Ian F. McNeely - Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet

I MAGINE 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 worlds 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. 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 lovers 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 knowledgeto know God, to unveil the secrets of natureand 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 individualismbut 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 Platos Academy, from law and politics to love and poetry, as well as everything that has since been added toand subtracted fromthis 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.