The very structure of the traditional encyclopaedia dooms itself. It can never know it all or show enough of what it knows. It can’t hope to keep up with important developments in the world, nor take back what it said about Hitler or slavery. And it can never answer the most searching questions about its own existence: are the people who read it from A–Z better able to understand the world than those who only read the preface? Does the present lowly cost of a fine set of Britannica or World Book or Brockhaus from 2005 – ten pounds or ten dollars or ten euros on eBay – mean that we no longer value things we held dear when the century was young? Is the information we receive today more or less reliable than the information we received in our childhood?
Knowledge is not general; it is specific, and only specifically useful at certain points and intervals. The hope of the ancients to capture everything between covers now seems as futile as counting the number of stars in the universe. Or, with hindsight, as futile as Britannica’s attempts in its twilight years to find a viable future: the 2011 Seiko ER8100 folding electronic ‘Britannica Concise’ with keyboard and grey-green screen, perhaps, or the 2012 Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD (with 82,000+ articles and Biography Bonus: Great Minds and Heroes & Villains).
Encyclopaedia Britannica is now just Britannica.com, and it’s not a bad place to hang out for a while. There is a lot of information one doesn’t need to pay for, and a neat home page displayed as a sort of historical newspaper, with stories on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War, a good array of quizzes and crosswords, and an ‘On This Day …’ column (featuring, on the day I last visited, an anniversary marking the date Dr Crippen murdered his wife). It is more democratic than its print version (in so far as it doesn’t distinguish between ownership in full morocco or half morocco), and when you get to the page for your annual premium subscription ($74.95 inclusive of what appears to be a permanent 30 per cent discount), you are reminded of the immense detail within and the 110 Nobel Prize winners and fifty Notable Sport Figures who contributed in the golden age. Importantly, the site emphasises its credentials regarding truth: ‘Facts matter more than ever, but they are becoming increasingly hard to find. Every Britannica article has been written by experts [and] vetted by fact-checkers.’ It didn’t actually say, ‘suck on that, Wikipedia,’ but it didn’t have to.
Besides, they were fighting different wars now. Compared to the 16.83 billion visits made to Wikipedia between March and May 2020, Britannica.com attracted 124.7 million. (Though tiny in comparison, the figure is far larger than the number of people who ever consulted its print edition.)
Towards the end of our alphabet, we confront one arresting paradox: we know more about our lack of knowledge today than at any previous time in history. Maybe that’s one of the things that keeps us going, the old hunting and gathering. A famous Map of Ignorance, constructed in the early 1980s by Ann Kerwin and Marlys Witte of the Arizona University Medical School, only heightened the value we place on learning. They applied it specifically to medicine, but it is fairly applicable to all fields of research.
Known Unknowns: All the things you know you don’t know
Unknown Unknowns: All the things you don’t know you
don’t know
Errors: All the things you think you know but don’t
Unknown Knowns: All the things you don’t know you know
Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge
Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don’t
Dr Kerwin, a philosopher-in-residence at the medical school, was delighted to see her chart travel the world online, calling it ‘a cosmic swerve … a silly prompt for exploration and celebration of the fertile home territory of learning’. Her colleague Marlys Witte reasoned that unanswered questions are the raw material of knowledge, ‘and (current) knowledge is the raw material of (future) ignorance, i.e., answers and questions shift with time and the accumulation of answers.’
Or as the Danish polymath Piet Hein put it:
Knowing what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience.
The Germans have a nice name for the study of the cultures of ignorance: Nichtwissenskulturen. One reason I like it is because it forms a triumvirate with two other words Informationwissenschaft (the organisation of knowledge) and Wissensgeschichte (the study of the history of knowledge).
This book has not been a history of knowledge, but it has tracked how one aspect of our knowledge has been communicated, circumscribed and passed on. When I drove down to the outskirts of Cambridge to retrieve a pristine set of encyclopaedias at the beginning of this book, I was using elements of my knowledge of finance, markets, communication, cartography, risk and safety, travel and technology. Driving back with the set, I was adding knowledge to ignorance, and knowledge to knowledge, which, as Denis Diderot knew in 1751, is all one can ever hope learning to be:
The goal of an Encyclopédie is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the work of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.
* In February 2021, I found the warning note amended to a page on George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier particularly arresting, although it was typicaclass="underline" ‘This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed.’
* All details from the commemorative booklet published by Britannica Encyclopaedia International, Ltd., and sent to all attendees a few weeks after the event.
Z
ZEITGEIST
This is what we knew then.
The great deceit of the encyclopaedia is that its obsolescence will necessarily render it redundant. Every generation believes its world to be changing faster than the last, and with a greater clarity of purpose, but we make a mistake if we think it necessarily contains more valuable knowledge. A fine encyclopaedia will stand you in good stead like an old wristwatch: its timing may be out, and sometimes it may not work at all, but its mechanics will always intrigue. These old volumes show us what we thought we knew, and we discard them with a rash disregard for the work of our forebears. Ancient editions carry a secret knowledge of their own, the enshrined accretion of learning. If nothing else, they are materially wonderful objects. Run your fingers down their raised spines and tell yourself you are not transported. As Albert Einstein once reported, the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to be children all our lives.
And what of the last jagged letter? Have most compilers run out of zest? Do the strings of their hearts still go zing as the presses ready their cranks? Here are a handful of entries in the rear-view mirror, heavily truncated, loaded with distant and noble erudition. Some appear wilfully naive; many check the ‘Who Knew?’ box. I hope they show the benefit to be had from not rejecting old things just because they are not modern. When we ascend to space in a rocket we are only able to do so because of those who once paddled uncharted in canoes.