Living Knowledge
One of the best qualities of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is that it is so well written. This is wonderful for the aspiring chef, for he needs to return to the book often for reference and assurance, and it’s pleasant to find a voice and personality in the text rather than just the data for ingredients and process. But perhaps the best quality of this particular cookbook is that the author pushes his reader to action.
Often our knowledge becomes darkened because we fail to put things into practice. For when we have totally neglected to practice something, our memory of it will gradually disappear.
—Mark the Ascetic
Okay, this makes sense: we remember what we do by practice. But ever since “Google” became a verb, it’s easier than ever to find what we’ve forgotten. Which leads to the question: In our ever-expanding human knowledge, what’s worth remembering? And especially since time is limited in a way that knowledge is not, what’s worth remembering by practice?
Perhaps the words of a more modern psychologist, Jamie Moran, can help answer this question: “Western rationalism as always mistakenly valued theory over practice, seeing practice as merely the ‘application’ of theory. But practice is a domain on its own, and so the practitioner discovers things, and undergoes things, that the theoretician either could never have imagined or dreamt of, or even if they were partially foreseen, they prove importantly different when they emerge and are encountered on the ground.”
So what is the knowledge that is so important that you’re willing to have it expanded and yourself changed by putting it into practice?
Pixels and Persons
There’s a difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. It’s the difference between persons and pixels.
The Greek word for “person”—prosopon—also means “face”. Before the digital era, if you wanted an image of someone’s face, you had to hire a painter or sculptor to create it. Then came photography and now—digital images, which are essentially visual displays of data.
Digital images are getting better and better, and as a result, the conversation about digital privacy is getting louder. As Seth Godin asserted in a recent podcast episode that inspired this reflection, people don’t like to be surprised by what a stranger could know about them.
But knowing about someone is not the same as knowing a person.
What’s the difference? Being present. Being attentive. Being curious. And the magical reciprocity that happens when while listening deeply to someone else, you get to know yourself again or in a new way, simultaneously affirming the humanity of both yourself and the other person.
We will make the digital images even clearer and the machines even more efficient and the robots even smarter. Because we can. Marketing based on personal information will get even more precise. But as this happens, I hope we will ask ourselves the kinds of questions the Amish ask and avoid falling into an unconscious Faustian pact with technology:
What might I lose from buying a product or service that is done by a machine rather than a person? Is what I might gain worth what I might lose? Where else could I get what I might lose?
If they don’t already, the computers will eventually know more about us than we know about ourselves. But they will never know us, for we are unique and unrepeatable mysteries, always changing and becoming someone different. Of course, we will try to program this into the algorithm, trying to close the gap between a person’s rate of change and the data trail left by that change. But the created thing, no matter how powerful or intelligent it becomes, will never truly know its creator.
Because to know a person truly is to know that you can never truly know that person.
Click here for Seth Godin’s thoughts on digital privacy.
Click here for a short article about the Amish and new technologies.
First Things First
Ignorance is no excuse.
This adage usually refers to wrong action, like running a red light because you didn’t know that when you’ve crossed the line, you’ve crossed the line. But ignorance is also no excuse for a lack of action.
If you have a wise quotation to share but can’t think of a creative, memorable way to share it, that doesn’t matter. Just share the quotation. After all, any creative frame you can provide is not that important. It’s the wisdom that matters. So here it is:
Do not say: “I do not know what is right; therefore I am not to blame when I fail to do it.” For if you did all the good about which you do know, what you should do next would then become clear to you, as if you were passing through a house from one room to another. It is not helpful to know what comes later before you have done what comes first…
—Mark the Ascetic
Right action is always the goal. Don’t worry that you don’t know everything. You never will. Just do the good you know to do because humble action will clarify the next step for you.
What we do is more important than what we know.