Knowledge

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. For thousands of years, this path to growth was blocked because people believed that ancient traditions and holy scriptures already contained all the important knowledge the world had to offer. A human culture that believed it already knew everything worth knowing would not bother searching for new knowledge. This was the position of most premodern human civilizations. However, the Scientific Revolution freed humankind from this conviction.

 

It is remarkable that this process did not already begin in the Axial Age some 2500 years ago. In the Western tradition, there is in fact a text from that time that marks the initial spark of our search for wisdom and has determined our thinking ever since. It is the Apology of Socrates written by Plato in 399 BC. The core statement of this founding document of Western philosophy is: "I know that I do not know." This is the formula that defines wisdom to this day. It is about knowledge and at the same time about the limits of knowledge. We are on an island of knowledge, surrounded by a vast ocean of ignorance. However, the limit of knowledge is shiftable. With the growth of knowledge, ignorance also grows. Our knowledge increases through information processing and inter-generative experience transfer, even though the structure of the knowledge changes in the process. Nevertheless, there is no reservoir of constructive ideas. Learned knowledge is not inherited genetically. We have to start again and again, each time corresponding to the current starting position. According to Karl R. Popper's Critical Rationalism, Western science is subject to falsification – in contrast to ideology.

 

A human is the only living being that is able to bring past, present and future into causal connections in its temporal consciousness. The anticipation of the future significantly determines our human thinking and acting. However, the open future is associated with a phenomenon of uncertainty that can only be approached with the greatest possible mental freedom and flexibility, especially in historical moments when the future changes direction. Our limited and continuing limited knowledge of the infinite number of determinants of the world and of each individual requires decentralized institutions and procedures in society and the economy for the discovery and processing of information and knowledge, through which we preserve our structures and processes from solidification and keep them flexible, changeable and capable of learning. Moreover, an increase in knowledge should be accompanied by a deepening of conscience.

 

In the future belief will successively replace knowledge. That might sound astonishing in view of the growing importance of science. However, it is undisputed that the constructs of our increasingly dynamic and complicated world are seen and understood by fewer and fewer people, but are nevertheless used as a matter of course. Without looking at the inner workings of these complex black boxes, we integrate them into our considerations in terms of their inputs and outputs. The part that we simply have to believe without understanding the function and explanations is getting increasingly larger. Thus, in an almost curious way, an old wisdom is reaffirmed: If you know nothing, you must believe everything. This gives the person explaining a higher significance than their explanation. In the future we will have to convince more with images and emotions than with arguments. Leadership is especially important in times of crisis. Managers manage the known, leaders manage the unknown.

 

With the pandemic, we are also experiencing an "infodemic", a confluence of a wide variety of information of different quality. In the process, our diverse world, which is immensely interconnected and complex, becomes clear to us, and it often requires great intellectual effort to understand it, which is the prerequisite for shaping it. Conspiracists are reluctant to take up this challenge. At the same time, this development reveals a huge media education gap, as we learn how people withdraw into the echo chambers of social media and use various digital channels to send us fake news and thus lack of knowledge. We have all become media empowered, but not all of us are media literate. We need more media education and media competence to accompany the digital revolution.

 

Before the Corona crisis, most people were convinced that big data could handle everything, including forecasting our future with predictive analytics. Now the limitations of this approach are becoming apparent. Firstly, the data are not sufficiently large, secondly, a number of data is manipulated, and thirdly, they are partly contradictory, so that even the best computers with artificial intelligence from Silicon Valley are not effective. The ignorance remains. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas assesses the current situation with a concise remark: "There has never been so much knowledge about our ignorance and about the compulsion to act and live under uncertainty.” In other words, we have no idea, but we know a lot about it. Dealing with ignorance, enduring ignorance in a level-headed and risk-conscious way – that is the “art” that has yet to be learned. In fighting an invisible enemy such as a virus, we must use our most effective tool: human intelligence. Since everyone believes they have enough brainpower, a case of distributive justice, we can be confident that we can find appropriate solutions to the pandemic.