The road to Wikipedia

How do we know what we know? A new book takes a long view of knowledge, from ancient oral traditions to the rise of universities and the Internet.

By Laura Miller

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Aug. 28, 2008 | We live in the information age, when networked computers give millions of users unprecedented access to communications and data. But so what? That is, in effect, what Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton have to say at the conclusion of "Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet." The authors are indeed hard to impress. Their small book takes a long view -- an exceedingly long view, beginning with the birth of Western civilization in the philosophical academies of ancient Greece and wending its way, century by century, to the present. McNeely and Wolverton remain unpersuaded that the Internet is as revolutionary as it's cracked up to be.

"Reinventing Knowledge" partakes of a contemporary academic trend that views institutions as the major shapers of people and societies (rather than, say, vast economic forces or the genius and influence of "great men"). Its subject is "knowledge," and the "production, preservation and transmission" of it, although unfortunately the authors never quite manage to define what knowledge means to them. True, the term is elusive; one generation's knowledge is the next's rank superstition. In the Middle Ages, thanks to Aristotle, everyone knew that maggots generated spontaneously out of rotting flesh, and this fact was considered to be top-grade knowledge, though we now know it to be incorrect. On the other hand, some people today are convinced that the 1969 moon landing never really happened, and despite the so-called evidence they've marshaled in defense of this belief, hardly anyone would call it knowledge.

Whatever, exactly, knowledge is, McNeely and Wolverton see it as having been "fundamentally reinvented fully six times in the history of the West." The six institutions that achieved these reinventions are the library, the monastery, the university, the "Republic of Letters," the disciplines and the laboratory. Each characterized and embodied its own age's conception of knowledge. Each, the authors insist, gave way to the next age's institution as knowledge was once again reinvented, losing its central role in the process.

At least part of what these institutions did was decide what constituted knowledge in the first place. They also organized it so that scholars and thinkers could get at it more easily, and they preserved it for future generations. Above all, they transmitted it through various methods of teaching. Given the amount of ground they've decided to cover, McNeely and Wolverton must necessarily be fairly sweeping in describing all this. Occasionally, "Reinventing Knowledge" is so general as to be vague and a bit colorless. This is a shame, since its perspective is fresh enough that when it succeeds it has the power to wrench familiar aspects of history into new and surprising shapes. The book works best when the authors remember to use concrete examples, as when they look at the difference between how ancient China and the Hellenistic empire chose to maintain their own cultures' knowledge.

The Library of Alexandria, founded and maintained by the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, contained (at its peak) as many as 500,000 texts, mostly works in the Greek tradition, but also writings from the various Mediterranean peoples of the empire (such as the Hebrew Bible, a translation of which the Ptolemies commissioned). Classical Greek culture was, in essence, oral; public speaking was the most important skill in a small democratic city-state, and being good at it became the goal of every educated man. Philosophers proved themselves in dialogue with other philosophers, and Socrates himself denigrated writing as untrustworthy; you couldn't quiz a written text about what it meant and you couldn't see and evaluate the man who wrote it. But the oral culture of ancient Greece wasn't very portable, which meant it wasn't well suited to being spread over a far-flung empire or passed on to succeeding generations in all its outposts. Written texts could supply those needs and give the elites of the Hellenistic empire a shared high culture to knit it together.

By contrast, the Qin dynasty that united China in the third century B.C. decided that much of the country's written tradition (especially Confucian works) subtracted from the glory of the Qin and ordered those materials burned. The Han dynasty that followed the Qin struggled to restore that tradition, with great difficulty, since the texts were often printed on strips of bamboo tied together with string, and even if they survived the burning campaign, they often got hopelessly out of sequence when the strings broke. (Greek texts, on the other hand, were written on long scrolls.) Han scholars carefully reconstructed their culture's classic texts; then the emperors had them carved onto hefty, unburnable stone tablets placed outside the National Academy of Louyang. Scholars from all over the empire could travel there and make rubbings from the stones to obtain their own copies of the texts.

The Chinese goal -- to rescue and protect the hallowed texts of the nation's past -- determined the technology they used to record their knowledge, just as the Hellenistic desire to compile and disseminate Greek culture made a more portable, flexible medium the better pick. The rubbings method ensured that Chinese scholars could possess identical, definitive copies of the Confucian classics. The Hellenistic practice of hand-copying texts introduced the possibility of amendments, marginalia and commentary as well as errors, which is one reason why there are so many different versions of old Western texts. In one technology, the values of perpetuity, authority and the emulation of the past were tantamount; in the other, it was expansion and change.

Despite their libraries, Greek and Roman societies continued to privilege public speech over writing. (As McNeely and Wolverton point out, classical authors didn't actually write their own works; they dictated them to scribes who were regarded as only slightly better than manual laborers.) When Rome fell and the West became largely rural, illiterate and plagued by the constant skirmishes of small-time warlords, Christian monasteries became the last redoubt of knowledge. Reading and writing were sacred there, talking often forbidden as a form of "idleness." The Christian attention to the inner self (evidenced in the religion's focus on faith and prayer) produced the West's first memoir, the "Confessions" of St. Augustine. For the first time people began to read silently. Not only were the monasteries established as a sanctuary from a corrupt world, they were also the place where the West began to conceive of study as a retreat where the soul could be tended, instead of the means by which a man acquired the skills to attain social and political power. Where the library had been a jewel in the heart of a great city, the monastery was an oasis in the wilderness.

Eventually, however, Europe's economy and cities recovered, and students began to congregate in towns where cathedral schools offered the training they needed to become doctors, lawyers and (especially) clergymen. The first universities began as guilds for students and their masters, like the guilds formed by artisans and tradesmen, rather than as physical institutions. ("Colleges" were residences, often established by charitable foundations, where students and teachers lived.) Religion was still the basis for this particular incarnation of knowledge and all the students were clerics, but they began to apply their learning to more practical matters that, not coincidentally, were of keen interest to the burgeoning middle classes. For example, canon law specialists worked out a rationale by which Christian moneylenders could charge a fee for their services (the birth of interest) without violating the biblical prohibition against usury.

The rise of the university saw the return of the idea of learning through debate and verbal contests in the theater of the classroom. Scholars journeyed from one center of learning to another, seeking the best teachers and jobs, forming a pan-European culture of learning founded on the lingua franca of Latin and the Roman Catholic faith.

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