Form Oak Journal – An anti-civilization journal and audiozine – Issue 2
Richard Katz, in the prologue to his book, Indigenous Healing Psychology,[1] recounts a conversation he had with a Ju/’hoansi healer, his “friend and guide,” while doing field research in Botswana in 1968, back when the Ju/’hoansi were still living as nomadic gatherer-hunters. Katz had brought a tape recorder to record their conversation, and was playing his collection of recordings of Ju/’hoansi healing dances for his guide, who was absolutely fascinated, and requested that the sounds be played over and over.
At some point, the healer remarked that the tape recorder was “something definitely powerful,” and said that he wished he knew how it works. Katz started to explain how the microphone picks up the sound, but his guide interrupted and said that he understood how the microphone works by collecting the sound and then sending it down the wire to the inside of the box, and then dismissed the microphone as a trivial thing, and said that he suspected that it wasn’t really the thing doing the hearing. It is obviously inside the box where the voices are being collected, he said, that’s where the real power is. And then he repeated that he wished he knew how it works.
When Katz started to tell him about energy and sound waves, his guide interrupted again, and said, “We already know those things. But what I really want to know is, how does it work?” Eventually Katz came to realize that he could not answer the question, that his own understanding was really only a superficial sketch of the process. His guide was disappointed, and said that “Whenever we’re given a thing of power by our ancestors—and surely this thing that captures our voices is powerful—we’re always told how it works and how to use it.”
A major difference between the Ju/’hoansi of the mid twentieth century and the inhabitants of civilization is that the latter have no idea about how anything really works—and even less of an idea about how any of it should be used. I’m looking at the cellphone sitting next to me right now. It is definitely a thing of power. And although I could give an extensive sketch of the basics of cellular networks and digital information processing and touchscreen circuitry, I really have no idea how any of it works or how it should be used, what greater purposes it should be applied to. All things of power in civilization are like this, from cellphones and automobiles to global financial institutions and international trade agreements.
The phrase “Knowledge is power” was first penned (in its Latin form, scientia potentia est) by Tomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, although the phrase is often attributed to Francis Bacon. Bacon, however, offered the slightly different version, “Knowledge itself is power.” Both of these versions express a kind of truth; and although the distinction between them may appear trivial on the surface, the difference is not a subtle one. The first suggests that knowledge is perhaps a kind of power, that knowledge can be put to use, that it can do things for you, that it enhances your capacity to act on the world in some way. Knowing how to operate an automobile, for example, increases your potential speed and range of movement. And in the competitive social world—the most frequent context of the phrase—knowing something that someone else doesn’t often puts you in a position to take advantage of their ignorance to your benefit. The Baconian version, however, suggests something more than just this: knowledge itself—the very fact of knowing—is the source of power, that the degree to which you possess power is, in a real sense, tied to—and limited by—what it is that you know and understand.[2]
Here in digitally-enhanced twenty-first century global society, we have easy access to an unimaginable and continually expanding corpus of information. And yet, from a relative standpoint, our own personal knowledge and understanding is becoming increasingly limited. This is the paradox of knowledge in civilization: as the totality of knowledge within society increases, any one individual is personally able to possess an increasingly smaller proportion of the available whole. A mid-twentieth century Ju/’hoansi elder could rightfully claim to be in personal possession of a substantial portion of the total body of important knowledge available within the larger Ju/’hoansi society. Access to knowledge was direct and open to anyone who would seek it. More importantly, because of the conditions and requirements of the Ju/’hoansi lifestyle, knowledge was distributed across a small number of broad domains that were meaningful and personally relevant, new knowledge could be easily incorporated, and the sheer quantity of knowledge available was something that could be reasonably managed by a single committed person. Thus, within the context of Ju/’hoansi culture, each individual was maximally powerful.
A common conceit of modernity is the notion that the civilized are far superior to those living more “primitive” lifestyles. Primitive is pejorative. Civilized is a mark of virtue. Life in civilization is complex and sophisticated. We in the civilized world know far more than any “backward” gatherer-hunter could possibly imagine. But in terms of the knowledge held by any one person, this simply isn’t true. First, there is no “we” doing the knowing. All knowledge is local; all knowledge is personal. And from the perspective of the civilized individual, each of us in our entire lifetime is able to entertain only a trivial, microscopic portion of the knowledge that is potentially available to us—to say nothing of the unimaginable expanding corpus of knowable things that remains forever outside of our reach. Unlike the Ju/’hoansi, who could have at least a working knowledge of most everything of importance that there was to know, we can know almost nothing at all. The sharply partitioned division of labor within civilization incorporates a finely calibrated division of knowledge. Knowledge has been outsourced. Instead of personal knowledge, we rely on external information repositories and groups of certified authorities and individual experts who claim custodianship of tiny slivers of detached and isolated domains of knowledge.
And our proportional ignorance as individuals is increasing exponentially. When I was born, in the early 1960s, the total amount of knowledge in the civilized world doubled every seven years or so. In the mid-1980s, the rate of doubling was 12 months. Now, it is estimated that this doubling occurs every few hours. What this means is that even the most highly educated adult alive today was in personal possession of a larger proportion of the total available knowledge in society when they were two years old than they do presently—and by orders of magnitude! Each of us is getting progressively more ignorant with every passing second. And, as a consequence, progressively more powerless.
Not all kinds of knowledge are equivalent, however. And there is a stark apples-to-oranges problem with any comparison between gatherer-hunters and the civilized. In a gatherer-hunter context, most all knowledge is in some way related to personal adaptation and survival—either directly, as in knowing which berries are edible and which are poisonous, or indirectly, in terms of various cultural customs and practices that serve to maintain a socially healthy community. This is not the case in a civilized context. Much of civilization’s knowledge is specific to the complex bureaucratic and mechanistic operations of civilization itself, and, from a survival or healthy community standpoint, entirely arbitrary. As a thought experiment, start jotting down all of the little things that you need to know in order to navigate a typical day. It will become apparent almost immediately that the overwhelming majority of these things have to do either with how to interact with specific technologies or with how to navigate the capricious requirements of bureaucratic institutions. Much of our knowledge is entirely irrelevant from the standpoint of adaptation and survival. Think about how much of your own knowledge includes superfluous and useless facts related to commercial entertainment and consumer products: the plot a movie you saw in 2007, which team won the playoffs last year, the performance characteristics of a 1967 Chevy Impala, the price of the latest 5G smart device, how to advance to the next level in a popular video game you played as a child.
One result of all this is that, despite swimming in a sea of easily accessed information, the civilized are starved for meaningful knowledge. Meaning itself has been commercialized, commodified, and drained of any real substance beyond a thin and glossy surface. Civilization’s need for distraction plays a big part in this, perhaps. It is best to keep things at a surface level of understanding so that people are prevented from thinking too deeply about the reasons behind what they are doing, the actual purposes to which their daily lives have been directed. Purpose and meaning are simplified, schematized, reduced to easily digestible abstractions, couched in emotionally-charged tropes, symbols that are divorced from any concrete reality.
Much of what passes for meaningful knowledge in civilization has been rendered into banalities and trite memes and superficial platitudes that leave us with a kind of pseudo understanding—pseudo-knowledge. Daniel Dennett called these deepities, those quips and clichés and truisms that seem to be capturing some profound truth, but, on closer inspection, turn out to be meaningless gibberish. If not simply tautological, they are either logically incoherent, so general as to be informationally vacuous, or, quite frequently, demonstrably false. “Love is eternal.” “Happiness is where you least expect it.” “Beauty is only skin deep.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Time heals all wounds.” “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” “Age is just a number,” and “You are only as old as you feel.” And, yes, even “knowledge is power.” Several of these are clearly false. Others are entirely empty of content. We’ve already addressed the Hobbesian “knowledge is power,” and here I might add that Bacon’s version seems to have something more substantial going for it, something beyond mere meme value: “knowledge itself is power” is a potentially testable claim.
These deepities seem harmless on the surface. But in a society where “surface” is all there is, in a society of distraction where we all suffer chronic information overload, where there is little opportunity to consider the truth-value of the many bits and chunks of information perpetually spattered at us, the unexamined is taken at face value, and our understanding of life becomes a piece of cheap box-store furniture: preformed and predrilled for quick assembly, but likely to collapse if actually used.
Knowledge functions somewhat differently in a gatherer-hunter context than it does in civilization. In the former case, the addition of something previously unknown can serve to enhance the relationships between the individual and the world around them—including the social world. Knowledge extends the individual’s ability to operate in the world, and enhances their personal connection with other people. Some kinds of knowledge can function that way in a civilized context as well. But in civilization, the addition of something previously unknown is far more likely to have no real relevance whatsoever in terms of extending a person’s ability to engage with the world around them: trivial facts about features of the world that are either irrelevant or of which the person has no actual contact—the discovery of a new exoplanet, for example. Or the introduction of a new video gaming system. Or the latest change in marital status of a popular celebrity.
I suspect that Bacon was on to something when he said that knowledge itself is power. I suspect that’s why civilization incorporates so many methods and mechanism for making real knowledge personally inaccessible. Real knowledge is dangerous for civilization. Real knowledge of what civilization is, real knowledge of what it means for each of us to be complicit in planetary destruction, might lead a person down the wrong path, might make them start to question the underlying meaning and purpose of it all.
[1] 2017, Healing Arts Press.
[2] When Bacon said that knowledge itself is power, he was talking more specifically about power over nature.