BY PETER SAGAL
KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic
By Simon Winchester
Illustrated 418 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers
Simon Winchester has made an illustrious career of raising anecdote to art. To wit: A correspondence between a British don and an asylum inmate about lexicography became “The Professor and the Madman,” his first blockbuster. His other books of travel, geography, history and biography all illuminate the past via an unerring sense of what might interest, provoke and engage, profiting from a former foreign correspondent’s understanding of how to tease a story out of facts.
The opening vignette of his latest book, “Knowing What We Know,” is autobiographical, set “in the late summer of 1947,” when he “was nearly 3,” and describes how he learned, in the most painful but lasting way possible, that there is a thing in the world called a “wasp” and that it can sting. He means the anecdote as synecdoche: to tell the story “of how knowledge has been passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of that passage have evolved over thousands of years of human existence.” But there is another theme present in that first tale and most of those that follow. A man who was nearly 3 in the summer of 1947 is now, in 2023, approaching 80. A book about transmitting knowledge by someone who has made his name by doing just that in the most erudite and entertaining way possible cannot help being a kind of commentary on the author’s own life and work.
Winchester’s overt purpose is never quite fulfilled. He touches on aspects of all of the topics encompassed by his title: the neurological locations of learning and memory, pedagogy, libraries, encyclopedias, methods of data transmission from ancient religious ritual to Wikipedia, the definition of knowledge, how best to measure and value it. But he doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer to any of the deeper questions. For example: Why does he remember that wasp sting so well — what street they were walking in, the kind of stroller he was riding — when so much else of his childhood is, as with everyone’s, long forgotten? Is it, as Christine Blasey Ford put it in a very different context, because “trauma-related experience is locked” in the hippocampus? Does the emotional weight affect the kind of things we know, and what we believe to be true? We are not told. Instead, we are given even more anecdotes, nuggets of narrative from across history and the globe, each a diversion from Winchester’s stated goal.
Winchester’s overt purpose is never quite fulfilled. He touches on aspects of all of the topics encompassed by his title: the neurological locations of learning and memory, pedagogy, libraries, encyclopedias, methods of data transmission from ancient religious ritual to Wikipedia, the definition of knowledge, how best to measure and value it. But he doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer to any of the deeper questions. For example: Why does he remember that wasp sting so well — what street they were walking in, the kind of stroller he was riding — when so much else of his childhood is, as with everyone’s, long forgotten? Is it, as Christine Blasey Ford put it in a very different context, because “trauma-related experience is locked” in the hippocampus? Does the emotional weight affect the kind of things we know, and what we believe to be true? We are not told. Instead, we are given even more anecdotes, nuggets of narrative from across history and the globe, each a diversion from Winchester’s stated goal.
But how diverting are these diversions! Early on, we learn of Shukla Bose, an Indian woman who quit her job to bring free education to the children living in the “pullulating aggregations of wretchedness” in the slums of what was then known as Bangalore. Later comes Andrew Bell, one of the founders of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 18th-century Edinburgh, a man who was 4 feet 6 inches tall and gifted with a gargantuan nose, which he would accentuate with a papier-mâché extension while riding about town on an enormous horse, as if daring anyone to laugh.
The intriguing information comes fast and thick: The first office for the creation of propaganda was created by the Catholic Church! Amazon’s Alexa device was named in honor of the Library of Alexandria! Did you know that Sir John Reith, founder of the BBC, required his newscasters to wear formal dress on Sundays — on the radio? I do not mean to diminish Winchester’s work by describing it as a delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter. Even our language for such things — “trivia, factoids” — assumes scorn for the merely interesting. But there are lots of ways of describing knowledge, many of which are explored here, and one workable definition might be: information that gives pleasure, arouses curiosity and widens, if only by a small fraction, one’s appreciation of the vast world beyond one’s immediate vision.
In an eloquent chapter on propaganda and manipulation, Winchester tells damning stories of how the Chinese government erased the memory of Tiananmen Square and how he himself witnessed the massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, known as “Bloody Sunday,” only to watch, appalled, as the British perpetrators lied about it for decades. But, in a footnote, he reveals that he was at work on this book as late as last year. Surely, with roughly half of the populace of his adopted home of America still under the thrall of “alternative facts,” he could have come up with a more current example of the dishonest manipulation of elections than the Zinoviev letter of 1924?
The book ends with a look back on a group of polymaths, people acclaimed for possessing more than a mortal’s share of knowledge, like Ben Franklin, Richard Feynman and Frank Ramsay, who died at 26 after revolutionizing philosophy and mathematics. It’s an odd place to end, until you remember that first story and its date. Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history — and become an Officer of the British Empire — as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world. You sense that he envies these true polymaths while knowing that he himself, a traveler, researcher and reporter, could never claim their genius. Were these men somehow closer to the divine ideal of knowledge than mere authors, those who learn and labor for the seemingly crass motivation of selling books?
It doesn’t matter. The value of knowledge can’t be ranked, just as the experience of a mathematical prodigy can’t be compared to that of someone who, say, has just won a trivia quiz. Winchester has spent his literary career bestowing on readers things they never knew before, be they about madmen, continents or volcanic explosions. The book may not, in the end, propound a new argument for the value of acquiring knowledge. But like all of Winchester’s books, it is one.
Simon Winchester has made an illustrious career of raising anecdote to art. To wit: A correspondence between a British don and an asylum inmate about lexicography became “The Professor and the Madman,” his first blockbuster. His other books of travel, geography, history and biography all illuminate the past via an unerring sense of what might interest, provoke and engage, profiting from a former foreign correspondent’s understanding of how to tease a story out of facts.
The opening vignette of his latest book, “Knowing What We Know,” is autobiographical, set “in the late summer of 1947,” when he “was nearly 3,” and describes how he learned, in the most painful but lasting way possible, that there is a thing in the world called a “wasp” and that it can sting. He means the anecdote as synecdoche: to tell the story “of how knowledge has been passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of that passage have evolved over thousands of years of human existence.” But there is another theme present in that first tale and most of those that follow. A man who was nearly 3 in the summer of 1947 is now, in 2023, approaching 80. A book about transmitting knowledge by someone who has made his name by doing just that in the most erudite and entertaining way possible cannot help being a kind of commentary on the author’s own life and work.
Winchester’s overt purpose is never quite fulfilled. He touches on aspects of all of the topics encompassed by his title: the neurological locations of learning and memory, pedagogy, libraries, encyclopedias, methods of data transmission from ancient religious ritual to Wikipedia, the definition of knowledge, how best to measure and value it. But he doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer to any of the deeper questions. For example: Why does he remember that wasp sting so well — what street they were walking in, the kind of stroller he was riding — when so much else of his childhood is, as with everyone’s, long forgotten? Is it, as Christine Blasey Ford put it in a very different context, because “trauma-related experience is locked” in the hippocampus? Does the emotional weight affect the kind of things we know, and what we believe to be true? We are not told. Instead, we are given even more anecdotes, nuggets of narrative from across history and the globe, each a diversion from Winchester’s stated goal.
Winchester’s overt purpose is never quite fulfilled. He touches on aspects of all of the topics encompassed by his title: the neurological locations of learning and memory, pedagogy, libraries, encyclopedias, methods of data transmission from ancient religious ritual to Wikipedia, the definition of knowledge, how best to measure and value it. But he doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer to any of the deeper questions. For example: Why does he remember that wasp sting so well — what street they were walking in, the kind of stroller he was riding — when so much else of his childhood is, as with everyone’s, long forgotten? Is it, as Christine Blasey Ford put it in a very different context, because “trauma-related experience is locked” in the hippocampus? Does the emotional weight affect the kind of things we know, and what we believe to be true? We are not told. Instead, we are given even more anecdotes, nuggets of narrative from across history and the globe, each a diversion from Winchester’s stated goal.
But how diverting are these diversions! Early on, we learn of Shukla Bose, an Indian woman who quit her job to bring free education to the children living in the “pullulating aggregations of wretchedness” in the slums of what was then known as Bangalore. Later comes Andrew Bell, one of the founders of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 18th-century Edinburgh, a man who was 4 feet 6 inches tall and gifted with a gargantuan nose, which he would accentuate with a papier-mâché extension while riding about town on an enormous horse, as if daring anyone to laugh.
The intriguing information comes fast and thick: The first office for the creation of propaganda was created by the Catholic Church! Amazon’s Alexa device was named in honor of the Library of Alexandria! Did you know that Sir John Reith, founder of the BBC, required his newscasters to wear formal dress on Sundays — on the radio? I do not mean to diminish Winchester’s work by describing it as a delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter. Even our language for such things — “trivia, factoids” — assumes scorn for the merely interesting. But there are lots of ways of describing knowledge, many of which are explored here, and one workable definition might be: information that gives pleasure, arouses curiosity and widens, if only by a small fraction, one’s appreciation of the vast world beyond one’s immediate vision.
In an eloquent chapter on propaganda and manipulation, Winchester tells damning stories of how the Chinese government erased the memory of Tiananmen Square and how he himself witnessed the massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, known as “Bloody Sunday,” only to watch, appalled, as the British perpetrators lied about it for decades. But, in a footnote, he reveals that he was at work on this book as late as last year. Surely, with roughly half of the populace of his adopted home of America still under the thrall of “alternative facts,” he could have come up with a more current example of the dishonest manipulation of elections than the Zinoviev letter of 1924?
The book ends with a look back on a group of polymaths, people acclaimed for possessing more than a mortal’s share of knowledge, like Ben Franklin, Richard Feynman and Frank Ramsay, who died at 26 after revolutionizing philosophy and mathematics. It’s an odd place to end, until you remember that first story and its date. Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history — and become an Officer of the British Empire — as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world. You sense that he envies these true polymaths while knowing that he himself, a traveler, researcher and reporter, could never claim their genius. Were these men somehow closer to the divine ideal of knowledge than mere authors, those who learn and labor for the seemingly crass motivation of selling books?
It doesn’t matter. The value of knowledge can’t be ranked, just as the experience of a mathematical prodigy can’t be compared to that of someone who, say, has just won a trivia quiz. Winchester has spent his literary career bestowing on readers things they never knew before, be they about madmen, continents or volcanic explosions. The book may not, in the end, propound a new argument for the value of acquiring knowledge. But like all of Winchester’s books, it is one.
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