Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

by Simon Winchester

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge.

That wasp, so vividly remembered, surely did me a considerable pedagogical favor.

Karl Popper noted, the amount of ignorance will always outweigh the totality of knowledge—there

Printing—first with the wooden blocks carved in ninth-century China and then six hundred years later with the movable metal types created in Mainz by Gutenberg and in London by Caxton—began the modern story.

If our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?

Translators of the ancient Greek texts have now distilled what Plato had Socrates say in this dialogue to be known henceforward as justified true belief—the

Knowledge as justified true belief, this concept of JTB, validated so very long ago, has ever since formed a cornerstone of the science of epistemology—the study of knowledge, from the Greek word epistēmē.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit. O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying! The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621

“the original instructions.”

The very earliest means of transmitting knowledge, those that still involve surviving indigenous peoples, have certainly endured. They are primarily oral or pictorial in nature:

First, it helps in real time to ensure the health and survival of a community—its survivance, to use a term from the anthropologists’ playbook, meaning something rather more than mere survival, a continuation of tradition by way of the regular connection with the spirits of tribal ancestors, a connection that helps keep “a sense of presence over absence.” Second, the handing on of knowledge helps maintain for the future the very coherence of the community itself, in much the same way as some modern religious rituals—those of the Jewish tradition come to mind—that help to keep a vulnerable community intact, self-aware, and self-confident.

Why indeed did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?

The teaching of children, in other words, is where the story of the transfer of knowledge truly begins.

At its simplest, education is an attempt by the adult members of any human society to transmit the knowledge at their command in such a way as to nurture the coming generation and shape it in approximate accordance with the adults’ own ideals of how best to live a life.

In four quite separated places around the planet, and over an extended period of around two thousand years that began around 3400 BC, the craft of writing was invented.

The fact that they are all very approximately of similar age, and that the civilizations that did the writing had no known contact with one another, argues powerfully that when taken together they illustrate the steady and linear progress of human evolution and suggest that genes played a signal role in this evolutionary step.

Chinese texts from the Shang dynasty, which ran from the sixteenth to the tenth centuries BC, hint at the existence of schools from very much earlier than anywhere else in the world.

John Templeton Foundation,

dark, hopelessly lost in the mountains. He thought that

Confucius, Mencius, the Book of Changes, the Tso Chuan chronicle, the Book of Rites,

Spanish conquistadors set fire to the deerskin scrolls in what passed for libraries in the Aztec communities

The desecration of culture seems so often to be one of the handmaidens of conquest.

And things, when assembled and curated and presented with the intention to educate or remind or simply to declare with pride, are generally to be found, if available for the public, in what the Greeks named for a temple to the Muses, a mouseion.

It is interesting to suppose that the very idea of a museum is mostly a Western construct. There is little evidence to suggest that there ever were museums in ancient China.

But suggestible people do exist, and in dismayingly large numbers. The press can and does on occasion play upon their fears, their apprehensions, their suspicions.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think. —Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), quoting Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

A piece of wood shaped like a wedge of pie is dropped into the water behind the boat. The drag from the wood pulls the rope, knotted at regular intervals, and the number of knots passing through the sailor’s hands in a certain time gives a rough measure of speed. That’s why nautical speed is still measured in knots.

The ship’s latitude can be determined by measuring the angle between the horizon and the sun at its highest point—though only if it is visible; clouds can make position fixing a real trial.

Longitude can be determined by noting the difference in time between locally observed noon, when the sun is at its highest point, and the local time with reference to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by an accurate ship’s chronometer, a good wristwatch, or a smartphone.*

Labor-saving devices have been around since people began to perform manual labor and wished they didn’t have to.

The Archimedes screw performed the latter magic, allowing irrigators to draw water up from a stream by the simple process of turning a handle, making the screw do the work for very little expenditure of human sweat.

The pulley block, first employed in Egypt in the twelfth century BC, offered a range of mechanical advantages to the lifting of weights that were solid, rather than liquid.

(It has to be pointed out again that total neutrality is never attainable in the dispersion of knowledge of any kind.*

If Shen was to be known for one memorable accomplishment in his life, it would be his realization of the usefulness of the magnetic compass.

Essentially, Shen Gua invented compass-aided navigation.

Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World of how humankind might one day fall in love with devices that help us not to think.

One coda: as a direct consequence of Hiroshima, today’s world is now awash in atomic weapons. Since no weapon thus far made has gone unused, it sems reasonable to assume that someone, somewhere, will detonate a hydrogen bomb in war.

Confucius wrote in his Analects a set of suggested rules that he reasoned might nudge society in a more civil direction.

eudaimonia,