The Less You Know

There’s a car mechanic I have known for years. Ed knew my father and worked on his cars; he knows me and my cars; he knows my wife; he knows my neighbors and their vehicles. Some years ago, my father learned that Ed had lost a son. At some point, he shared with Ed that he, too, had lost a child. They never talked about it again. It was a kind of silent bond, something they knew in common.

Is Ed a good mechanic? I’m not sure. But I trust him. At the least, Ed will make good on the job he takes on. I will go to him first for advice; he will tell me what he really thinks, and I will live with it (and drive with it). When my father died, I brought Ed a photo showing my dad standing next to his old truck, the one Ed worked on for thirty years. It’s posted on the grimy garage wall now. When I go to the shop, Ed greets me with a smile and calls me by my first name. Real knowledge.

We’ve all heard of the modern information explosion, driven by digital communication. In truth, it was set loose long before by the invention of alphabets and writing, printing presses, then trains, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, radios, and TVs. Scholars talk about “knowledge transmission,” “dissemination,” and “diffusion,” especially as all this relates to political and social change. A lot of commentary is negative, though it presumes a basically positive view of knowledge itself: The more one knows, the better. The debate concerns how one knows something—laptops and screens versus in-person; this book or that book; images or words; this news outlet or another. The premise of knowledge as a good is never questioned. Democracy is built on knowledge; human worth is established by it; education is freedom; “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” People inveigh against disinformation; nobody opposes information.

I find myself dissenting from this consensus. I go with the traditional proverb: “The less you know, the better.” (There’s a related Russian proverb, “The less you know, the better you sleep”—but that’s for later.) I’m not saying that ignorance is a good in itself. My point is that we need fewer objects of knowledge, more time to explore them, and just a few people to do it with. The knowledge most worth having requires us to live somewhere and be in a stable pattern of life so that we can learn to trust those nearest to us. In English (as in Hebrew), “truth” and “trust” come from the same root. So does the word “tree,” the rooted character of which tells us something about knowledge and stability.

Was there more trust, say, in the Middle Ages? There were pilgrimages, crusades, and trading. Still, people traveled about very little in comparison with today or even the sixteenth century. If you were born somewhere, you probably died there. It is not until the fifteenth century that we begin to see surnames migrating outside very restricted areas of just a few miles circumference. Medieval mobility tended to be decidedly local. Basically, you lived with, married, and died with—and therefore learned and prayed with—people you knew all your life.

The sixteenth-century Reformation is often treated as an example of the revolutionary consequence of a “knowledge explosion,” brought about by radically changing modes of communication: the printed pamphlet or book, new and better roads, multiplied and growing urban areas that gathered people in large numbers close to one another, hordes of traveling armies and populations displaced by war, and ships crossing oceans to foreign continents. Scholars have been interested in how new “ideas” were “spread,” and they have focused on the media of Protestant or Catholic “propaganda.” Very modern concerns. 

It is true that early modern Europe’s speedier communications and broader networks brought more “news” to people more quickly. Not always with happy results, however. Robert Burton opened his groundbreaking tome The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) with these words:

I hear new news every day and those ordinary rumors of war, plagues, fires, inundation, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of townes taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain . . . 

I recommend reading the whole astonishing paragraph. Anxiety was a major element of Burton’s treatise, the fruit of the new abundance of information. With all the violent upheaval of confessional strife and national conflict, where the wrong allegiance could easily spell one’s doom, trust was often in short supply. The Russian version of the proverb has its place in those times: Identity based on knowledge is often dangerous. Better to remain ignorant of ideas and notions that rouse terrible passions, making it easier to avoid taking sides.

Yet, for all the changes of early modernity, it was not until the late eighteenth century, and only in large cities, that letters reached their destination in less than several weeks. Governmental and business correspondence may have done better. Still, for most people across borders, let alone oceans, well into the late nineteenth century it could still take months for news of family to reach the anxious heart. The death of a child or parent might not be known for a year, or many more. This was still true for my immigrant grandparents, waiting to hear from a relative in far-off Lithuania. When it came to important things, news was often dreadfully old. Love could only linger and ponder.

Today, news is meant to be new. Some researchers tell us that in America you are likely to have “met” 80,000 persons over your lifespan (three a day across seventy-eight years of bouncing around the landscape). Others put the number as “low” as 10,000. These are called “contacts” in the literature, because they could be as fleeting as a barista or vagrant. Imagine how this compares to the past, whether in 1300, 1600, or even 1900. These were times without today’s large supermarkets, airports, crammed classrooms, and our demanded passage through masses of people, now multiplied through digital means. Even those who are agoraphobic search among the surging current of contacts for some immediate revelation: What’s the scoop? What does so-and-so say? What has so-and-so written? What’s the response of so-and-so?

But we do not know so-and-so. We have no space to consider him or what he says. Today, there is little depth of encounter and reflection—not even around a mealtime table, since many families no longer eat together. The eighteenth-century skeptical philosopher David Hume helpfully showed how the most important aspects of our life with God are tied to such relationships: The knowledge we actually live by derives from trust. 

Hume famously rejected accounts of contemporary miracles because these are based on the “testimony” of others that remain remote. In his argument, however, Hume actually emphasized how much our knowing can only ever depend on such testimony. We are ever reliant on others for knowing what we need to know to make our way through life. It is only the trustworthiness of others that grants us access to reliable knowledge. Even about God. Hume’s own unhappy limitation was never to have dwelt patiently among the witnesses to faith: the age-cured experience of family and neighbor who labored under God’s providence. Instead, he spent more time with the “new news” of the world. He turned into one of Britain’s great historians.

The real or figurative village, as opposed to today’s wired metropolises, may lack the competencies of physicists, journalists, historians, and epidemiologists. How then could any villager, swimming in a sea of ignorance, ever navigate the world? The answer is clear enough: carefully and slowly. Quietly and deeply. With people he has come to trust. The physicists, journalists, historians, and epidemiologists may advise and intervene on the margins. But they can’t provide a substitute for wisdom, which is won over time and transmitted in and through relations of trust. Indeed, the scientists and specialists rely on their own small communities of experts, whom they trust. Or so we hope.

Our whole faith is founded on the trust of testimony. St. John presents himself as above all one who “testifieth” (John 21:24). To believe him is to discover the source of our life (20:31). And how shall we come to trust? John’s own testimony, he says, is based on hearing, seeing, looking upon, even “handling” his Lord “from the beginning” (1 John 1:1). Like St. Paul, the power of John’s persuasion will be felt “face to face” (3 John 14). Faith flourishes among those who have come to know each other. Witnesses may well go “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), but to be a good witness to Christ paradoxically requires the willingness to stay put with those who listen and learn, to know their sufferings and losses, to remember their names, to post on the walls of toil the pictures of their old trucks. Our churches, with their anxious worries about relevance, chasing the “ordinary rumors” of news that is barely grasped, seem to have forgotten what knowledge really is. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.

Image by Eugenio Landesio, public domain. Image cropped.