Supplanting Authority: the Enlightenment

Encyclopedias have been around for a long time. One of the earliest in the West was Pliny's Natural History. Pliny is a source of information, for instance, on Roman technology, engineering, gold mining in Spain, and so on. Although a personal creation, it represented a a compilation, as Pliny wrote, of 2,000 "facts" that he had gleaned from over 2,000 works by 200 writers. Other civilizations also produced encyclopedias, but, before printing, the collected knowledge of humanity was accessible only to the learned.

The early modern period produced a modification of the genre. Encyclopedias would henceforth provide the general public with the fruits of knowledge. Knowledge was to be accessible. Accessibility was enhanced with alphabetical entries and diagrams. The most famous project of this genre was that of Diderot and D'Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published during the years 1751 and 1772. It had a very grand purpose: to accumulate all the knowledge of the world. Clearly, many collaborators and contributors would be required for such a project, even more than Pliny had accessed for his Natural History.

Previously, knowledge had been institutionalized. The Church and the Crown were major institutions, and also the curators of what was known. One could say the same about craft guilds, which guarded their industrial secrets. The Encyclopédie showed how to make cloth, to dye, to brew, to produce horseshoes, and so on, processes that in the past had been closely held by practitioners in order to curtail competition. There was an aura surrounding such authority, as there was no appeal beyond them. The story of Galileo's troubles with the Inquisition are an instance of the pitfalls of seeking to offer an alternate version of institutionalized wisdom. So, along with the praiseworthy goal of enlightening the public, the authority of such traditional authorities would be undermined by demystifying knowledge, by making it accessible in readable form.  The idea was that individuals, instead of accepting the truth of a single authority, could read an article in the Encyclopédie, on which a number of learned scholars had contributed, and decide for themselves what constituted truth.

The perils of institutionalized knowledge

Until a few days ago, I had never thought much about the way that a collaborative work functioned to overcome or transform existing forms of authority. I attended a talk at Columbia University concerning the first alphabetically organized encyclopedia of Jewish law, the the Pahad Yitzhak, by the Italian rabbi and physician Isaac Lampronti (1679–1756).

I asked myself, however, whether a work that is produced by a gaggle of collaborators or contributors is any more "truthful" than the authority of a single instance. Today, for instance, 97 percent of scientists are said to agree that humans are responsible for global warming. But, back in Galileo's day, 97 percent of scientists thought that Galileo was incorrect about heliocentrism. Thus, a consensus is just as prone to errors and, indeed, biases, as is a religious or other traditional authority. Indeed, "experts" are not always reliable.

Picture credit: Slate