Democratic Knowledge

                We tend to think of knowledge in individual and proprietary terms.  People possess knowledge and use it to leverage their interests and status.  We seem to think that knowledge is just ‘out there’ for the taking, and that having more of it is proof of hard work and intelligence.  We don’t even blink at the notion that some people have a right to have more knowledge than others or that the people who seem to have it deserve to have it.  If we were truly democratic in the way we approach knowledge, we would see that these assumptions are problematic.  I want to draw on two books, Cognition In The Wild, by Edwin Hutchins and States of Shock, by Bernard Stiegler, to propose an alternative approach to the way we think about knowledge.

                I am writing this in the wake of the college admissions scandal that made headlines across the country.  Rich parents had faked and bribed people to insure their children could go to elite institutions.  The public outrage was over the fact that the sanctity of these institutions was tarnished by the unseemly behavior of these rich parents.  The outrage should have been focused on the supposedly ‘elite’ designation of those institutions in the first place.   Put aside for a moment the ‘legacy’ students who gain admission through family ties and donorship that already dilute the notion that the students at these institutions are some how more ‘worthy’ than other students.  The more fundamental problem is the idea that a democracy can function on an elite definition of knowledge.  As Hutchins makes clear, knowledge is a cultural formation not an individual trait or characteristic.  Elite institutions promote the idea that an oligarchy is necessary to govern a democracy, a notion the ‘founding fathers’ believed to their core. 

                The problem with that notion is that the knowledge created is created by and for the people who need and use it.  The knowledge of the world produced at Harvard or Yale is not knowledge of an objective reality shared by everyone, it is the knowledge of a world that recognizes and perpetuates the positional advantage of the people at Harvard and Yale.  The system works to vigorously protect the advantage of their perspective against the perspectives and interests of other groups of people with different experiences and interests.  In some ways, it is a continuation of Plato’s philosopher kings who were the only class of people who could be trusted to know the good.  When poverty is studied in the Ivy League, it never includes an examination of the system that created an unequal distribution of wealth and status which form the basis for the Ivy League in the first place.  That is, it never includes the world view or knowledge of the people who are actually impoverished or their positionality in the system that creates knowledge about them but does not actually include them.  Luhmann once said that the people studied end up being more like the characters in a 19^th century novel than real people.

                If we are serious about being a democracy, we need institutions that bring everyone represented by or impacted by the knowledge we create.  Stiegler proposes just that in States of Shock.  Instead of universities that represent the narrow and self-serving interests of the elite, he proposes universities that foster inquiry by and about the people who live around them.  We should be less interested in what pharmaceutical companies want than what patients think they need.  As feminist critics of science have long maintained, who interests are behind the questions that generate research means everything in what kind of research is done and what results are produced.  In a democratic educational system, the research, learning and production should be based on what the people need to know.  We need to know what the effect of an unchecked assault of social media means to the way we relate and raise families.  We need to know how to feed ourselves and organize our lives in ways that are healthy and sustainable.  Too much of academia is either feeding corporate greed or academic egos instead of generating knowledge that is useful to the people.  We have promoted a system that makes a few people smart (and rich) and a lot of people dumb.  That may serve a capitalist vision of the world, but it can’t produce a democratic society.

                So, be amused or horrified or scandalized by what a few insanely rich parents did to help their kids get laid at an elite institution instead of a state school if you must, but don’t miss the larger scandal about the way we produce, distribute and share knowledge in the process.