simulating knowledge (2)

knowledge is not knowing

If today’s institutions of higher education are the factories for the “production of knowledge,”* then the assembly lines are lined with hunched over graduate students and junior faculty, managed over by tenured professors, journal publications and academic deans. Conferences, papers, books and other publications roll off the conveyor belt into this nebulous expanse known as “knowledge”.

The research, or perhaps more precisely, the knowledge produced, is not a result of some objective process, but a product of a certain set of assumptions, procedures and methodologies that are generally accepted by the said management of the university assembly line. That is not to say that none of the research is valid, but that it is subject to assumptions and processes particular to its academic field—generally accepted principles for how to conduct research and come up with conclusions.

Likewise, the knowledge produced within the walls of the ivory tower, is not necessarily more relevant, more important or more valuable than our own “knowing” as individuals. It is easy to get caught up in the abstractions of statistics, theories and categories to the extent that they become more real than the world they were supposed to study.

Case in point in these two excerpts. Excerpt one comes from Jane Jacobs Life and Death of Great American Cities, where she recounts the recounts the then prevalent urban planning mindset of privileging park space:

When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint…

But I could not imagine where the money had come from for the rehabilitation, because it is almost impossible today to get any appreciable mortgage money in districts of American cities that are not either high-rent or else imitations of suburbs. TO find out, I called a Boston planner I know.

“Why in the world are you down in the North End?” he said. “Money? Why, no money or work has gone into the North End. Nothings’ going on down there. Eventually, yes, but not yet. That’s slum!”

“It doesn’t look like a slum to me,” I said.

“Why, that’s the worst slum in the city. It has two hundred and seventy-five dwelling units to the net acre! I hate to admit we have anything like that in Boston, but it’s a fact.”

“Do you have any other figures on it?” I asked.

“Yes, funny thing. It has among the lowest delinquency, disease and infant mortality rates in the city. It also has the lowest ratios of rent to income in the city. Boy, are those people getting bargains. Let’ see… the death rate is low, 8.8 per thousand, against the average city rate of 11.2. The TB death rate is low, less than 1 per ten thousand, can’t understand it, it’s lower even than Brookline’s. In the old days the North End used to be the city’s worst spot for tuberculosis, but all that has changed. Well, they must be strong people. Of course it’s a terrible slum.”

“You should have more slums like this, “ I said, “Don’t tell me there are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as much as you can from it.”

“I know how you feel, I often go down there myself just to walk around the streets and feel that wonderful, cheerful street life. Say, what you ought to do, you ought to come back and go down in the summer if you think it’s fun now. You’d be crazy about it in the summer. But of course, we have to rebuild it eventually. We’ve got to get those people off the streets.”

Here was a curious thing. My friend’s instincts told him that North End was a good place, and his social statistics confirmed it. But everything he had learned as a physical planner about what was good for people and good for city neighborhoods, everything that made him an expert, told him that North End had to be a bad place.

This other excerpt comes from C.S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, recounting the mind of a sociologist:

..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of things that are not seen.



* Though this I suspect is changing with the growing role of the internet. In fact, Wikipedia is still bookmarked as TRUTH on my internet toolbar.
** For awhile, I think I was doing pretty well on writing entries that weren’t entirely based on quotes. I guess I’m finally breaking that streak now. It’s hard to say things when you keep finding people who write everything you would want to write, but do it much better than you ever would.