KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW:
THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE FROM ANCIENT WISDOM TO MODERN MAGIC
SIMON WINCHESTER
© 2023 Harper
$35.00
415 pages

How do you know that?

Sometimes, you know things because you just do. You learned through osmosis, the grapevine, an elder, or a peer. Someone said something and bingo! you were enlightened, informed, made aware. In fact, starting just a few weeks after you were born, you became an information sponge, and so you remained for about the first twelve years of your life. You learned from teachers and parents in a "generational food chain." After a while, learning came slightly harder; still, no matter what your age now, you have the capability to learn.

"The arc of every human life," says author Simon Winchester, "is measured... by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge."

But how?

In the beginning of time, knowing was a matter of social skills: we learned, and shared what we knew. Writing was invented, coincidentally, in two places on the globe at about the same time, and the ability to preserve information on tablet, parchment, or vellum led to the creation of repositories for that information. Schools were founded, testing was established.

While Plato and Socrates thought about how we learn, their knowledge about it was limited. For a long time, knowledge was based in the heavens, until Voltaire shook things up and aimed big thinkers at facts, rather than religion.

In the meantime, Indigenous peoples and the illiterate passed down their knowledge in stories and songs, which worked because, as Winchester says, "people tell people things... in a thousand ways" Societies began to understand that swapping knowledge with other groups helped spread information. Books were invented, newspapers and magazines followed, then came the telegraph, radio, telephones, television, and the internet — which causes Winchester to wonder if we might forget how to learn and remember when we don't need to do so?

It happens to the best of us: those embarrassing moments when a fact is just out of reach inside your brain and you flounder. You might not be able to say exactly what you want to say, but after reading Knowing What We Know, you'll see how you may have learned it.

In examining the vast catalog of human knowledge, we must look at almost every study that's ever been tackled, and here, Winchester does the heavy work of separating what's important from what's not so much. While this still might be too much information for some readers — and Winchester touches on TMI — it helps to see that knowledge is a layered thing that can also be slippery, easily manipulated, and dangerous. He goes on to sound a plaintive alarm at our reliance on conveniences: many of us don't remember phone numbers anymore, and addresses are elusive things. What's next?

Readers who are concerned about libraries, banned books, the disappearance of language and societies, and fake news will appreciate this book immensely. Knowing What We Know is good — and now you know.