Why knowledge is not nearly enough
We all need to start thinking for ourselves, time is running out
There’s been a fair amount of merriment this week in the public prints about the Globe Theatre’s current production of Romeo and Juliet in London. The cynic in me thinks that for a mediocre production they’ve sure found a way to get publicity.
The trouble is I think they truly believe they are acting in our best interests, snowflakes and ‘woke’ warriors as we all yearn to be. Not.
First off, the director has explained that the play is not about a love affair, it’s about teenage angst and suicide. Silly old me, I thought, apart from the fact their families are at war with each other, the double tragedy is that, having escaped all that malarkey to be together, they leap to the wrong conclusions, as teenagers are wont to do – and die unnecessarily. Clever, see: there’s the real tragedy, the final drama. Good, wasn’t he, old Bill?
Directors – usually young – out to make a name for themselves, have been messing with the perfection of this play for centuries. But with this production, Ola Ince, as director, takes the proverbial biscuit. Apart from employing a wrecking ball against the plot, the programme solemnly announces that the deaths at the end (and, I guess the one in the middle, too) are not real. Yes. You read that right: audiences are also offered counselling from the box office staff should they find the violence upsetting; also, I promise, not a joke.
Interestingly, the production team seem less concerned with the bawdier parts of the play – as when the nurse is joshed by Mercutio with his ‘prick at noon’ comment – thus sexual innuendo or even exploitation, what with Juliet being well under age is apparently OK (at least for the woke wallies).
There you go, today it’s all about mashing up a good play and creating a frisson around absolutely nothing (of relevance to the actual play).
In our anti-social media obsessed world, ignorance is bliss. Confected rage erupts at every perceived insult to the permanently outraged users, just waiting for the next chance to explode over a perceived slight of the latest shibboleth. Or anything someone, somewhere has decided the audience should get over-excited about. It doesn’t matter, as long as it fits the sole purpose of enraging the Facebook Furies, the Twitter Gangsters or the Instagram Mobsters.
This leads me to the following question: are we living in an age where there is unparalleled access to information and knowledge but, equally, where an alleged educated population have never been so wilfully ignorant?
Or have chosen to be.
The phrase, dumbing down, has frequently been applied in cases like the present production of Romeo and Juliet. In a wider context, the BBC takes it as axiomatic that audiences constantly need to be informed of the same facts, over and over again (listen, or watch, any news broadcast on radio or television). I am sure that you, like me, are driven mad by it. And, as a result, we never move on from the most basic information about anything. There is no debate, just repetition. Eventually, you stop engaging with this twaddle. Perhaps, someone, somewhere, wants that outcome. We’re all dropping out in despair.
Yet, at the same time, the availability of knowledge has never in human history been so accessible. For instance, in writing this newsletter, it was a matter of seconds to check the details of the current Globe Theatre production, all from my desk and using my laptop, while I continued to write.
This ready availability of knowledge and information, though, comes at a price, some elements of which are not yet fully manifest. One obvious point (and remarked about in educational circles for some time): with knowledge so completely at our finger-tips, why do we have to bother to remember anything? All we need is a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop and an internet connection. Job done.
Why, therefore, do we bother to insist our children are still taught by outdated methods which rely heavily on remembering facts and figures? Even languages can be ‘taught’ using machines as translators. This is likely to get more sophisticated as time passes.
The answer of course is staring us all in the face. Our brains did not develop over millions of years in order to abdicate a crucial function of conscious existence to Wikipedia, for example, whose undoubted value is nevertheless tempered by the fact that its entries are submitted by people whose contributions are not in any conventional sense peer reviewed.
I know the Wikipedia response to this. I am a subscriber, a putative editor and contributor. It is that the model for providing entries, and their subsequent corrections and amendment, is self-righting. That is, in the long run, the tendency to the truth will out. (This is not the case where politics is involved, and there are many other areas of contention as well.)
The Wikipedia example is no better or no worse, for the uncovering of the roots of knowledge, than that of any other fully reviewed academic exercise, in both its production and its subsequent amendment. This applies critically to science, but also to history, if often more controversially in the case of the latter.
It has been said that knowledge is power. But giving a small child the keys to the British Library does not axiomatically result in a genius; far from it. Knowledge needs mediation, interpretation, debate above all. Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy, a book first published exactly 400 year ago, I am struck by one thing. Robert Burton has scoured the civilised world for published texts, which he quotes extensively, hence the book’s immense length. This tome was a definitive precis of all European knowledge about depression at that time.
But its great flaw is that Burton takes the words of everyone, especially the ancients as gospel. It’s an appropriate word, because religious texts are similarly searched for meaning, never for serious debate, to this day. It’s why, if we had not had the Renaissance and, more important, the Enlightenment, we’d still all be stumbling in the dark, praying for a cure for Covid 19, instead of celebrating the success of vaccines against it.
The acquisition of knowledge, then, viewed purely as written stuff, physical stuff, intellectual stuff, however dressed up, is only the beginning. The fact we have access so readily, so freely, to what amounts to the sum total of human endeavour, is amazing; truly wondrous. It’s the first time in human history we have had that privilege.
Then the hard work starts: we have to process it and organise it, for ourselves, for others; critically, for our children. Most of all, we have to remind ourselves, day by day, that we each have to think, and keep thinking. There is far too much acceptance of others doing the thinking for us. And look where that’s got us.
It comes back to the functioning of society, in the West, of liberal democracy. Citizens of a democracy simply cannot sit back and let professional thinkers (they frequently disguise themselves as politicians, or academics for that matter) run the show as they do right now. We’ve let it happen, quite slowly, ironically as the voting franchise has widened.
On the surface, it seems alright: it has allowed us to get on with our very busy lives while the ‘professionals’ look after our interests. Except, they do not, inter alia choosing to line the pockets of special interest groups (yup, chiefly the already rich). In doing so, they have had to be more than economical with the truth: we’ve been comprehensively lied to, and still are.
Yet, we have the knowledge: we just need to start fielding its rich resources as the gateway to taking back power, prior to regaining control, not as a stupid vacuous slogan but as an exercise in citizen democracy.
What’s this got to do with a poor production of one of Shakespeare’s plays in London? Quite a lot. There comes a moment when what we could all agree on as an acceptable truth gets so bent out of shape in effect it becomes a lie. That production is, if not consciously lying, then wilfully dissembling to its audience, who are not getting the real deal, just a tawdry, ill-considered mishmash of ill-considered trifles.
There is such a thing as the truth: we’ve been gulled to believe it doesn’t exist for decades by post-modernist clap-trap, yet another blind alley academics have driven us and themselves into. If there is a conceit at the heart of post-modernism it is the solipsist, narcissism that also characterises addicted users of anti-social media. It’s all about me, me, me.
Unsurprisingly, adherents of post-modernism abhor the Enlightenment. Yet, some things cannot be lied about, turned into ‘my’ truth, which is said to be not the same as ‘your’ truth. Down that road lies damnation, madness, chaos: the ultimate destruction of the human values that bind us as a species.
Look around: we’re part-way down that road already. Time to start thinking for ourselves by exploring the fantastic opportunities provided by the opening up of a cornucopia of knowledge in just the past 20 years. It’s there for the taking, before the hosts of the unrighteous shut it away, as they did before, back in the Dark Ages.
Who would be against the free availability of all that knowledge? The Chinese Communist Party; the Taliban; North Korea: enough said.
This week: Tim found himself exploring the origins of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest practised religions, unquestionably a huge influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why? I’m riding a horse called Zorro, these days, and I rather like to think he’s named for Zoraster (or Zarathustra) the founding prophet.