made irrelevant by the precision of the global positioning system (GPS) within a few years. Now someone with only a cell phone can get the job done with digital precision and using limited knowledge, and nowhere near the smarts of Ruth. “Up until this point sailors had been required to think their way across the sea. Soon there would be an instrument that, at a stroke, would do all the thinking for them.” “Huge swaths of human thought have been snatched away, and vast areas of responsibility have been delegated to electronics.” GPS is now the only global utility free to anybody.
While the service is far better and easier, what about the void in smarts needed?
Then there is the south seas islander whose people’s marine skills are far more attuned to nature and subtler than the mechanical instruments. Technologies are coming and being supplanted at ever increasing rates. Telegraph less than a century, telex and pagers for a couple of decades and a fax machine for less (physicians excepted). However, cultural values and practices and oral traditions centuries old may continue to be practiced.
The author suggests that commerce and greed may have motivated the rapid evolution of technology.
Now at the same time, reliance on such a comprehensive tool as the cell phone, can leave a person helpless with the sudden absence of it. Needing to make a phone call, a phone can be found but numbers, even the most important, have not been committed to memory, but the phone relied on to present them when called upon. Further one’s location is also known through the phone with reliance on simple geographical knowledge having been abandoned. Maybe you have a car, but your phone is needed to open it.
The breadth and depth of the author’s research into the areas germane to building his case is impressive.
He often uses some ornate and humorous turns of phrase that invite savouring and sometimes scurrying for a dictionary…or most likely google.
The precis portion of this review is available at this link. http://www.bookreviewsbyalex.com/review/knowing-what-we-knowthe-transmission-knowledge-ancient-wisdom-modern-magic
