Sometimes, a great idea is all you need. Other times, even the best of ideas needs a little help.
In the 1890s, Belgian duo Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine had what must have seemed like an absolutely brilliant idea: assemble as much information as possible, write each factoid on an index card, store the cards in hundreds of specially made filing cabinets, cunningly index everything so the desired information can be easily retrieved, encourage anyone with a question to call on the telephone, and charge them 27 Belgian francs to find the answer.
The duo’s collection of information came to be called the Mundaneum, and while it certainly grew – 150 rooms filled with millions upon millions of index cards – it didn’t exactly thrive. Given the technology of the day, storing an ever-growing mountain of information, and then quickly finding it, were insuperable problems.
The help that Otlet and La Fontaine needed didn’t arrive for a century, with the invention of the internet. With modern technology, tools such as Google and Wikipedia have finally been able to deliver what the Mundaneum promised – vast stores of information, retrieved almost instantly.
The Mundaneum is one of the odder detours in this history of – as the subtitle says – The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.
Starting with a few thoughts on what knowledge actually is – something more than just raw data, apparently – it moves through the ways in which humanity has stored its accumulated knowledge and passed it on.
For the most part, those steps in the history of knowledge-wrangling are what you might expect: starting with symbols pressed into damp clay 5000 years ago, we move on through papyrus, scrolls, codexes, Gutenberg and his Bible, books, libraries, newspapers and encyclopedias, right up to the digital era.
Along the way, the story of knowledge heads down many alleyways, of varying relevance to the book’s central thrust.
There’s the story of the development of paper, and the legend of Cai Lun, the Chinese official who supposedly came up with this particularly useful medium for storing knowledge after watching wasps make their nests.
We get a celebration of the BBC, and its success in disseminating the right kind of knowledge – or at least the right kind as decreed by BBC management. And, more or less as the opposite, a warning on the dangers of propaganda, with examples that include China’s largely successful erasure of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the British government’s ultimately less-successful attempt to blame the victims for the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland.
There’s also a look at propaganda’s commercial cousin, public relations, and its sometimes elastic connection with the truth. It was an enterprising PR man, says Winchester, who was responsible for the enduring popularity of bacon and eggs as a breakfast choice; another gave the tobacco industry a leg up by making cigarette smoking a symbol of female emancipation – “torches of freedom”, he called them.
On the technical front, we get discussions on everything from the pocket calculator, which freed millions of users from needing to know even basic maths; GPS, which delivered navigators from the complexities of the sextant; and search engines and Wikipedia, which excused many of us from having to know much about anything at all.
We also get a lot about education, which, in a formal, going-to-school sense, is rather older than you might imagine: 4000 or so years ago, not far from modern-day Baghdad, children – boys, to be precise – were spending their days in classrooms, inscribing the day’s lesson on pieces of clay.
As this long history of knowledge handling unfolds, with its ever-increasing technological sophistication, you can hear the big question approaching: what’s the point? That is, what’s the point of knowing anything any more, now that we have machines to do the knowing for us? Instead of all the hard work of acquiring knowledge, wouldn’t it make more sense just to wait until we have a question and ask the computer to supply the answer?
Maybe some early Mesopotamian curmudgeon was raising the same objection when the first symbols were pressed into the mud – who’s going to bother remembering anything now that it’s all written down? – but it’s a question that gets more acute as the technology grows more sophisticated.
The stakes have been raised by the latest developments in artificial intelligence – and credit to Winchester for being up with the play in this fast-changing area. Now, the promise is that technology will be able to package up knowledge in a way that is indistinguishable from what a human might produce. And what happens then? Will the technology free us from the hard graft of acquiring knowledge, leaving us with more time to pursue knowledge’s more upmarket cousin, wisdom? Or will it just turn us into a bunch of empty-headed know-nothings, too ignorant to know how much we don’t know?
Knowing What We Know, by Simon Winchester (William Collins, $37.99)
