Before writing, what mattered most was remembering.
Verse and metre, repeated tropes and familiar characters, high-emotion and strong plots: that all helped bards to remember epics and sagas. No wonder that in oral traditions knowledge is so often transmitted as story: that makes the concepts more memorable than lists of unrelated facts.
Those who sought to recall information, rather than myth, argument rather than narrative, employed memory palaces. You create an unexpected, surprising image – say, Zeus applying crimson lipstick – and place him along a route you know well – the track from home to church, say. You find dozens of these and place them along the journey in prescribed locations. Each one you give to hold a piece of information. The cost of Jacob’s wool or the address of the money-lender, the password to your iPhone or the name of your daughter’s best friend’s new baby. As you walk the path in your mind, lipsticked Zeus presents you with the fact you’ve secured to his keeping.
Once you can write, you can keep lists and records, memoranda and information. The memory recedes that little bit as you no longer need to exercise and strengthen it – but the quantity of information you can store increases exponentially. You just have to remember in which book or which folder, on which of these miscellaneous scraps of paper you jotted down that vital snippet. Knowledge is liberated and, in part, democratised. You can send a letter jam-packed with facts to another person outside your immediate group. You can fill a book with history and scientific discovery.
Writing, even more than an oral tradition supported by memory, allows humans to co-operate on a wider geographic scale than other animals and, remarkably, across time. Future generations do not have to make discoveries over and over again: they can learn about them from the written record.
It enables development and fuels technological advancement.
But when knowledge is distributed on paper or screen, is the value of information altered? Perhaps it feels more objective and static? Rather less tied to the knower and the process of coming-to-know? For sure, to remember something is easier if you yourself came to an understanding of it. It’s easier if you have a strong emotional reaction to it. If you believe it. Once on paper, though, all facts become, in a sense, more equal. For better and for worse. Who said it confers authority that little bit more strongly than who wrote it, because the originator or source needn’t be present at the learning of it by a reader. Maybe it’s easier to read information from a source you despise than to hear it from their lips. Maybe it’s easier to have an open-mind, or, to take the negative perspective, to be polluted.
Leibniz, I think it was, is believed to have been the last person to know all that humanity knew. He’d read all the books then published. Taken on board the sum of human knowledge, from the Greeks and Romans, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Islamic world. How much he knew of Eastern thought is up for grabs. And of course the oral traditions of the Americas and Australia were out of his reach. But, let’s say he knew all that an educated European man could possibly know.
These days, I wonder if one person could know all there is to know about one single subject. Say, cancer? Or even about one particular type of cancer? We dive so deep in our disciplines that a narrow focus is all we can have. There is so much knowledge. On everything.
And how much do we need to remember? Memory can be out-sourced to Google, to Wikipedia, to a terabyte of hard-drive. What status knowledge? What status memory? You’d hope that this would liberate mental real estate for creativity. And for learning ‘how to’. You’d think it would give us the space to think. Yet when there is so little point in remembering or in knowing, how much direct and immediate access do we have to that information to apply it in thought or creativity?
An oral culture might have been more concerned with conserving knowledge than in accumulating it. The value lay in what was already given, rather than what remained open. Self-limiting to an extent. Now, where there seems too much information to choose between, perhaps the value in which we hold it is even lower. It is like hyper-inflation, what once cost £1 now costs £10,000 and so £1 ceases to be of great interest. But every fortune is built of an accumulation of £1s. Disregard them, and no fortune can be amassed. Yet, what if some - or many - of those coins are fake?
What comes to matter more that conservation is consideration; instead of pure accumulation, we need powers of assessment.
To judge. It demands a base of solid knowledge and decades of developing discrimination. That is what education needs to supply.
Because this was the great lesson of the Scientific Revolution - not to take authorities to be the authority. Some may harbour doubts about the possibility of progress, but the inability to question and analyse, to make observations and discoveries, guarantees if not decline, at least stagnancy.
Jonathan Haidt has many interesting points on this matter. He founded the 'Heterodox Academy' project and it is his, sensible, contention, that educators and students alike should resist orthodoxy for a heterodox principle. The same rule applies to all individuals.
It is a challenge in a world where there are so many voices; where, as I explained in a recent post, it can be tempting to put all one's eggs and ego in a single ideological basket; and where it is hard to know whom to trust. But Haidt offers a useful tip. Most of us are unconsciously beset by the biases of motivated reasoning. When we like something, we don't say, 'Is this entirely credible? Must I believe it?' Instead we say, 'Can I believe this?' Among whatever host of unsupported claims or poor arguments, there will be one fact, somewhere, that we can claim to be true. And that's enough for us. If anyone questions us about this belief, we can say, 'Well, that's true, so the rest is likely to be.' Of course, there's no logic to that argument, but who cares? It's how we feel. On the other hand, if we don't like something, we will subject it to the most rigorous analysis. We only have to find one questionable claim, and that's it: we don't have to believe it. See how climate change denial works?
Being aware of this normal human tendency, we can seek to apply the same rigorous analysis to the claims we intuitively like, while recognising the vigorous efforts we are going to in order to support the gut-feeling about what we do not like.
One of his tutors, says Haidt in a talk with Sam Harris, had a policy of contesting every claim, to pursue it to its logical extreme. Just see where the opposite point of view takes you. You might find golden nuggets in arguments you resist, and a depth of invalid assumptions in those you have long espoused.
Haidt seeks validity in all arguments and resists the security of certainty. In short, he recommends that we go easier on each other, while maintaining a personal epistemic humility. This may help to combat our inclination to moralise and make harsh judgements, our tendency for motivated reasoning. He offered what he described as his favourite quotation from the ancients, a Zen monk, Seng-T'san (I have quoted here more than Haidt but less than the full teaching):
The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood,
the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in inner feelings of emptiness.
Be serene in the oneness of things and such
erroneous views will disappear by themselves...
When the thought is in bondage the truth is hidden
for everything is murky and unclear.
And the burdensome practice of judging
brings annoyance and weariness.
What benefit can be derived
from distinctions and separations?
If you wish to move in the One Way
do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.
Indeed, to accept them fully
is identical with enlightenment.
The wise man strives to no goals
but the foolish man fetters himself...
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