On the compulsion to know

This article is an edited excerpt from the dissertation I wrote for my Masters, which was essentially an attempt to articulate the value of 'not knowing'.

This excerpt gives a broad-brush account of the ways in which we have been 'compelled to know', from the Enlightenment, through the Industrial Revolution, up to the 21st century.

Coherent adult practitioners must appear to know what they are saying — as though they can know something that the language they speak doesn't.

— Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

Even as I write this sentence, I myself don’t quite know what this dissertation is really about, or what exactly it is attempting to say.

This is, perhaps, not the most promising remark to make at the beginning of an dissertation. And yet, it seems to me not only apt but necessary to make it, because it speaks to the truth of my predicament, and also, I believe (and as Adam Phillips suggests), to something essential in the experience of thought, knowledge, and language.

Admitting to not knowing what one is saying, and ‘not knowing’ in general, runs quite severely against the grain of most people’s estimation of such qualities as coherence, competency, and attainment — in academia, but also in the professional world more broadly.

Knowledge as commodity

Throughout our education, and later in the workplace, we are expected and compelled to know: to know what we are doing; to know the answer; to know what we are talking about — or at least, to convince ourselves and others that we do.

As Ivan Illich observes, we come to consume and reproduce knowledge as if it were a commodity:

Schooling — the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock. [...]

[B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form;[…] that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value.

The influence of the European Enlightenment

The knowledge we are compelled to have (to consume, to possess, to wield) is a sort of knowledge particular to a certain view of the world, stemming primarily from the European Enlightenment, and perhaps more distantly, from the inception of Western Philosophy itself.

It is a view of the world which has increasingly come to conceive of knowledge almost solely in terms of logical reason and rationality, and which, on the whole, values knowledge insofar as it is instrumental to power and control. "Human knowledge and human power meet in one", wrote Sir Francis Bacon.

Of course, such knowledge certainly has its place; we would have neither science nor technology without it. Indeed, in some sense it is bound up, intrinsically, with instrumental action itself; if we have a purpose and wish to achieve it, logical reasoning can come in very handy, to say the least...

When, however, it becomes the sole (or certainly the predominant) paradigm through which we are capable of understanding and relating to the world, we run into serious problems.

When rationalism trumps ethics

Our understanding of what is good – of what we value as a society, and of what it might mean to be a good person – becomes subject to and distorted by a particular sort of rationalistic, mechanistic calculus:

What matters is what is quantifiable.

What matters is productivity and efficiency.

Development or progress are synonymous with growth and expansion – whether of knowledge, wealth, or power – all of which are understood fundamentally as commodities, and none of which recognises such things as limitation or restraint.

Something has value only insofar as it can be manipulated, leveraged, or exchanged, particularly for money. Since money is able to put a price on anything, nothing is truly sacred.

Similarly, nothing is believed to be ultimately beyond the reach of rational understanding and control, and therefore there is no scope for mystery, or wonder — and therefore no true possibility for beauty.

The mechanistic psyche

Since the Enlightenment, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, this mechanistic calculus has increasingly pervaded the very fabric of the social and individual psyche alike.

The impact of this was observed by Thomas Carlyle as early as 1829, in this famous and lucid passage from his essay 'Sign of the Times':

Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also […]. The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling.

Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavours, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection but for external combinations and arrangements for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle.

It is disconcerting, to say the least, how true this still rings nearly 200 years after it was written. It is even more disconcerting to observe that Carlyle was writing at a time when the influence of machines was still (relatively) overt, in terms of their presence and function in relation to human experience.

The exacerbating influence of digital technology

Today, a significant proportion of our experience not only of work, but of language, culture, and human relationships – and even more fundamentally, of perception and thought itself – is directly mediated by technologies and algorithms which:

Are designed, monitored, and controlled by corporations whose interest, above all else, is private profit and power.
Commodify and degrade our attention, and systematically cultivate addiction and consumption without limit.
Intentionally disguise these purposes and functions from the person using the technology.

Indeed, with the advent of mass communications technology – and more recently, of digital technology, the internet, and artificial intelligence – this influence has not only penetrated further into our personal and psychic lives than ever before, but has become ever more subtle and undetectable in its ability to do so.

Thanks for reading!

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W. G. Brown