Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria To The Internet

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• 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.
• As some see it, the current “information age” threatens to make knowledge as ephemeral as an electronic pulse flitting through a fiber-optic cable.
• 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.
  • Where is the wisdom we have lost… (T.S. Elliott) -> wisdom gets diluted when it is easier to get. Religion that doesn’t require faith will never last (Joseph Smith)
• This book is thus a history of institutions of knowledge. It chronicles the six institutions that have dominated Western intellectual life since ancient times: the library, the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the disciplines, and the laboratory. Together these institutions have safeguarded knowledge through the ages by acting as interfaces between scholars and the rest of society. Each was formed, amazingly enough, to organize the totality of knowledge. Each coalesced in reaction to sweeping historical changes that discredited its predecessor or exposed its limitations. And each parlayed dissatisfaction and disillusionment with existing ways of knowing into an all-encompassing new ideology legitimating its mission for the outside world. In times of stability, these institutions carried the torch of learning. In times of upheaval, individuals and small communities reinvented knowledge in founding new institutions.
• Yet many of the “giants”-Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, for instance-appear fleetingly, if at all: their contributions, however momentous, fit comfortably within existing institutions. We in fact aim to avoid the usual “great men and big ideas” approach to intellectual history. Instead we examine shifts occurring, often without conscious direction, among entire communities of scholars pivotally situated in history.
  • Great thinkers have stood on the shoulders of renegades who shaped the institutions in which “the greats” thrived
• Ideas, great or small, can communicate their effect only through the institutions that organize them.
  • Mediocre idea with strong support vs strong idea with mediocre support
• The most novel experiments, the most fundamental discoveries, the most stupendous feats of academic genius exert their influence over us because their creators said, wrote, and did things that reorganized the activity of other, lesser minds.
  • Our institutions shape us. Feels like university was rare, founding fathers were much more educated. Now everyone goes to college. “Lesser minds?” Where are the greatest minds today? Where are the institution builders?
• For example, it would be impossible to survey, even cursorily, the accomplishments of each individual discipline from anthropology to zoology. But it is not hard to grasp that when a mass market for education first arose after 18oo, a new specialization of intellectual labor creating these fields was the natural result. Such insights unlock the whole of intellectual history, for all its arcana, to the layperson’s understanding. None of this is to suggest that the majesty of ideas can be reduced to the crude, material circumstances of their production.
• LBut innovation in technology does little in itself to guarantee the progress of knowledge as a whole. We risk committing a serious error by thinking that cheap information made universally available through electronic media fulfills the requirements of a democratic society for organized knowledge. Past generations had to win knowledge by using their wits, and never took what they knew for granted. Recalling their labor and travail is, if anything, more important than ever if we are to distinguish what is truly novel about the “information age” from what is transient hype.
  • Connect to TS Elliott quote. Knowledge that is harder to get is more fully appreciated. But why? Distribution has shrunk. In the 1800s the knowledge gap was dramatic. Nowadays the average person is sort of smart and the long tail is in the middle
• At every unpredictable juncture, changes in the wider world, not the activities of specific geniuses or intellectuals generally, have driven the reinvention of knowledge. But whenever a new institution of knowledge crystallizes it exerts a remarkably pervasive influence. So comprehensively has each one refashioned the life of the mind that even the most enduring and entrenched practices of knowing submit to reform and renovation under its aegis. As we will see, even today’s “knowledge society,” for all of its apparent novelties and radical departures, is but the continuation of this millennia-old pattern.
  • Stories of “geniuses” resonate with us because we can empathize with them. But the massive shifts come from reforming institutions
• In particular, libraries rest on the conviction that writing is the best way of organizing knowledge.
• Any institution that has lasted well over two millennia has to have appealed not just to scholars and academics but to society at large. It must have fulfilled some of the deepest aspirations of ancient people, reflected the wishes of those commanding influence and resources, and meshed with the structures of social and political power.
  • Define institution. What makes an institution stick and succeed?
• The Sophists gathered in public spaces already frequented by men engaged in self-betterment, specifically the gymnasiums. Professionals for hire, they explained epic and archaic poetry, Homer in particular, and taught their clients to speak well. The ability to win any argument-the skill the Sophists purveyed-paved the road to influence and power in the polis. Literary knowledge was more important than scientific knowledge in this world, as it was throughout the premodern period. Effective speech conferred mastery over people, which in an age before advanced technology counted for far more than the mastery over nature that science offers. Sophists addressed the challenges of democracy by systematizing the art of persuasion and the pedagogy of speaking well. In so doing they became the first true practitioners of textual scholarship. The careful, methodical study of Homer meant getting the words exactly right, which entailed an grammar, rhetoric, and roughly the field we now label linguisti or philology. For this the Sophists relied heavily on the written word, and in particular on books. They became infamous for the refinement of their linguistic distinctions and made lawyerly arguments drawing their evidence and citations from poetic precedents. Books, as references, were indispensable handmaidens to the sophistic style of argument.
  • Connect to John Quincy Adams talking about teaching rhetoric
• Socrates, foremost among the circle of elitist philosophers suspicious of democracy’s tendency to put knowledge up for sale.
• The Socratic method, a robust question-and-answer, is the expression of an oral pedagogy founded on the productive friction bętween masters and students.
• Speech thrives on one-sided positions, so argument can go on indefinitely around the same questions; writing makes an inclusive, ecumenical approach both possible and desirable.
• Where schools fade or fragment, libraries persist; where schools sustain fixed arguments and preserve intellectual lineages, libraries absorb new knowledge and accommodate newcomers to learning.
• Such dynasties simply commanded, for the first time, the resources to establish institutions outlasting their founders and tied to the longer-term fortunes of the states that sponsored them.
  • The death of Alexander the Great left a power vacuum that was filled by competing “dynasties” who, instead of conquering, had to compete for talent
• Vying with other empire-builders in Antioch, Pergamum, and back in Macedonia and Greece, the Ptolemies made their city a magnet for ambitious emigrating Greeks. Alexandria grew under their tutelage to become the multicultural city of antiquity par excellence. The Ptolemies were uncommonly cultured rulers and established as a paradise for scholars a lavishly endowed temple to the Muses, the Museum. Imperial patronage marked a critical shift away from the self-sacrificing public-spiritedness of Athenian philosophers toward a newfound concern for scholars’ private lives, and in particular their incomes. Certainly the emphasis once given to character formation in the classical polis receded when politics began to center less on competitive speech than on palace intrigue. Pampered, coddled, secluded in a royal compound set apart from the hustle and bustle of a busy, polyglot port city, Museum members enjoyed hefty tax breaks and free use of residence halls, dining facilities, personal servants, teaching rooms, colonnades and open spaces, and, most important, the famous library. Resentful outsiders called it a “birdcage” for politically emasculated bookworms. But the Museum was part and parcel of a very shrewd policy to lure talent from all over the Greek world by providing all the creature comforts and cultural amenities of Greek life.
• Amid Alexandria’s embarrassment of riches, by contrast, public intellectualism was easily sacrificed to private curiosity, and philosophy was transmuted into something more recognizably academic.
• The categorization of knowledge, whether in tables, trees, or Dewey decimals, has exerted a fascination among modern-day scholars far disproportionate to its actual importance. Classifi cation schemes are arbitrary conveniences. What matters is not whether history is grouped with poetry or with politics and what that says about the ancient mind, but simply whether such schemes make books readily and rapidly accessible to roaming encyclopedic intellects.
  • #[[Roam Research]]
• Euclid’s geometry falls into the same category: more a synthesis than an original work, it nonetheless ranks as history’s most influential mathematical textbook.
  • Synthesis vs original thought
• We may well wonder why great rulers, from the Ptolemies of Egypt to the Medicis of Italy to the sultans, mughals, and emperors of Asia, have so often patronized academic scholarship. It cannot be simple chance, the mere goodwill of powerful figures who happen to take an interest in the life of the mind, that higher learning has prospered under such extensive financial and political support. One explanation is straightforwardly, even cynically political. It holds that rulers invest in cultural capital to burnish their reputations and paint their rivals as base warlords by comparison. Especially in a culturally unified but politically fragmented world such as the Hellenistic one (or for that matter Renaissance Italy or “Warring States” China), centers of higher learning tipped the balance in an otherwise equal contest among a limited number of rivals.
  • Globalization, even at small scale like these melting pots, makes unification through conquest the Malian way of assimilation. Without that you have to compete for talent.
• But in 24 BCE, the Qin (“Chin”) emperor, from whose dynasty China get its name, put an end to this. First he brought the warring states to heel and created China’s first unified empire. Then his chist minister, Li Si, himself an accomplished Legalist scholar clamped down on all rivals to the Qin state philosophy, Confucianism especially. The philosopher-potentate proceeded to mandate a general burning of the books. In a notorious memorial to the emperor, Li Si explained that having access to private learning meant that scholars trusted their own teachings instead of the emperor’s orders. “Those who dare to discuss the classical literature among themselves should be executed and their bodies exposed on the marketplace. Those who use the past to criticize the present should be put to death together with their relatives.”
  • Either you have a competitive multi-cultural marketplace of ideas (Ptolemies) or you engage in violent cultural unification via conquest (Qin, Alexander, Rome)
• China was an empire of scholars. Its unity reposed in its textual tradition. Dynasties came and went, but the Chinese classics, and the script that unlocked them to understanding, kept the dream of a unified Chinese civilization alive during epochs of upheaval.
  • America, in juxtaposition, is the child of the naturally combative tradition of Greek philosophy via the Founding Fathers. Democracy breeds freedom but it also makes unification impossible. More and more Americans no longer have a “common language.”
• The Greeks, both by inclination and by circumstance, lived in the present. Newcomers to the world stage, peripheral to the great Asian empires, they lacked the sense of deep time and rootedness in place that oriented Chinese scholarly culture so decisively toward reconstructing the historical past. This made the Greeks forward-looking, innovative, explorative. It also made them historically shallow and sometimes startlingly naive.
• Nothing in their cherished epics, set in a familiar Aegean world ringed with monsters and marvels, prepared the Greeks to rule and understand foreign peoples.
  • Our inability to understand and appreciate other cultures will be our downfall
• Baghdad’s House of Wisdom
• Late antique Alexandria was rife with religious tension and communal violence on all sides, pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Political authorities were simply losing their power to hold this mix of cultures together, and Greek learning had lost its role as intellectual arbiter among them. Knowledge was now the contested patrimony of a fractious multicultural metropolis. Jews and Christians used it, as we saw in the case of the Septuagint, to refine their religious doctrines. Hermetics used it to lend prestige and give depth to Egyptian folk magic. Hypatia’s colleagues threw around their philosophical weight-unsuccessfully-to defend the pagan Serapeum temple (home to the Museum’s daughter library) against Christian onslaught. But philosophical pagans no longer had anything like a lock on Greek thought or the power it had in the past.
  • “Intellectualism” is being weaponized by religious and irreligious. Tweet about party rejecting science vs. party rejecting math
• MONASTERIES NOT ONLY PRESERVED LEARNING THROUGH CENTURIES OF CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE BUT FORGED NEW LINKS FROM THE STUDY OF WRITTEN TEXTS TO THE MARKING AND MEASUREMENT OF TIME.
  • What will be the “monasteries” of the coming civilized collapse?
• The library at Alexandria, as we have seen, succumbed to the withering of urban amenities and the withdrawal of political patronage attending the collapse of ancient empires. Indeed, none of the schools or libraries of antiquity escaped extinction. But unlike them, Christian monasteries were formed in conscious retreat from urban civilization, well before that civilization collapsed. They were therefore remarkably well adapted to the preservation of learning in times of decay and devastation. They rank among the longest-lived continuously existing institutions of any kind in the Western world. Longevity is integral to the monastery, part of its institutional DNA.
  • What are the institutions today being built on “longevity?”
• Romans in particular consistently prized speech and made it central to public life and public values. Schools taught young men the trivium, the three arts of proper Latin grammar and diction, persuasive rhetoric, and dialectic (that is, how to mount a logical argument). Oral education offered more than vocational preparation for the law courts or imperial administration. Personal morality itself was anchored in an individual’s public reputation, won through verbal exchange with other elite men of leisure.
  • “Logic”
• Christian thinkers agonized over their reliance on the fruits of pagan learning. Tertullian (ca. 155-230) threw down the gauntlet early, asking what Athens (philosophy) had to do with Jerusalem (religion).
  • We accept all truth no matter the source - Erik Hansen’s stuff
• Christianity had long since established itself as a religion that could exist outside the matrix of civilization and its institutions. As long as its texts survived, so too would its teachings.
  • Ideologies that can exist outside of institutions - but why?
• The slow collapse of Roman civic culture would continue for more than two centuries. The society to emerge from it would be nearly its opposite: illiterate and oral; rural, underpopulated, with a subsistence economy; dominated by warriors constantly in conflict with each other; and yet-profound testimony to the universal appeal of Jesus’ message-homogeneously Christian. (The task of learned men two centuries after Augustine was not so heady as the reconciliation of Plato and Christ. In an exclusively rural environment, it had devolved into the preservation of written culture per se, The knowledge needed to derive meaning from scripture would have to come from another source-a key function taken over, in the West, by the monastery.
  • Why did Christianity survive intellectual disagreements of scholars and the ignorant halls of barbarism?
• The monastery was the first institution of knowledge specifically adapted to the absence of civilization, to the wilderness.
• In establishing a new model for European monastic scriptoria, Cassiodorus (ca. 490-580s) drew the next logical conclusion: that monasteries must be deliberately designed to preserve ancient manuscripts.
  • How does an institution exist outside society in the internet age when “knowledge preservation” can’t be a guiding light?
• Drawing on and modifying Cassian’s writings, Cassiodorus also issued his own Institutes. Best described as an “extremely detailed annotated bibliography,” the work also offers poignant testimony to the collapse of learning around him.15 Cassiodorus warned his monks that books would have to serve “in place of a teacher.” Broken links with Roman culture’s oral tradition meant that “you have masters of a bygone generation to teach you not so much by their tongues as by your eyes.
  • The power of books
• Adhering to such a text enabled communities of monks to survive and thrive despite the personal quirks and transient lifespans of individual members.
• In the prologue to the Rule, Benedict describes the monastery as a “school for God’s service,” a training ground for the renunciation of personal will and utter devotion to God.
  • School of the Prophets
• A number of the Ten Commandments appear in the list, as do warnings against petty faults that might, unchecked, cascade into sin. Numbers 37 through 40 enjoin the monk, respectively, “not to love sleep,” “not to be slothful,” “not to murmur,” and “not to slander.” Private property too is singled out as a vice to be “cut out at the roots.
• Bedtime came as early as 6:30 p.m. Monks should sleep in separate beds, if possible in one room, “in their robes, belted but with no knives, thus preventing injury in slumber.” About eight hours later, in the middle of the night, monks arose. Then began a cycle CC of prayer, alternating with periods of reading, work, and meals, lasting throughout the monks’ time awake. There was no breakfast, and during the darker months of the year only one meal a day. Taking the Lenten season as a benchmark, a typical twentyfour-hour period might unfold as follows:
• 2:00 a.m - Rise 2:00-3:30 a.m. - Vigils 3:30-4:30 a.m. - Meditation 4:30-5:00 a.m. - Matins 5:00 - 9:00 a.m. - Reading, with Prime at 6:00 a.m. (sunrise) 9:00 a.m. - Terce 915 a.m.-4:00 p.m. - Work, interrupted by Sext at 12:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m. - None 4:30 p.m. - Vespers 5:00 p.m. - Meal 6:00 p.m. - Compline 6:30 p.m. - Sleep
  • #[[Daily Schedule]]
• Reading was commended to monks even outside the liturgy. All common meals were to be accompanied by edifying reading. The time after supper and before bed was also to be filled with reading rather than talk. The extra dark hours after matins in winter were to be used “to practice psalms or for reading.”
• In late antiquity the pope had simply announced each year when Easter would come. But as communications deteriorated with the collapse of Rome, it became critical for local congregations to celebrate with confidence even in isolation.
  • How do institutions survive isolation?
• Left Behind book series.
• Sanskrit learning as a result emphasized timelessness, not time, and textlessness, not texts.
• “The day is not sufficient for asking and answering profound questions,” in the words of the seventh-century pilgrim Xuanzang, from China; “From morning till night they engage in discussion.”46 None of the European monasteries ever approached Nalanda in size, scope, or dedication to knowledge. Christian ascetics had long since traded talk for silence, forsaking vocal interaction for patient devotion to texts. They might outlive Nalanda, though they would not necessarily outshine it. We have to look beyond the monastery to understand where and how the spirit of scholarly dispute revived in Europe, to an entirely new institution of learning that took root there: the university.
  • Interesting to think about the diffeence of focus between spoken vs. written Spoken = debate = discovery Written = revrew = established Monasteries survivd the fall of civilization because they were naturally defensive vs exploratory.
• First, the earliest universities, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-at Bologna and Paris-were not deliberately founded; they simply coalesced spontaneously around networks of students and teachers, as nodes at the thickest points in these networks. Later European universities, like American universities, were of course deliberately established, but only after the model had emerged (twice) on its own. Second, virtually all European universities are urban phenomena. This follows from the first proposition, for when teachers and students began to assemble, they needed to do so in placeswith infrastructure and amenities: lodging and stationers, taverns
  • Universities emerge as natural nodes of networks. YC or On Deck alumni groups are more similar vs their more deliberate programs. Cities = universities. Characteristics of a university: (1) Built organically around a network of people, (2) universities are city-centric (e.g. built in amenities), and (3) people-centric vs place-centric
• Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, universities originally had no campuses, no buildings, no bricks and mortar. The term universitas referred to a group of people, not to a physical place. Nor did it betoken “universality” in the sense of allencompassing knowledge, as we might think today. Instead, universitas was a concept in ancient Roman law referring to a sworn society of individuals.
• If the monastery was a viable institution for organizing knowledge in a world dominated by Christianity, how did this guild of students and teachers come to displace it? Why did the monastery not continue as the predominant home of scholars and their books until Christianity as a unifying ideology was challenged by the Reformation?
• Put simply, Europe finally recovered from the blows dealt to it in the waning days of Rome.Throughout the eleventh century and culminating in the twelfth, Europe’s economy rebounded dramatically. Agricultural productivity improved, the population boomed, commerce and trade flourished, cities and towns took shape, church and state bureaucracies spread their tentacles throughout society, and people began to interact more through money and contracts and less through oaths and traditions. Above all, people took to the road.
  • Crazy the global impact a nation can have. What happens if America falls? “Global pride cycle” - Globalization > prosperity > equality > suspicion > nationalization > tribalism > war
• Parisian Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who took on questions like “Can God do what he does not, or not do what he does?” Meticulously weighing the objections and counterobjections to each proposition and arming himself with the philosophy of Aristotle (newly rediscovered through Muslim mediation), Aquinas produced the greatest summary of Christian theology yet devised, the Summa Theologica. In Aquinas’s thought, pure (Abelardian, Aristotelian) and applied (Dominican, Franciscan) conceptions of knowledge meshed with and mutually reinforced each other.
• While Paris was known for both theology and liberal arts, Bologna was the preeminent school of law, both civil and canon (the law of the church). Men went there mainly for practical, utilitarian reasons.
  • The debate of liberal vs. practical study is as old as the university
• The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who resided north of the Alps, in Germany, with most of his territories and retinue, lay claim to large swaths of the region, particularly the wealthy cities of Lombardy. But he had little means actually to govern. In a gambit to gain the loyalty of “all those scholars who wander for the cause of study, Barbarossa extended his protection to “those made exiles for the love of knowledge.”
  • Playing for the “scholar” vote
• As paradoxical as it sounds to modern ears, they expressed their individuality by folding themselves into groups, for only in this way could an expanding roster of new social roles, from friars, to scholars, to citizens, to merchants, protect and assert themselves. The scholars’ universitas was clearly but one expression of this much larger phenomenon.
  • Connect to Alexander De Tocqueville “Americans love to associate”
• Viva voce learning, pedagogy through the “living voice, was standard practice in medicine, as in every field. After the dictation of introductory texts in lectures, the real heart of teaching was the disputation, a staged debate between master and master, student and student, or master and student. In so-called quodlibets (“whatever you want”), a question was posed and a master took on all comers. A master might even dispute himself, in person or in a written treatise or commentary. These virtuoso performances were like knights’ tournaments for scholars. Disputations represented the direct continuation and institutionalIzation of Abelard’s dialectical warfare, not on account of his personal influence but instead owing to the culture of aggressive masculinity they shared.
  • Debate #Logic
• There was nothing innovative about Prague’s curriculum: Charles intended expressly to replicate the best of both Paris and Bologna. Its arts faculty in particular functioned as such faculties did everywhere else, as routine preparation for advanced professional study. Instruction was given in the standard trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Together these seven liberal arts, inherited from ancient Rome, are still nominally recognized in the bachelor’s (B.A.) and master’s (M.A.) degrees used today.
  • Curriculum
• What religion meant, how law and life should interact, what knowledge was for: all were ultimately decided not by any patron state, church hierarchy, or even professorial guild but by the ulama, a body of scholars that has thrived without formal institutional definition to this
  • In Islam - decentralized institutionalism
• Abbasid Baghdad became the new Alexandria. Its House of Wisdom, founded around 800 CE through the caliph’s largesse, gathered a multicultural scholarly community to translate all known exemplars the stargazing pagans of Harran (in what is now Turkey) worked there alongside Arab Muslims. Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Sanof “foreign” wisdom into Arabic. Christians, Jews, and even skrit texts and terms were all appropriated, and Arabic itself became a far richer and suppler language, and above all an international one, as a result. Collation and translation, as before, remained the gateway to synthesis and discovery. Alchemy (ar kimiya), a precursor to chemistry but also a spiritual discipline, drew upon Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, and algebra (al-jabr) developed from Hindu mathematics. (What we call arabic numbers, including zero, actually originated in India.) Nourished by multiple sources, Islamic learning brought the Greek and Indian exact sciences to a far higher degree of technical refinement than either had attained independently. Later Muslim astronomers came within a hair’s breadth of replacing Ptolemy’s geocentric universe with a sun-centered one, for example.
  • House of Wisdom
• In all these cases, innovations in scholarly interpretation must be shown to rest on the assumed truth of past wisdom recorded unerringly in recited texts. Every copied text in Islam attains clarity and completion only in the commentary that the scholar provides, quite often by literally interpolating new words in red ink in original passages written in black.
  • Connect to Brigham young quote: “all the scriptures are useless without the living oracle of god.”
• Every hand-copied written manuscript circulated in Islam thus included, in addition to the body of information it conveyed, as complete a list of prior copyists and commentators as possible, ideally going back to its original author. The concern to build a “golden chain” of authentic, reliable, documented oral transmitters accounts in large part for the Islamic world’s long-standing resistance to the printing press, despite its very early adoption of paper from China. Over a lifetime of study, seekers of knowledge accumulated a satchel of licenses rather than a handful of degrees; the transmission of knowledge was from person to person, not in schools organized as formal corporations as in medieval Europe.
  • Like block references so you can trace back the originator of the idea
• In the midst of all the governments that decide the fate of men; in the bosom of so many states, the majority of them despotic, governed by sovereigns whose authority extends over people and property, there exists a certain empire which holds sway only over the mind, an empire that we honor with the name Republic, because it preserves a measure of independence, and because it is almost its essence to be free. It is the empire of talent and of thought. The academies are its tribunals; people distinguished by their talents are its dignitaries. (ANONYMOUS (1780))
  • Progression through history and especially towards the Reformation seems to push towards individuality vs group emphasis
• FROM KYLE - Not sure where this fits in the book but an underlying theme is the role of the institutions. The library, the monastery, the university, even the laboratory eventually, are all institutions that helped our relationship with and understanding of different things. History, God, ideas, the world. The Reformation and (I think) the “Republic of Letters” are very individualistic. People’s politicization of science and partisan tribalism feel like a radicalization of “individuality.” - connect to the idea that “my opinions are as good as your facts” from death of expertise
• The Republic of Letters can be defined as an international community of learning stitched together initially by handwritten letters in the mail and later by printed books and journals. The term is of ancient origin; it hearkens back to Cicero (106-43 BCE), the Roman orator who matched wits with Julius Caesar, defended the republic against tyranny, and died a violent death at the hands of Mark Antony’s henchmen. When not speaking in the Senate, Cicero pursued scholarship at his country estate and corresponded with learned friends, not only to carry on the life of the mind but also to refine his oratorical and political skills. The Ciceronian ideal of a respublica literaria was revived imitatively when it reentered European usage in the late fifteenth century. Shorn of its political overtones in its later incarnation, this ideal inspired new practices of humanistic discourse among men (and some women) of letters.
• It was an institution perfectly adapted to disruptive change of unprecedented proportions. Its history raises the question of why Europe’s diversity brought progress in scholarship when by rights disunity ought to have crippled it. The answer is as simple as it is radical: with existing institutions of learning in crisis or collapse, the Republic of Letters founded its legitimacy on the production of new knowledge. Real bricksand-mortar institutions-print shops, museums, and learned academies-provided it with substance, as we will see. The Republic of Letters acted as an umbrella institution for them all. Owing to its legacy, international cooperation remains a hallmark of Western scholarship to this day.
  • Best institution to study for today is one that can survive turmoil. Monasteries survived by retracting from the world but this embraced the world - Substack? sciHub? GitHub?
• By the same token, when knowledge became politicized, the international culture of scholarship suffered.
• The Republic of Letters was a figurative polity constituted at the moment that politicized religion tore Europe apart. In conditions of crisis, it emerged as an alternative, secular institution of learning, partly rivaling, partly complementing the old universities by knitting European learning back together.
  • What is today’s equivalent?
• The Republic of Letters, like any republic, was governed by its citizens. But unlike other republics, its form of citizenship was anchored neither in space nor in formal laws or institutions. Unlike the urban citizenship of the Middle Ages, which granted rights in the specific town where a person lived, citizenship in the Republic of Letters was international. And unlike the guild citizenship of the medieval universitas, which was also international in the sense of being portable from place to place, there were no certificates, no degrees, no formal credentials of any kind: anyone who obeyed the rules of civil conduct could join. The Republic of Letters was totally unanchored in space. There were no fixed nodes, like Paris or Bologna-only the network itself.
  • Decentralization
• The republic transcended not only frontiers but generations. It was explicitly seen as a collaborative venture bringing scholars together not only across Europe but also across time. As Descartes put it, “With the later persons beginning where the earlier ones left off, and thereby linking the lives and the work of many people, we can all go forward together much further than each person individually would be able to do.”7 The belief in indefinite progress became a hallmark of the mature Republic of Letters, a key part of its legacy to modernity. It set members of this institution apart from the medieval scholastics, the first in fact to dub themselves “moderns,” but, in a cliché already popular at the time, only as dwarves standing on the shoulders of past giants. Prior seekers of knowledge could at best recover ageless wisdom from the past and patiently extend it-a view shared even by scholars of the early Renaissance
  • This would make a good twitter thread - “call for a modern republic of letters”
• Renaissance humanists aimed to recover ancient learning and ancient texts because ancient models-Cicero, most importantly -showed what it meant to have good character, to be a good leader, and to exhibit versatility and strength during times of tribulation.
  • Connect to Chris Sacca quote in 20VC - we know how to exercise but we don’t really study how to be a good person
• If logic was the basis of scholasticism in the universities and grammar the part of the trivium most useful in the monastery, rhetoric occupied pride of place for humanists in the Republic of Letters.
• Renaissance humanists departed radically from them in the way they practiced these techniques. They revived rhetoric not as oratory-the delivery of speeches-but primarily through the art of letter writing. Letter writing stressed a very different set of virtues from the oral arguments of the Greek polis and the Roman republic. Civility, friendship, politeness, generosity, benevolence, and especially tolerance: these were the qualities of “humanity” found in the form of the letter.
  • DMs are the modern “letter” - look at famous email exchanges (e.g. Facebook or Steve Jobs)
• Perhaps you will have heard something about me, although this too is doubtful, whether a petty, obscure name would reach far into either space or time. And perhaps you will wish to know what sort of man I was, or what were the results of my labors, especially of those whose fame has reached you or whose bare titles you have heard.”
  • How do we speak to posterity? Sam Altman tweet on 11/29/21 - “you are living through and creating important history. Take notes!” We have Aristotle to thank for Socrates
• Communication in the Republic of Letters was indeed rarely face-to-face, and participants might correspond for decades without ever meeting each other. The letter offered a twofold benefit to its members.
  • Twitter
• Erasmus, for example, became Europe’s first celebrity intellectual by crafting his public image in print, in particular by carefully editing and publishing his own letters,
  • Influencer
• But Galileo knew that correspondence networks alone could sustain his ideas. Peiresc’s defense of his scholarship illustrates that citizenship in the Republic of Letters was a real, not just a symbolic, political advantage.
• Virtuosi collections might have upended an entire scholarly culture founded since ancient times on learning from texts. Instead, the Republic of Letters reacted by embracing their wonders, publicizing their achievements, and confronting their implications for the organization of knowledge.
  • Decentralized intellectual debate can make room to discuss whatever is “new” because there is no orthodoxy to threaten
• Under conditions of uncertainty, the English courtier Francis Bacon offered the only sensible prescriptions: focus on facts, reserve judgment, discipline your imagination, and resist the urge to theorize. The inductive or “scientific” method he developed raised the questions of how new knowledge could be legitimated, how bogus claims could be separated from verifiable ones, and how coarse facts could be smoothed into the general theoretical understandings that any ordered mind craves.
• As we have seen, the letter, the book, and the museum together reformed many practices of the university, the monastery, and the library and opened up new vistas for scholars. The Republic of Letters founded its legitimacy on these new institutions, which complemented yet often radically extended the old ones. But midnight correspondents, isolated and persecuted book authors, and eccentric collectors piling up stuff in curiosity cabinets could make for a very lonely scholarly universe. One other Renaissance institution, the academy, came about to put people in the same room.
  • Institutions as foundations
• With traditional intellectual authorities in retreat, laypeople took unprecedented initiative in founding these new communities of learning.
• A fissure between literary and scholarly pursuits, and in par ticular between the classical arts of fine expression and the serious business of empirical science, was opening up in the Republic of Letters, and men and women fell on opposite side of it.
• Like Cicero and even Plato himself, academicians retreated from the world and devoted themselves to the pursuit of knowledge but never lost the aim of reentering and reshaping social life.
  • How do we shape social life?
• But early modern academies enjoyed a choice that Cicero and the others did not have: they could join a virtual Republic of Letters, thriving on the discussion of new knowledge, rather than do battle in real politics against the encroachments of dictatorship and absolutism. How else could academicians proclaim themselves citizens of an international “republic” and not be taken as an organized political conspiracy?
  • Breaking away from institutions
• By contrast, Europeans achieved unprecedented breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, anatomy, and natural history but at the cost of abandoning politics and constructing an imaginary Republic of Letters that thrived in the midst of unprecedented violence and chaos.
  • AI, ML, robotics, energy in the midst of poverty, violence, and class warfare / nationalism
• Writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argued that the “subdivision of employment in philosophy, as well as in every other business, improves dexterity, and saves time.” Knowledge he saw as a commodity, its production a form of industrial labor, its progress additive and cumulative. As “each individual becomes more expert in his own peculiar branch, more work is done upon the whole, and the quantity of science is thereby increased.” Disciplines, to Smith, were an artifact of scholars’ seeking a niche in the marketplace of ideas. This cheery capitalist vision comported well with the modern, secular, competitive arena the Republic of Letters had become by the eighteenth century.
  • Death of expertise > specialty > opinion? > I know nothing > I know a little > I know a lot > I know a lot about a little
• The creators of the best-selling French Encyclopédie gathered together all the arts, sciences, and even crafts in 71,818 articles.
  • History of encyclopedia
• Yet the trumpeters of print capitalism never succeeded in replacing the hierarchy that attends face-to-face learning. Seekers of knowledge today do not simply furnish themselves with a set of quality encyclopedias and venture forth into the world. They must instead submit to years and years of schooling.
  • Changing?
• Insulated groups driven by their own questions and methods, they make the production of new research an end in itself, often with little regard for fitting it into the wider world of learning.
  • Academic research
• On July 12, 1721, Wolff gave a lecture titled “On Chinese Practical Philosophy,” extolling the ethical genius and rational precepts of the Confucian classics.
  • Look it up
• The Pietists bucked a trend toward “extensive” reading inaugurated by the media revolution of the Enlightenment. While country lawyers reclined with encyclopedias and maidservants devoured cheap novels-reading a lot, but superficially-the scholarly devout attended to a precious body of texts ever more intensively.
  • Active reading
• Introductory lectures were called “encyclopedias, syntheses of various fields of learning packaged for the convenience and edification of students, who came and went as they pleased. Göttingen was quite literally a living encyclopedia.
  • Topical primers; history of encyclopedia
• Students took turns as “directors for a day,” gaining classroom experience by emulating the professor. They were expected to deliver original presentations based on novel research rather than parrot the shopworn arguments of their predeces sors. Often they picked their own topics instead of having them assigned by the professor. Peer pressure and competition for pr fessorial approval induced them to take on the most difficult research problems and tackle them assiduously. All this compelled students to prepare their essays beforehand: written scholarship became a new gold standard for disciplined scholarship in the face-to-face settting of the seminar.”
  • Learning by teaching
• Only a vanishingly small number of print consumers-perhaps Benjamin Franklin alone-had the selfdiscipline to make their own contributions to the Republic of Letters.
• Neohumanism provided the ideological raw materials to build an integrated national culture. Healing the same religious divide that had called the Republic of Letters into being in the first place, the worship of Western civilization would become the new religion of modernity.
  • What is our “new religion?”
• The system’s many washouts joined a swelling “academic proletariat” likened by contemporaries to starving artists or traveling comedy troupes.1 The only way up and out was to publish. Unlike the lecturer’s reputation as a teacher, which spread off campus only in the most exceptional cases, printed scholarship acted as a calling card for the professional intellectual. Hegel secured his chair at Berlin by writing books with arcane titles like The Phenomenology of Spirit, finished at Jena in 1806 and spirited out of town when Napoleon’s armies were literally outside the window. Specialized monographs and journals, like Hegel’s Critical Journal of Philosophy, created a publishing industry by and for academic specialists. In this way a fundamentally artificial market in print became the favored means to gain national exposure outside an academic’s home institution and garner a call from a rival university.
  • Birth of academic research
• Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), regarded as the founder of the discipline of history. Ranke wrote of one archival find, “Yesterday, I had a sweet, magnificent fling with the object of my love, a beautiful Italian”-no signorina, but a cache of musty papers-”and I hope that we produce a beautiful Roman-German prodigy” (a work of scholarship!). Following one late-night bout at the writing desk, Ranke wrote, “I rose at noon, completely exhausted.
  • “A student called from his studies” - John Quincy Adams
• To add to the encyclopedia of knowledge requires more than the industry and calculation of Adam Smith’s earnest businessman. It requires the passion born of a missionary impulse and transferred to the calling of specialized research.
  • Missionary
• Scientific dynasties and academic intermarriage are not unheard of in European history. What made the Curies novel was that women now stood as near equals beside their husbands. We often think of hard science as a quintessentially masculine domain, yet after women were admitted to universities in the late nineteenth century they achieved their first notable academic success in fields like physics and chemistry, not literature, history, or philosophy. The Curies were no anomaly; other female figures, such as Lise Meitner (a pioneer in nuclear fission) and Mileva Marić (Einstein’s wife), gained access to the citadels of male academia through the portals of laboratory science.
  • Women in science
• Several familiar characteristics of laboratory science distinguish it as a fundamentally new kind of scholarship. First, laboratory science yields results that are reproducible at will, in a controlled, contained, predictable environment; they’re not wonders, or miracles, or magic. Second, the laws it derives are universally applicable across space and time. The universal gas law, PV=nRT, is true wherever you are, and it is as true today as it will be millennia hence.* Third, while the humanities thrive on dispute and dialectic, science privileges academic consensus. Achievements deemed “true” are rapidly accepted as “fact” by the entire community of scientists. This helps to explain, fourth, why laboratory science came to enjoy public acclaim and widespread acceptance even after it ceased to be practiced in the relative openness of the gentlemanly academy and retreated behind closed doors. “Objectivity” is a label we might give to this bundle of characteristics, and the laboratory localized it in hallowed spaces where scientific craftsmen tricked nature into doing the unusual-not once, but replicably and reliably.
  • Transitioned from perspective and conjecture to results and analysis
• The two Humboldt brothers, Wilhelm, the architect of the research university, and his younger brother, Alexander (1769– 1889), who became one of the most famous scientists of the century. Wilhelm spent his life at a writing desk, drawing up the blueprints for Prussia’s educational system, penning treatises on comparative linguistics, and conducting diplomatic correspondence as the Prussian ambassador in, successively, Rome, Vienna, and London, Alexander became a world traveler. His epic voyage to South and Central America from 1799 to 1804 garnered hìm worldwide fame and generated thirty volumes of research findings in the decades after his return. Years later, at the peak of his influence, Alexander returned to the roving naturalist’s life with an expedition through Russian central Asia. Today the Humboldt Current, the Humboldt penguin, three Humboldt counties in the United States, and the Mare Humboldtianum moon crater all attest to the sheer physical sweep of his impact on the study of nature. (Alexander even dabbled in philological research to establish for the first time how Martin Waldseemüller had come to name the Americas after Vespucci.)
  • Two brothers. Alexander is legit
• Humboldt presided over a supercharged Republic of Letters grafted onto the global networks of European colonialism, putting remote scientists in contact with one another. His world-girding enterprise depended on the ability of dispersed nonexpert practitioners of natural observation to share data via post. Operating in the openness of the Republic of Letters, Humboldtian science could, in principle, be taken up by anyone who came into possession of his writings. Thus Charles Darwin, despite a desultory university education, set off on his own adventure in the Galápagos Islands after reading Humboldt. Humboldt’s science aspired to universal applicability but otherwise lacked the characteristics of objectivity found in the laboratory. He did not aim to manipulate nature reliably and reproducibly, only to observe it. His theories on natural phenomena-the causes of volcanoes, for example-aimed to provoke debate and discussion, not establish consensus. His methods commanded enthusiastic public support, but only because they invited public participation; none of them required expert or private knowledge.
  • So good!
• The scientist must commit himself or herself to the authority of the master to learn precious skills that cannot be imparted in any other way. Only by accepting that craft wisdom, those secrets, does an individual become initiated into the fraternity. One does not argue with a Bunsen burner (not successfully, at least); one learns how to make it perform.
  • Apprenticeship
• Science gains its public authority by making amazing predictions, but only by turning the world into a laboratory can scientists establish conditions that enable them to say reliably, “This will happen.
• Every human being, whatever his or her particular constellation of intellectual faults and fortes, carries a two- or three-digit “intelligence quotient” (IQ), largely invariant over a lifetime, that denotes his or her inherent mental capacity. Intelligence testing is an enduring victory for modern psychology, whose centrality to the development of social science is analogous to that of chemistry in the natural sciences.
• Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) became the guru of what his followers called “scientific management.” “In the past,” Taylor wrote in 1911, “the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”
  • Systems thinking
• In a telling reversal of gender roles, it was Lillian, not Frank, who brought academic credentials to the partnership. Frank (1868-1924) was a building contractor by trade, which no doubt provided the inspiration for having his children submit sealed bids to win contracts to remove tree stumps from the front lawn.
  • Parenting
• An art gallery and concerts, a library and a bookshop, a night school for adults and public lectures given by the likes of John Dewey (the famous pragmatist philosopher from the nearby University of Chicago), made cultural and educational outreach an integral, not just incidental, aspect of its mission. More than a community center, Hull-House also functioned as a prolific site of knowledge production, Its members authored twenty-seven books and contributed over fifty articles to the recently established American Journal of Sociology.
  • Communal living
• By the early twentieth century, they had also realized that giving away a fortune was actually a monumentally difficult task for anyone who cared, as they did, how the money was spent. They therefore targeted their giving scientifically. Carnegie Corporation leaders had for some time felt beleaguered by aid petitions from settlement houses and other charities. They thus determined to put an end to “benevolent receptivity” and “passive sorting” in favor of more active “initiative in seeking out those forces in the social order that promise to be significant and fruitful.”
  • Rockefeller and Carnegie
• NASA director James Webb published Space Age Management, heralding the application of social-scientific techniques to the one space still unconquered by the laboratory: the cosmos itself. “No nation that aspires to greatness,” he argued, “can continue to rely on the methods of the past. Unless a nation purposefully and systematically stimulates and regulates its technological advances will surely drop behind.”
  • “We choose to go to the moon because it is hard.”
• Cold war America was gripped by the belief that raw brainpower, steeled by objective analysis and nourished by farsighted patrons, could meet all of America’s military, scientific, and social challenges. Webb’s Apollo space program was its clearest expres sion: a philanthropic mission for all humanity (“one small steph for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”), the biggest of big science management systems, created by rocket scientists who were the best of the best brains. It is easy in retrospect to identify cases where such visions went right (the moon landing), went wrong (Vietnam), or produced ambiguous results (the Great Society, nuclear energy).
  • Progress studies - why so little faith in it now?
• Even today, nearly two decades after the cold war ended, this is the world we inhabit.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz.
  • Look it up
• Epochal historical events have determined that the laboratory, not the monastery, will continue to dominate the life of learning. Other latetwentieth-century trends, like the democratization and commercialization of knowledge, are now pressuring existing institutions to meet the demands of a “knowledge society.” Above all, the ascendancy of the laboratory is reshaping the basic missions of other institutions, pushing some toward obsolescence, giving others a new lease on life.
  • For now. How do institutions survive?
• Finally, the Internet, hatched in secretive cold war computer laboratories, has revived the ancient dream of a universal library to serve the dictates of democracy and commerce, empowering the public to share information-and possibly knowledge-wholly outside the disciplines. Back in the 1970s, social analysts still spoke of the research university as the institutional anchor of the postindustrial economy. A generation further on, the balance has shifted, with laboratories both inside and outside the university driving the growth of our vaunted “knowledge society.”
• Combined, the attack on the canon of Western civilization, the rise of vocational fields of learning, and the substitution of quantitative metrics such as SATS and grade point averages (GPAs) for the subjective, humanistic evaluation of intelligence eroded the very foundation on which the disciplines were first erected.
  • Reformation led to progressive liberalism that may have thrown the baby out with the bath water
• For all the hue and cry surrounding “political correctness,” the disciplines’ quiet abdication of their former commanding influence over pedagogy represents their most consequential departure from the compre hensive, integrated, tiered system of teaching and research established by Wilhelm von Humboldt.
  • The very places you should be able to go to “offend” your worst ideas
• For many “knowledge workers,” intellectual excitement is best found not in the traditional havens of academic freedom but where the experimentalism of the laboratory meets and meshes with the entrepreneurship of the corporation.
• “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush
  • Look it up
• Among those inspired by his essay were Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, and J.C.R. Licklider, whose Libraries of the Future (1965) described a digitized library networked for access by multiple users and able to learn from and continuously adapt to their queries and feedback.
• The “cyberculture” of the early Internet pioneers bears remarkable similarities to the early modern Republic of Letters as it broke free from medieval universities politicized by religion. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, long-haired renegades working within the bowels of a modern-day knowledge-power complex transformed the computer from a symbol of corporate regimentation into a technology facilitating personal expression and open collaboration.
  • Republic of letters 2.0
• Today’s information utopianism, born of a homegrown countercultural humanism to replace the discredited classical humanism of the Republic of Letters, is one of the most enduring legacies of the sixties, and one with deep roots in American history.
• The laboratory has put so much information at our fingertips that many now identify information with knowledge itself.
  • Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? TS Elliott
• Amid the worldwide ascendancy of the laboratory, we now face the task of discerning what is enduring from what is ephemeral in a climate of relentless technological hype and brittle American triumphalism. Promoters of the vaunted “information age” often forget that knowledge has always been about connecting people, not collecting information. Computers and the Internet, for all their democratic potential, merely allow us to live out dreams of high-tech wizardry conceived decades ago in an epoch of can-do American ingenuity. New electronic com munities such as wikis and blogs, at the moment collectively dubbed Web 2.0, if anything make the pursuit of reliable, authentic knowledge more, not less, difficult online, by drowning out traditionally credentialed cultural gatekeepers.36 Relatively few networked forums provide a truly democratic alternative to the focused, substantive, reasoned-and elitist-debate that still governs the disciplines. The widespread conflation of knowledge and information reflects what we no longer value about the ways that disciplines interpret texts and ideas, art and music, and other products of culture.
  • Signal vs noise
• Increased contact with spaces outside the ivory tower-businesses, governments, hospitals, neighborhoods, social-service organizations, primary and secondary schools-might give scholars the chance to apply and refine their learning in experimental settings.