Are we losing the wisdom of the ages?

‘Now, what I want is Facts…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of far more than simply having imperial gallons of facts poured into us until we are full to the brim. The novel’s opening scene is a wink shared between naughty school-children, between Dickens and us, reminding us that teacher is being absurd. Of course knowledge means more than just an accumulation of facts.

But what then? Simon Winchester’s Knowing What We Know is a loose run-through of several millennia’s worth of epistemology and approaches to the transmission of knowledge. It begins with the author’s childhood shock at a wasp sting. This is a powerful kind of experiential learning, more painful but more memorable than Gradgrind’s rote learning. ‘I had inadvertently acquired a morsel of knowledge’, observes Winchester philosophically, before introducing Plato’s Theaetetus with its theory of justified true belief. We then consider some of the world’s systems of education and examination, the aggregation and storage of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias, the transmission – and manipulation – of news, and the recent history of machine intelligence, before finishing up with a few of history’s great polymaths: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Benjamin Jowett and Shen Gua.

There is a nicely global focus to Knowing What We Know, enhanced by Winchester’s own experiences as a journalist in Asia. Early on he has a surprising detail about the Boxing Day earthquake of 2004. To recap, this was the third largest earthquake ever recorded, off the coast of Sumatra. The tidal wave that it sent radiating across the Indian Ocean killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and beyond.