An Empty Encyclopaedia

The gradual emptying of knowledge held in common leaves civilisation vulnerable

“Hence debate between fundamentally opposed standpoints does occur; but it is inevitably inconclusive. Each warring position characteristically appears irrefutable to its own adherents; indeed in its own terms and by its own standards of argument it is in practice irrefutable.”
- Alasdair MacIntyre

Immediately after the turmoil of the Three Kingdoms period ended, Cao Pi (tsao-pee) became the new emperor of what is now called China. He swiftly commissioned ‘the Emperor’s mirror’, a vast anthology intended to include all known knowledge for the benefit of the imperial court. The Roman and Arabic empires also circulated reference books like these purporting to offer a complete view of everything that mattered, although not with quite the extensiveness of the Imperial Mirror.

The British Empire later made the Encyclopaedia Britannica a definitive symbol of human knowledge, a project usurped by the Wikipedia today. Yet ‘encyclopaedia’ did not always mean a reference text. The word originates in Greek and meant ‘training in a complete circle’, namely the spheres of arts and sciences. It still meant ‘education’ when it crept into French in the sixteenth century, and it was German scholars later that century who associated ‘encyclopaedia’ with a book, a meaning that lingered and soon supplanted its older sense entirely.

Since at least Nietzsche, the brash arrogance of imperial certainty represented by the encyclopaedia has been challenged as the very project of a definitive reference to knowledge has become suspect. Thus the fostering of the odd claim about a ‘post-truth’ society, meaning on the one hand a culture incapable of constructing any consistent form of truth, and on the other the absence of any emperor to adjudicate the boundaries of acceptable knowledge. Hardly surprising that the most reliable content the Wikipedia can compile is petty corporate trivia - it offers an outstanding reference to every minor character ever published by Marvel or DC, a purpose that would have baffled Emperor Cao Pi.

Yet the encyclopaedia and its digital successors represent a role we inheritors of the mantle of civilisation cannot quite survive without. It provides an epistemic commons, that is, a shared community practice (commons) of knowledge (epistemic). Without an epistemic commons, it is in principle implausible for governments to enact any regulation without evoking outrage, since it is by having shared knowledge that we agree upon reasonable restrictions. Without this commons, governments can decree whatever nonsensical tomfoolery they happen to desire. As Ivan Illich warned, irrational consistency exerts a mesmeric hold on bureaucrats who are always in urgent need of expedient means to pursue whatever ends happen to be dictated.

As Alasdair MacIntyre observed, it is not that debate between opposing viewpoints doesn’t take place, but rather that the positions which clash are experienced as utterly irrefutable for whomsoever adopts them. As MacIntyre cautioned, pragmatically this is the case: each faction is committed to their own standards of argument, and so disagreements proceed from entirely different sets of practices and premises. Alas, since MacIntyre’s warning, the situation has become far worse, since now even the debate itself can be prevented. The internet has achieved a degree of censorship that would be the envy of Soviet Russia. Not content with inconclusive debate, we are faced with the imposition of what Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora have called “the illusion of consensus”.

If tyranny is inherently destructive to civilisation, as I fear, then civilised people require a collective encyclopaedia in order to support an epistemic commons, else any notion of shared citizenship becomes swiftly impossible. Yet an enormous number of Wikipedia pages have become clandestine battlegrounds where attempted edits are swiftly reverted by legions of faithful zealots, precisely because disputes must now be circumvented. The commons for knowledge shrinks as it is encircled by new upstarts seeking the imperial crown, and the search engines of Google Rex only index whatever pleases the throne.

Our mythic encyclopaedia, the book that entails the complete circle of knowledge for collective civilisation, is unravelling. The ink gradually fades for ever more topics until the pages threaten to become entirely blank. What, after all, could be written down concerning such previously undisputed terms as ‘precaution’, ‘vaccine’, ‘climate’, ‘sustainable’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘illegal’, ‘refugee’, ‘genocide’, ‘violence’...? The reflection in the Imperial Mirror grows dim indeed. One by one, the pages vanish. We are faced with the prospect of an empty encyclopaedia, and with it the ruination of the civilisation it once encircled.