Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet

209 Pages·2008·1.08 MB·English

by  Ian F. McNeely

R K
EINVENTING NOWLEDGE
ALSO BY IAN F. MCNEELY
The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s
“Medicine on a Grand Scale”: Rudolf Virchow, Liberalism, and the Public
Health
ALSO BY LISA WOLVERTON
Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands
Cosmas of Prague, Chronicle of the Czechs (translator)
REINVENTING KNOWLEDGE
From Alexandria to the Internet
IAN F. McNEELY
WITH LISA WOLVERTON

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
Frontispiece: Western and non-Western knowledge systems in contact. Charles
D’Oyly, “A European Gentleman with His Moonshee, or Native Professor of
Languages.” From Thomas Williamson, The European in India(1813), courtesy
of the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
Copyright © 2008 by Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
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Production manager: Anna Oler
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McNeely, Ian F.
Reinventing knowledge: from Alexandria to the Interne /Ian F. McNeely, Lisa
Wolverton.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-39307033-0
1. Intellectual life—History. 2. Learning and scholarship—History. 3.
Civilization, Western—History. 4. Civilization, Modern—History. I. Wolverton,
Lisa, II. Title.
CB358.M37 2008
909—dc22 200801900
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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To Jing and Margot
Contents
INTRODUCTION
1. The Library
2. The Monastery
3. The University
4. The Republic of Letters
5. The Disciplines
6. The Laboratory
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
Introduction
IMAGINE PUTTING the entirety of knowledge on the World Wide Web. Every
book and every article from every branch of study, every manuscript and every
artifact from every ancient culture, every painting and every musical recording,
every DNA base-pair sequence and microchip blueprint: everything we call
knowledge would be faithfully digitized, universally accessible, completely
indexed, and easily searchable. This is no longer just a science fiction fantasy
but potentially a reality for Internet behemoths like Google, which is already
busy scanning the contents of some of the world’s largest libraries.
Now consider an alternative project, one dreamed up by a different group of
cyberspace visionaries: a 10,000-Year Library, whose aim is to preserve
knowledge for the distant future rather than make it instantaneously available in
the present.1 This project would allow us to send mail to the future and (when
we get there) receive it from the past, to store time capsules and remind us when
to open them, and to stockpile handbooks for reconstructing civilization in the
event of global catastrophe. The 10,000-Year Library is not a projection of
technological confidence but a recognition of an Achilles heel. Its aim is to make
us mindful of time in a way that our fast-paced society has forgotten. As some
see it, the current “information age” threatens to make knowledge as ephemeral
as an electronic pulse flitting through a fiber-optic cable.
We are living through one of the recurring periods in world history when
far-reaching changes in economics, culture, and technology raise basic questions
about the production, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. How do we
adapt to vastly new circumstances to ensure that we can reproduce ourselves as a
culture? What new institutions will we need to organize and transmit the totality
of our knowledge? Are conventional libraries obsolete? How must the traditional
university change? Can we continue to expect that scientific advances will
improve our lives? What will digital media do to the production and distribution
of knowledge in words and images?
In this book, we ask what light history can shed on these questions. But
instead of worrying about where knowledge is headed in the future, we want to
recall the drama and dynamism surrounding the pursuit of knowledge in the past.
Instead of chronicling the growth of an educational system about which many
are all too complacent, we want to convey how different and exciting and even
dangerous the life of the mind could be for those confronting similar upheavals
hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Before the age of multibillion-dollar
university endowments, high-profile government labs, digital media, and
wireless broadband, scholars were pioneers and renegades, and knowledge was a
hard-won treasure. Everything new they learned was in danger of being lost and
forgotten, whether through the hostility of those who feared new ideas or, more
insidiously, through the simple neglect of those unwilling to organize and
preserve a collective civilizational memory. Today, as we again face the
daunting task of organizing all our knowledge, we would do well to study the
example of those who showed an equal boldness to do so under far more adverse
conditions.
This story includes a rich array of events and characters, from the medieval
Christian monks who devised schemes to preserve knowledge as the Roman
Empire crumbled around them to the scholars who set up an international
“Republic of Letters” to unify early modern Europe as it was being torn apart by
Protestants and Catholics at war. It includes Peter Abelard, the arrogant
medieval logician who tangled with his masters, seduced his star pupil, Heloise,
and wound up watching his books burn and suffering castration at the hands of
his lover’s uncle. And it includes the public and private struggles of Marie Curie,
one of the first women scientists, who literally poisoned herself to death with
radiation to explore the structure of the atom.
One of the unlikeliest results of the efforts of these men and women, and
many others, is a body of knowledge common to all who live, work, and study in
the so-called Western world, and increasingly elsewhere as well. Medieval
theologians like Abelard and atomic physicists like Curie had very different
reasons for pursuing knowledge—to know God, to unveil the secrets of nature—
and yet both contributed to what is often deemed the “Western intellectual
tradition” and thus to the story we have to tell in this book. We would argue that
“the West” itself is better defined by its institutions for organizing knowledge
than as a set of cultural values or a region of the globe. Imagine a group that
includes ancient Greek shepherds, French aristocrats, Soviet apparatchiks,
Californian commuters, and perhaps even students at the University of Malaya in
Kuala Lumpur. These “westerners” differ radically in language, ethnicity, and
lifestyle. Historically they have been concentrated in Europe, but they have since
spread to its colonies and beyond, all over the world. Most now subscribe to the
so-called Western values of democracy, secularism, science, and individualism
—but others have endorsed the exact opposites. What they chiefly share is a
common intellectual heritage. But how can that heritage be defined? And where
is it heading? If we can understand where it came from, perhaps we can make
educated guesses about where it is going.
This book attempts precisely that. It traces the production, preservation, and
transmission of everything deemed worth knowing in what has become the
“Western” tradition. Such knowledge comprises all the subjects debated in
Plato’s Academy, from law and politics to love and poetry, as well as everything
that has since been added to—and subtracted from—this list. This book is not a
history of philosophy, though it engages with the philosophical ideas that
animate our educational practices. Nor is it a history of education, though it
argues that the way knowledge is conveyed from generation to generation is
inseparable from the content of that knowledge. Most obviously, it hardly
touches on informal knowledge, the type of knowledge we get from reading a
newspaper, fixing a motorcycle, parenting a child, or creating a work of art.
Formal knowledge, the kind organized by institutions by and for the wider
public world, is our province. Our approach is necessarily selective, even as it
aspires to encyclopedic breadth. We take examples from Christian theology and
nuclear physics, Homeric Greek and corporate law, the mapping of continents
and the study of the mind.
This book is about the West, but it generates an understanding of this term
by drawing comparisons with the world’s other great literate cultures. For the
sake of this book, we can reduce these to three: China, Islam, and India. China
had the world’s longest-lived alternative tradition to the West, a parallel universe
of scholarship and civilization that came to an end only in the twentieth century.
Islam shared with the West both an origin in Near Eastern monotheism and the
absorption of Greek knowledge and philosophy. India, a region with one of the
world’s oldest homegrown knowledge systems, founded on Sanskrit, has been
enmeshed in complex webs of influence involving the rest. In all four traditions,
academic institutions grew up to solve problems universal to literate societies,
problems for which Western scholars simply found particular, enduring
solutions. These include how to produce knowledge, by converting oral
philosophical traditions into written scholarship; how to preserve it, by copying
manuscripts, establishing a canon of scriptures, and ensuring that the meaning
and sense of their language is maintained; and how to transmit it, by animating
the dead letter in face-to-face discussion and debate or surmounting the
impossibilities of face-to-face contact by resorting to letters. Periodic glances at
the solutions of other cultures to these problems highlight not the intrinsic
superiority but rather the historical specificity of European, and later American,
variants.
This book is thus a history of institutions of knowledge. It chronicles the six