The Cleavage and Technologization of Knowing
Notes on Enlightenment
I still think of this Substack as an experiment. It’s a work in progress. Having finished this post, I find myself scratching my chin and frowning. I’m trying very hard to keep to a weekly update schedule (haven’t missed one yet), and this time the demands of my life away from my writing desk compelled me to turn over what’s basically an impromptu and undercooked exercise in freewriting. I have a hard time knowing when to stop, slow down, or pull over and examine a map when I’m flying by the seat of my pants like I was here.
During the next few weeks I’m going to set a six-paragraph limit on updates and see what happens.
Generally speaking, the members of a “primitive” preliterate society knew what they all knew. In a setting where the most significant form of specialization consisted of the division of labor between the sexes, and where knowledge that was not reiterated and enacted by the group soon passed into oblivion, we could expect to see very little divergence regarding both practical fact and metaphysical matters. During periods of stability, such a culture would have little patience for a maverick who disputed the community’s magical (even superstitious) world-narrative, in the rare event that it produced such a person. The noetic apparatus of orality and the exigencies of a low-tech subsistence economy gave primitive cultures a steeply conformist and conservative tilt.
If I can be excused for making popular generalizations on this point: if perhaps an animal sacrifice had no bearing on an annual yield of acorns, if a ritual dance did not actually affect the probability of rain, or if propitiations to the spirits haunting the land could be empirically proven as useless because there demonstrably aren’t any spirits to be bribed, it didn’t matter because such practices were part and parcel of a system that worked. People were fed and clothed and housed. Generation engendered generation. Central harmony was assured; the people knew themselves and understood their roles and obligations vis-à-vis one another and the animate world from which the group eked out the means of its survival. Hence their conservatism: if the community’s practices kept its members alive—and if the known history of innovation lay in the crepuscular province of myth, recommending little in the way of practicable emulation—why risk switching things up?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and it was likely the pressures of scarcity and migration that impelled different peoples across the world to experiment. Degree by degree, century after century, animal husbandry, horticulture, metallurgy, architecture, and every other foundational rudiment of civilization additively developed. Labor became divided and specialized, and civic hierarchies crystallized.
The advanced societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt each produced a literate priest caste whose vocational concentration was knowledge itself.1 To this set devolved the responsibility of recording and keeping secular and sacred histories, tracking the motions of the stars and planets and “reading” whatever they might augur, recognizing diseases and prescribing treatments, managing integral sectors of the economy, and, of course, acting as the intermediaries between the gods and the people. Notables who wielded authority from a sphere distinct from that of the ecclesiastical or bureaucratic classes (such as the Kshatriya caste of India or the nobility of medieval Europe) might also be literate and learned, insofar as it was usually a good thing for the heads of a region or state to have some idea of what their brains were thinking.
The difficulty of mastering cuneiform or hieroglyphics helped to ensure knowledge monopolies in the Bronze Age societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, while the necessity of knowing Latin allowed for the same in medieval Europe, in spite of the relative simplicity of the Roman alphabet.2 All generalizations about the medieval period as a whole are necessarily sloppy, given that we’re talking about constellations of localized groups across an entire continent over a span of centuries, but it’s safe to say that the illiterate farmer or stable hand wasn’t versed in the controversy surrounding the ontological status of universals. Such matters had little bearing on any practical affairs of theirs, and the medium and venues in which they were discussed by learned men were largely closed off to them.3
The point I’m driving at is that with specialization of labor and the foundation of a literate ecclesiastical and scholarly caste came a cleavage of knowledge across developed societies.
It’s natural that the farmer, the blacksmith, and the miller (assuming all were illiterate and unschooled in Latin) were each possessed of knowledge exclusive to practitioners of their trades, and it just as obviously follows that their conception of facts pertaining to natural philosophy and theology would have been exceedingly rudimentary (or even wrong) by the standards of those who wrote and read the books in which such knowledge was set down, studied, and copied. The great monastic libraries of the High Middle Ages already contained more information than any individual could retain and make use of, and access to that information was restricted to a miniscule portion of the population. Justifications for the triune social order employed physiological metaphors: the hands and legs and brawn of society (laborers) ought to be guided by its reasoning faculty (the Church), and it would be a reversal of the natural order to let the muscles arrogate to themselves the function of the brains.
It would be false to say that the medieval third estate was totally ignorant of the intellectual regime and cultural productions of their time (by the fourteenth century this certainly wasn’t the case), but they were nevertheless captive subjects. The Christian world-narrative was a box which the illiterate laborer could no more think his way out of than a blind cave salamander could conceptualize color. That a learned clergyman or monastic could do so is demonstrated by the relatively high number of them who were executed or suffered punishment otherwise for heresy, and by the breeding of humanists and eclectics through contact with increasingly available pagan literature.
The monastics and schoolmen who enjoyed the knowledge oligopoly which the culture of chirographic production locked in place for them were perhaps less likely to think of themselves as jealous gatekeepers than the stewards and disseminators of true knowledge, if their contemporaneous reactions to the printing press were issued in earnest. Their fears will sound familiar to anyone concerned about the “epistemological crisis” of the internet age: the rapid production and propagation of texts without ecclesiastical supervision, they warned, will lead the rude masses into the darkness of untruth.
Their fears were justified insofar as the Reformation and the scientific revolution were direct consequences of print technology. The prosthetic hippocampus which once belonged to a very narrow strip of the population came into increasingly general use among the bourgeoisie, who usurped from the Church the means of producing texts. The social convulsions were rapid, but not instantaneous. The earliest printings of Aristotle still required the reader to know ancient Greek and Latin. Even when vernacular printings were available, they were still expensive enough to be luxury items—but still considerably cheaper than manuscripts had been. In any case, it took several decades for the exhaustion of classical texts to fuel printers’ demands for new material.
“Life is not determined by consciousness,” Marx wrote, “but consciousness by life.” Ideology lags behind reality. The ethos of the intellectual movement which we now call the Enlightenment was both a declaration and intensification of the repatterning of human activity around print technology that was already long underway by the time the likes of Locke and Hobbes were drafting their manuscripts. Broadly speaking, it emphasized the (relative) democratization of knowledge enabled by the printing press, the empiricism of the scientific revolution, and the possibility of principled free-thinking outside the boundaries drawn up by the weakened but still formidable churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant. Diedrot intended his grand Encyclopédie to provided the (bourgeoisie) layman with an organized foundation of general knowledge on which he could ground his own thinking. Kant, whose career effectively closed out the Enlightenment, famously articulated what the whole thing was about:
[I]t is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.
But that the public should enlighten itself is more likely; indeed, if it is only allowed freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. For even among the entrenched guardians of the great masses a few will always think for themselves, a few who, after having themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread the spirit of a rational appreciation for both their own worth and for each person's calling to think for himself…
Thus, once nature has removed the hard shell from this kernel for which she has most fondly cared, namely, the inclination to and vocation for free thinking, the kernel gradually reacts on a people’s mentality (whereby they become increasingly able to act freely), and it finally even influences the principles of government, which finds that it can profit by treating men, who are now more than machines, in accord with their dignity.
By “immaturity,” Kant refers to the tendency of people to credulously accept and follow the reasoning of others instead of employing their own capacity for reason. The general thrust of the Enlightenment, at least on paper, was that an across-the-board improvement in human knowledge, facilitated by freedom—“the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters,” Kant clarifies—would improve the general lot of humanity (though he and most of his peers were principally concerned with the bourgeoisie).
Judging from the rise of philosophical irrationalism in the late nineteenth century and the character of fin-de-siècle arts and letters, the project entered into turbulent waters and ran aground sometime between the French Revolution and the Belle Époque—but this isn’t the place to attempt a postmortem.4 The point is that the aspirations of the Enlightenment evinced a faith in technology to effectuate a general elevation human intelligence and virtue, and to thereby improve the human condition. That technology was print. Locke and Hobbes worked as tutors, and Kant taught university classes—but their life-projects were directed toward mass media.
The subject of print culture relies on a prosthetic that automates portions of his cognitive labors. The original and revolutionary genius of chirography resided in the text’s function as an external memory store: with tablet or scroll or codex in hand, the reader contacts testimonies which have been abstracted from any person (except perhaps from the chirographer) and from the things and events of which they “speak,” and which can either be copied down or set aside for later retrieval. Nothing need be memorized in detail.
Moreover, the text automates the very act of thinking. To read silently is to drive one’s thoughts along a rail laid down in advance by somebody else; it can be irresistibly tempting to satisfy oneself with having exerted one’s faculties just to that extent and then leave it at that.5 It typically takes discipline and training to interrogate a text and use it as a stepping stone for intellectual exercises of one’s own—and comparatively few people receive such instruction. Writing preserves knowledge by substracting from the word all responsiveness and all concrete experience of that to which it refers, and the tenuousness of knowing corresponds to the tenuousness with which discursive content finds purchase in objects and events in the world of sensuous experience.
Most information received via text remains abstract to the reader. Unless we are ourselves archeologists and archivists with access to historical artifacts and primary sources, we’re constrained to take historical narratives as they are given to us. We can read about astronomy and chemistry and physics, but one cannot know an empirical science in the capacity of an armchair reader—especially not when the phylogenic divisions of the sciences have all become so far advanced in their specialized grooves that in some cases decades of study and exceptional talent are required simply to get oneself up to date. The giants on whose shoulders a modern-day Newton would stand have grown monumentally taller since the seventeenth century. The extent of the cleavage has never been greater.6
Philosophy that is learned without discussion and argument, physical sciences that are learned without direct observation and experimentation, history that is learned though a vernacular gloss—any discursive knowledge without the ligature of active experience and self-directed application connecting it to the world in which the reader operates is necessarily fragmentary, and often illusory. The printing press constructed a hothouse of dilettantism. On this point, I’m reminded of the passage in The Great Gatsby in which Tom Buchanan oafishly explains the books on eugenics he’s been reading lately:
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California —” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
I suppose many or most of us have at least once felt ourselves foolish in this way: having recently read a book by Adorno or whomever, we mention it at a social gathering and talk about its contents, and are embarrassed to discover the vacuity of our own understanding. (“So, like, the culture industry makes it so we’re always working, you know, even when we’re technically off the clock, and it’s, oh, totalitarianism. Do you see?”) We voluntarily stepped up for a pop quiz and realized we didn’t grasp or retain the material half as well as we imagined. This was precisely the caution Plato advised in the Phaedrus: reading in and of itself doesn’t necessarily increase one’s knowledge or facility for reasoning. Nor did generalized literacy make people any smarter as an aggregate. By and large it instead brought about a noetic reorientation. Whether it was a net gain or loss for the mass of humanity as a whole is up for debate.
I don’t mean to say the print-driven technical advances of the last three or four or five centuries haven’t delivered unambiguous material improvements to the majority of people living in the West. But being able to go to the doctor and get a prescription for antibiotics, fly across the ocean on an airliner, buy any sort of produce year-round, or watch steaming movies on a smartphone doesn’t mean we’re all more intelligent or even more reasonable than the majority of people who lived a thousand or two thousand years ago. We have more engineers and surgeons and scientists, certainly—but every “civilized” epoch has its specialists. “Physicists,” wrote Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie, “who are attached to their theories with the same zeal and for the same motives as artisans to their practices on this point, resemble the common run of people much more than they imagine.” We can say the same about an atomic engineer or a neurosurgeon or an AI developer.
If you’re old enough to remember the early rumblings of the digital revolution, you might recall some of the public internet’s first exponents speaking of the medium’s possibilities in terms strikingly reminiscent of the Enlightenment—although in their case they placed a direct and explicit emphasis on the medium of transmission. By an even more profound democratization of knowledge production and distribution, they contended, we can break the oligopolies which the networks, academies, and parties have long maintained over culture, knowledge, and politics; the information superhighway will be a tool for education and the unfettered sharing and improvement of ideas unlike any the world has ever seen.
We know how that worked out—but the point I’d like to dwell on is how the internet superseded the text as a means of automating thought and offloading memory. Nick Carr sounded the alarm relatively early: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Maybe—but it would be better to once again say that it’s reorienting our intelligence. We have immediate and free access to more discursive knowledge than Diedrot could ever dream of compiling—but there’s no organization to any of it, and the technical dimensions of its delivery do very little in the way of encouraging the exercise of intellectual discipline or reasoning from principles which Plato and Kant both recognized as the basic criteria of a mature thinker. Most of us use our devices in the capacity of portable “libraries” as machines for retrieving fragmentary data and confirming biases.
In a wedding reception debate between a young atheist who googles facts about geology (using search phrases beginning with “how do we know that…”) and a Christian fundamentalist who’s memorized Bible passages supporting the “Young Earth” view, there are two main difference between the interlocutors. The first is that the atheist is much more likely to have an accurate view of the situation—but that’s incidental when he himself can’t tell basalt from obsidian on his own and has to turn back to Google when the canny fundamentalist asks him how exactly isotopic dating works and what it proves. The second is that the Christian fundamentalist actually has a firmer grasp on what he’s talking about than does the atheist, even though his argument more or less follows an intellectual algorithm, and even though he’s definitely wrong.
Feeling certainty in our understanding of something when we can’t articulate a proof of it for ourselves makes that understanding a matter of opinion or of faith, and most of us today have as little alternative but to trust our oracles as did the medieval peasant to accept what the parish priest and the church’s stained-glass windows told him about heaven and earth. To be adequately “well-informed” today is an impossibly high bar. Unless we’re content with minding our own business and admitting ignorance of most affairs beyond our neighborhood and the modest facts of which personal experience and real study have acquainted us—and the tendency of digital culture to politicize everything makes a principled and honest agnosticism tantamount to cowardice—we’re constrained to handle synoptic information instantaneously delivered by a machine as though it were earned knowledge.
None of this necessarily makes us stupid—our adeptness at rapidly searching for, retrieving, and using information evinces a mode of operational intelligence whose exercise was unknown to the thousands of pre-digital generations before us—but it very much tends to make dogmatists of us, in spite of our pretensions to enlightenment.
One of the most notable exceptions, of course, is Classical Greece.
Innis: “A complex system of writing becomes the possession of a special class and tends to support aristocracies. A simple flexible system of writing admits of adaptation to the vernacular but slowness of the adaptation facilitates monopolies of knowledge and hierarchies.”
Moreover, illiterate people generally don’t deal in abstractions (they’re inclined towards the particular, practical, and concrete), and something like the realism/nominalism controversy was nothing if not abstruse.
It might suffice to say that convergence of an unameliorated cleavage in knowledge and power across social and regional divisions with profoundly transformative technological and economic developments resulted in progress occurring as something much less like a march than a feverish and dyspraxic lurch. Insofar as the Enlightenment was associated with bourgeoisie liberalism, a pushback was inevitable under the circumstances.
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid. But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life. Thus in the modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts. Of course, no one is merely a mathematician, or merely a lawyer. People have lives outside their professions or their businesses. But the point is the restraint of serious thought within a groove. The remainder of life is treated superficially, with the imperfect categories of thought derived from one profession.
Society is changing how much humans leverage what we do, not what humans are or what we do.