Scientia potentia est – “Knowledge is power” – was launched upon the world by Francis Bacon, and entered flight with Thomas Hobbes. The phrase was among the watchwords of the new, post-Catholic, “scientific” order, or “Reformation” as its exponents came to call themselves. They had a new, nominalist, appreciation of technology.
Yet the phrase, or some near variant, may be found in the Hebrew Book of Proverbs, and here and there over the many intervening centuries. The difference was that Bacon, and his secretary, Hobbes, used it like thugs. They meant political power – the power over others. They did not mean the power to fuel virtue.
That “information” is power was a decisive step down, into mediocrity. It seems to have come about when the generations of advertising salesmen co-opted the phrase, and began using it in their promotions.
“Information is power” was among the clichés by which my little mind was poisoned, when I was very young. This was towards the end of the 1960s, and for a few years thereafter. Even today, I still hear it – this deathless cliche – though often from a speaker who is trying to be droll.
I will concede some specialized application. When a piece of information is discovered, that can serve as blackmail bait, I must allow that the knowledge has potential power. If the victim is Christian, however, he may refuse to pay, to save the blackmailer from Hell – making the knowledge useless.
The contrary assertion, that “power is information,” usefully reveals the essential nonsense in the phrase. These are two things located on different planes, and the “THIS is THAT” does not work, even metaphorically – except in the Blakean sense, that when you have power over someone, he knows you.
My own first attempt at defending myself against the cliché was to ask, in a high school class of all places, a simple question of the teacher who used the phrase: “Does it make any difference if the information is true?”
(I was then accused of being a smart-aleck, and had to explain that I wasn’t being one, for a change. For I had recently learnt that Socrates was NOT a know-it-all.)
In my subsequent thinking on the topic, I realized that the truth didn’t matter to the user of such a phrase; and moreover, that it still doesn’t matter to his kind. For, like any glib statement, it only matters that a truth-alleging noise be uttered, which will evaporate before it can be examined.
The relation between “information” and “truth” is an irrelevance except for those who take life seriously. To those who do, however, it is a source of vexation.
The “big lie” (which has now become a popular phrase among little liars) would “theoretically” work as well, as any truthful information, but only if those who hear the “big lie” let it pass by. This they may do from fear of punishment, or just to avoid inconvenience.
Indeed, “fear of inconvenience” has become one of the most powerful motivators in the West today. You do not say something because it may be willfully misunderstood (such as racism, classism, genderism, &c) and you have decided that is not a hill you could wish to die on.
We may assume the Devil is pleased by this arrangement, in which telling a joke can get you destroyed – especially if the joke is very funny.
Humor, too, is only acceptable to people who take life seriously. Satire is, after all, a means of communicating truth. (Unserious people assume that the price of truth will always be too high.)
But being serious about the truth of information does have some effect on power relations; usually, an inverse effect. For a people who will not agree to be lied to becomes ungovernable by liars. In this way, we see the more reasonable contrary of “knowledge is power.”
Yet it is not the information (which is transient by nature) that has the intimidating effect. It is the explicitly moral significance of the truth that puts the powerful on defense.
Thus, knowledge does not give power, even indirectly. Consider: there are innumerable people who know how to make an atomic bomb, or a virus in a laboratory, and are not even tempted to do so. Even the knowledge of how to come out of a street fight, on top, will not automatically be used to start street fights.
Genuine knowledge belongs more closely to wisdom than to the protocols and procedures of power. It is why, back when our society was more sane, distinguished professors made much less money than they do now that “knowledge” and “information” have been inflated.
But their power of getting money and influence did not come from the topics they profess. Rather, it came from union maneuvers, for the rank and file, and from political skills in the superlative cases. Even the President of the United States need not show any exceptional mental ability.
One might speculate that original knowledge could lead to power, through the intermediary of wealth, except all my information about the world tends to confirm that this is an illusion. Those who invent remarkable things, on which the biggest fortunes have been made, are most often rewarded with abject poverty, and mountainous debts. Why is this? They are easily taken advantage of by persons with half their IQ.
One might almost say, and I will intemperately add, that the will to make a fortune is entirely separate from the will to knowledge.
Copyrights and patents may be made into objects for trade, and there have been some stupendous beneficiaries, but as a rule, only after the inventor has died, or been bought out cheaply. Unless, of course, he is Thomas Edison, who was more a businessman than an inventor.
If God thought knowledge or information were worth rewarding with power, He would not have been so sparing in His distribution of intellect.
__________
You may also enjoy:
+James V. Schall, S.J. On Limits
Fr. Paul D. Sclaia’s Knowledge That Blinds
