Owning Knowledge

The atypical range of arcane knowledge exhibited in posts and comments on Ricochet is enjoyable and oddly comforting. It reflects a disposition towards the sheer enjoyment of learning and the acquisition of knowledge itself, a disposition that may be eroding.

The aboriginal peoples of Australia had no written language. The entirety of the mythology, history, art, and survival technologies had to be contained in a single mind to be passed on orally over a lifetime for younger members. I watched an interview with an elderly Australian woman who explained that there were no categories, separate subjects or specialists in the indigenous culture. The closest word for that body of knowledge was “the law.” Possessing that body of language defined one’s identity, membership, occupational skills and the source of meaning.

Until rather recently in the human experience, the notion that one does not need to actually possess knowledge because it can be looked up later if needed would seem foreign if not insane. I told my eldest grandson that the local librarian chewed me out one time because I forgot to erase the penciled notes I wrote in the flyleaf. In that non-electronic era, whenever I saw a word, a historical or literary reference, or something else I did not recognize or understand, I would make a note in the back of the book if I did not have a notepad with me. That way, I could look it up later. My grandson found that strange because his education neither instilled the same outlook about possessing knowledge nor induced the same habits of curiosity.

It made me wonder if hyperlinks and the internet had existed then, would it have been an ongoing feast for my curiosity, or would I have not bothered, valuing it less knowing it was there if I ever cared to look it up?

An emergency room physician or a fighter pilot would not have the luxury of looking it up later when specific skills and knowledge were required in the moment. But in so many other contexts, all of us can drift and delegate in ways that were once unimaginable because we can look it up later. Does information technology protect ignorance and indifference?

A half-century ago, when I was doing SAT math prep in church basements for DC public school students, family members would attend sessions, bring refreshments and watch with keen interest. I observed a grandfather berate a boy for goofing off during a problem session, telling him that only a knucklehead does not realize how important education is and that teachers deserve respect. His own grandfather may have been the son of a former slave or certainly of a generation that did not take education for granted.

Now, we make all skills and knowledge in those same public schools almost optional. Applied social justice will obviate the need for competence or intellectual formation for minorities, and for wealthier white kids, narcissism and sexual license comprise the new formational experience. Increasingly, American kids cannot even formulate the questions for which that amazing technology could provide answers in the unlikely event they were ever inclined to ask.

For an indigenous Australian, if there were no one left who knew “the law”, then that knowledge and the way of life it defined would die. For modern Americans, are we deluding ourselves that knowledge survives so long as there is an electronic repository for it, even if no one actually seeks much less possesses it? If it does not form us, is that knowledge dead?