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Citation: Strate, L. The Future of
Knowledge, and the Fate of Wisdom,
in the Age of Information. Philosophies
2024,9, 160. https://doi.org/
10.3390/philosophies9060160
Academic Editor: Brian L. Ott
Received: 13 July 2024
Revised: 22 August 2024
Accepted: 4 September 2024
Published: 24 October 2024
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philosophies
Article
The Future of Knowledge, and the Fate of Wisdom, in the Age
of Information
Lance Strate
Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Road,
Bronx, NY 10458, USA; strate@fordham.edu
Abstract: John Henry Newman defined the university as “a place of teaching universal knowledge”,
which suggests that it is also an environment for the teaching and creation of knowledge, and therefore
a medium for the teaching and creation of knowledge. Based on the field of media ecology, defined by
Neil Postman as “the study of media as environments”, and following Marshall McLuhan’s famous
maxim that, “the medium is the message”, we can understand knowledge to be the product of a
particular type of medium or environment. Taking inspiration from the poetic questions posed by
T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have
lost in information?”, this essay takes issue with the view expressed among internet boosters that
information is the basis of knowledge, and knowledge is the basis of wisdom. Instead, an alternative
understanding presented in which information as a contemporary phenomenon is a product of the
electronic media environment, knowledge is a product of the literacy associated with the chirographic
and typographic media environments, and wisdom is a product of the oral media environment.
Keywords: information; knowledge; wisdom; media; media ecology; media environment; orality;
literacy; electronic media
MAN is permitted much
To scan and learn
In Nature’s frame;
Till he well-nigh can tame
Brute mischiefs, and can touch
Invisible things, and turn
All warring ills to purposes of good.
Thus, as a god below,
He can control,
And harmonize, what seems amiss to flow
As sever’d from the whole
And dimly understood.
But o’er the elements
One Hand alone,
One Hand has sway.
What influence day by day
In straiter belt prevents
The impious Ocean, thrown
Alternate o’er the ever-sounding shore?
Or who has eye to trace
How the Plague came?
Forerun the doublings of the Tempest’s race?
Or the Air’s weight and flame
On a set scale explore?
Thus God has will’d
Philosophies 2024,9, 160. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9060160 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 2 of 17
That man, when fully skill’d,
Still gropes in twilight dim;
Encompass’d all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him.
That so he may discern
His feebleness,
And e’en for earth’s success
To Him in wisdom turn,
Who holds for us the keys of either home,
Earth and the world to come.
The Elements, by John Henry Newman
1. Pre(r)amble
In 1852, John Henry Newman published a series of lectures on higher education under
the title of, The Idea of a University. In his preface to the book, he opens by stating: “The view
taken of a University in these Discourses is the following:—That it is a place of teaching
universal knowledge” [
1
] (p. ix). His emphasis is on teaching and on knowledge, but given
the added stress on research and publication that came to the fore over the course of the
20th century, we could also note that it is a place for the creation of universal knowledge.
And while my concern in this essay is with knowledge itself, before considering that
topic, I want to begin by noting that Newman defined the university as a place, which
I believe would be what comes to mind for most people when we think of institutions
of higher learning. We think of campuses, of buildings and dormitories, of lecture halls,
libraries, laboratories, and landscaping, of classrooms, cafeterias, and conference rooms, of
gymnasiums and athletic fields, of the quad and the student union, and, near and dear to
us all, of faculty and administrative offices great and small, as well as, lest we forget, of
parking. But deep in our hearts we know that real estate and facilities do not a college make,
and this has been borne out in recent decades by the rise of online education, something
that keeps administrators up at night.
While there is most certainly more to the idea of a university than its physical plant
and geographical location, we can perhaps bridge the gap between Newman’s definition
and contemporary experience by substituting the term environment for place, and refer to the
university as an environment for the teaching and creation of knowledge. The significance
of this substitution lies in the understanding that environments do not have to be physical
places, and this includes learning environments; they can be better understood as situations
or contexts [
2
–
5
]. Contemporary educators have become quite familiar with internet
applications such as Zoom, especially on account of COVID-19 quarantines and lockdowns
(leading to many of us now feeling zoomed out). But well before the pandemic, academics
have been aware of videoconferencing software and internet-based learning platforms,
virtual classrooms and cyberschooling, online universities and various digital resources for
pedagogy and research. In this sense, Newman was more accurate than even he imagined
when he referred to the university as an idea, which in a Platonic sense means that it is a
form that exists independent of its material basis or physical substance. In other words, it is
astructure, one that remains more or less the same regardless of an institution’s religious
affiliation or lack thereof, or the particular faculty, students, and administrators involved.
The university, then, can be considered a formal structure for the teaching and creation
of knowledge.
As a formal structure, we can also recognize that the university is an organization for
the teaching and creation of knowledge. Some administrators and all too many trustees
would say that institutions of higher learning are businesses, but of course no one wants
to jeopardize their 501(c)3 status, so better to say that they are nonprofit corporations.
This gives particular emphasis on administration rather than educational mission, some-
thing that faculty have been known to take exception to, and brings to mind the well
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 3 of 17
known anecdote concerning Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as President of Columbia
University after winning the Second World War, and before becoming President of the
United States. During a ceremony honoring one of Columbia’s professors, Isidor Isaac Rabi,
who had received the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering nuclear magnetic resonance,
Eisenhower gave a speech in which he said how it was always good to see an employee
of the university receive recognition. Rabi immediately interrupted and said, “Excuse me
sir, but the faculty are not employees of the university. The faculty are the university”. And
this was true at one time, certainly back when the university was first invented during the
Middle Ages. But it is certainly not true today. Just ask the students.
At least some students would likely answer that a school, on any level, is not the
faculty, it is a factory. And as much as we might hate to admit it, it is clear that the
industrialism of the 19th century has influenced and altered our educational institutions,
prompting such radical critiques as Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich (1971) [
6
]. As factories,
what schools produce, according to Illich, is credentials; this makes our traditional colleges
and universities the original diploma mills. Another, more basic product would be grades,
an innovation introduced during the Industrial Revolution [
7
]. As one of my old colleagues
used to say, we, meaning the faculty, teach for free, it is the grading that we are paid
to do. There are more benign answers, though, notably that what schools produce are
educated individuals, and, following John Dewey (1956) [
8
], citizens capable of governing
themselves in a democratic society. To the extent that higher education is, for a segment
of the population, a rite of passage, you might also say that college produces adults.
Returning to Newman’s definition, however, we could conclude that the university is a
machine for the teaching and creation of knowledge. While this may seem at odds with
Newman’s understanding of the university as an idea, the two can be reconciled via Lewis
Mumford’s [
9
–
11
] argument that the machine itself is an idea (and therefore a formal
structure), and that the first machines were human organizations, consisting of organized
human labor employed for construction, e.g., digging irrigation ditches, building pyramids
and monuments, etc., and conquest, e.g., organized military force, etc. (for more on
higher education as machine, see [
12
]). Of course, we do not have to think about schools
in old fashioned mechanistic terms, as it would be more in keeping with the times to
see them through the lens of computer technology, something that IT departments no
doubt would like, where students and faculty alike are reduced to data to be processed,
through automated programming, based on artificial intelligence. We would then see our
institutions as information systems running on binary codes [13], for example pass or fail,
graduate or do not graduate, and publish or perish.
At this point, I think it is not unreasonable to put forth the notion that the university is
amedium for the teaching and creation of knowledge. Recognizing that the school, in all
of its myriad forms, is a medium, would be consistent with the expanded and expansive
category of media utilized within the field of media ecology [
14
]. Marshall McLuhan,
in his highly influential work, Understanding Media ([
15
]; see [
16
]), referred to all forms
of technology, including tools and techniques, machines and methods, as media, and
this would include the school as an invention, technology, and an information system.
McLuhan also approached media as form, the relationship between form and content
being equivalent to that of medium and content, and drew on the Aristotelian notion
of formal cause [
12
,
14
,
17
–
19
]. Moreover, media ecology incorporates the scholarship of
Lewis Mumford [
9
–
11
], so that the medium/technology as formal structure and material
substance also applies to the machine as idea and application, and the field includes the
idea of situation and context, including physical space and place as well as symbolic and
social settings and circumstances, as media [14,20]. Significantly, the original definition of
media ecology put forth by Postman [
21
,
22
] specified that it is a field of inquiry based on the
study of media as environments, to which I have added that it is also the study of environments
as media [
14
]. This definition is more than mere metaphor, as the term medium and the
term environment are synonymous. Moreover, environments represent the conditions under
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 4 of 17
which we live and act, which is why I have characterized media ecology as an approach to
understanding the human condition [14].
Having begun with Newman’s idea of the university as a place for the teaching and
creation of knowledge, and from there to the idea of the university as an environment for
the teaching and creation of knowledge, to arrive at the idea of the university as a medium
for the teaching and creation of knowledge, we can understand that knowledge, in this
sense, refers to the content of a medium, and specifically that knowledge is the content
of the medium of the school. Admittedly, it would be easy enough to think about this
tautologically, and say that knowledge being the content of teaching, whatever we happen
to be teaching is knowledge. This is akin to shooting an arrow, and wherever it lands,
saying that is the target. And it could perhaps be justified by McLuhan’s (1964) [
15
] famous
aphorism, “the medium is the message” (p. 7), thereby concluding that schooling is its
own message. Indeed, one of McLuhan’s direct sources of inspiration for the medium is the
message came from the anthropologist, Ashley Montagu [23], who wrote, “in teaching it is
the method and not the content that is the message” (p. 62); he also wrote that education
“does not depend upon the transmission of knowledge, but upon the manner in which the
knowledge is transmitted by the teacher” (p. 62). There is much validity in this view, but
I also want to emphasize that neither Montagu nor McLuhan ever denied the existence
of content. Instead, what they wanted us to understand was that content has less of an
impact on us, individually and collectively, than our methods, which is to say, our media.
And that along with ourselves, our content is influenced and shaped by our media—in
systems terminology, content is an emergent property of the medium. What follows is
an exploration of the concept of knowledge, and the related concepts of information and
wisdom, viewed as the content of particular types of media and environments, based on a
media ecology approach to understanding the human condition.
2. The Age of Information
To better understand the relationship between knowledge, information, and wisdom,
I take as my inspiration T.S. Eliot’s poetic play from 1934, The Rock, where he poses the
questions, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge
we have lost in information?” These questions were taken up in the field of information
science, and separately in the field of knowledge management, where the relationships are
often expressed visually, with the addition of the concept of data, as the DIKW pyramid,
a hierarchical display with data on the bottom, information above it, knowledge above
information, and wisdom at the top [
24
–
28
]. While limited to specialized scholarly cir-
cles during the 1980s, the basic idea was popularized and widely circulated among the
digerati around the time that the internet first became a popular phenomenon, in the early
1990s. Taking up Eliot’s questions, the response was, simply put, that when you have
enough information, you get knowledge, and when you have enough knowledge, you
get wisdom. The DIKW pyramid is, in some ways, reminiscent of Abraham Maslow’s
(1954) [
29
] hierarchy of needs model, with physical needs on the bottom, followed by safety
needs, then love and belonging, then esteem, and crowned by self-actualization. There are
significant differences between each one of these needs, but they also all are identified as
the same type of phenomenon, as human needs and psychological motivations. Similiarly,
the DIKW pyramid seems to suggest that there is some kind of underlying commonality
that information, knowledge, and wisdom all share, but does not mention what it would
be. This is true also of the purely verbal formulations of wisdom being the product of
sufficient knowledge, and knowledge of sufficient information. The implication is that they
are somehow similar to, say, in chemistry, a solution being a mixture of compounds, and
compounds being a combination of elements, or in physics, of molecules being composed
of atoms, and atoms of subatomic particles. In the sciences, the commonality would be that
all are variations of the phenomenon we call matter (or energy). But to relate information,
knowledge, and wisdom in this same way is to miss the point made so cogently by Eliot,
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 5 of 17
that one is not reducible to the other, and that their relationship is not additive, but rather
is some ways oppositional.
Internet boosters would naturally be sympathetic to the view that information consti-
tutes the building blocks of knowledge and wisdom, but what Eliot rightly expresses is the
idea that there are qualitative differences between information, knowledge, and wisdom,
differences that make a difference, to use Gregory Bateson’s (1972, 1979) [
30
,
31
] happy
phrase. Arguably, they do share a commonality, however, insofar as that common ground
is media. After all, McLuhan’s famous dictum, the medium is the message, directs us to
seek out media in all things, including media. And it seems only fitting to follow Cardinal
Newman’s direction, to take the via media, and see where it leads. In doing so, I want to
stress that this is not to say that media are the atoms that information, knowledge, and
wisdom are composed of. Rather, in keeping with the media ecology approach, media are
the environments in which information, knowledge, and wisdom exist, and out of which
they emerge. Moreover, the medium is the message also means that each medium has its
own distinctive characteristics and biases that are qualitatively different from other media.
Our concern in media ecology is with categorical differences, differences between different
media, which are, again, differences that make a difference.
I do want to acknowledge that the concept of information, as put forth by Claude
Shannon in his information theory [
32
], has been utilized to analyze a wide variety of
phenomena, from data transmission and computing to cracking the genetic code, uncover-
ing the complexity of whale song, and measuring the heat output of stars. Indeed, some
physicists, a minority of them, but a significant number, argue that information is the
fundamental stuff that the universe is composed of. Until such time as a true paradigm
shift occurs, however, I will set aside any speculation about whether the universe is an
enormous digital medium or supercomputer, or a hologram for that matter, and stick with
the current model of the universe as made up of energy and subatomic particles. But I
do believe that Shannon’s information theory is significant, and not the least because he
came to it while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, otherwise known as Bell Labs,
in New Jersey. Working for what was then known as the telephone company, Shannon
was naturally concerned with electronic signal transmission and data processing. This
indicates a close relationship between information and electricity, electric technology, and
the electronic media. Of course, as a phenomenon linked to the Second Law of Thermody-
namics and the universal tendency towards entropy, information by far predates human
invention, and human existence for that matter. But the concern reflected in Shannon’s
efforts to establish a theory of information and a means to improve communications, and
the concern reflected in Eliot’s questioning of information in relation to knowledge, seems
to be a trend thoroughly of the 20th century. In fact, I would suggest that it begins not long
before Shannon and Eliot, with the birth of broadcasting beginning in the last decade of the
19th century with Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless, and becoming ubiquitous
with the advent of commercial radio during the 1920s.
It is the advent of radio that results in the new research area of mass communication,
and the concomitant concept of the media of mass communication, soon shortened to form the
phrase, mass media, and more recently referred to simply as, the media. Before radio, rather
than references to media, there was only, the press. A particular periodical or newspaper,
such as the New York Times or the Atlantic Monthly might be referred to on occasion as a
medium, but there was no collective concept of the mass media, the news media, or the print
media. It is worth recalling the First Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted along
with the rest of the Bill of Rights in 1791, reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances”. No reference to media there, just speech
and the press, which corresponds to orality, and literacy, the latter as amplified by the
printing press. Religious practice also involves oral communication in the form of prayer
and sermons, and print in the form of sacred texts and prayer books. Peaceful assembly
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 6 of 17
involves group discussion, public speaking, or collective chanting, and possibly signs as
well. And petitions can be delivered in writing or by speaking. All of these modes of
communication center around the word, which is to say, around speech and the press.
Along with the absence of any reference to media, there is no mention of freedom of
information. That phrase does not enter popular discussion until after the Second World
War, when the United Nations General Assembly declared it a fundamental human right in
1946, and included in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, Article
19 of which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and
impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. In the US,
the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 established that citizens have a right to access
information about their government, and the phrase freedom of information was adopted by
other nations as well during the postwar period. A few years later, President Eisenhower
established the United States Information Agency (which was folded into other parts of the
State Department in 1999); in this case, information served as a euphemism for propaganda,
although it was put forth as a form of diplomacy. And this is not as cynical as it seems,
because information is not about what is true or false, it is about uncertainty reduction or
disambiguation, to use Wikipedia’s favored term, and about control.
3. Information and the Electronic Media Environment
Eliot’s poetry reflects the new concern regarding information that appears following
the introduction of radio, and it is worth noting that it also follows the invention of televi-
sion in 1927, although the widespread adoption of television broadcasting was delayed
until after the end of the Second World War. The 20th century also saw a great expansion
of the telephone network, the most complex form of wiring at that time, which in turn
served as the technological basis of the first interactive, programmable computers during
the 1940s. Practical problems regarding electronic signal transmission, storage, coding, and
processing, were very much on the mind of many of the pioneers of computing, such as
Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, and
many others. With the continued development of various forms of broadcasting, wireless
electromagnetic signal transmission, telecommunications, and networking; along with
technologies of data processing, storage, and delivery; and calculating and computing
machines, integrated circuit technology, and digital media, the postwar period becomes
known as the age of information, the product of information technology, which becomes part of
an integrated network of information systems, characterized by their information architecture,
communicating via the information superhighway or alternately the information infrastruc-
ture, all of this a part of an information revolution that results in an information society and
an information economy based on information capitalism, supported by information science,
and introducing the troubling problem of information overload. Certainly in terminology if
nothing else, we have been subject to an information explosion that marks this period as the
information age.
As noted, the late forties also marks the beginning of commercial television broadcast-
ing in the US, and by the start of the sixties television had become the dominant medium
in the United States. This means that the information age is also the television age, and no
one understood this better than Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan (1964) [
15
] recognized that
broadcasting is a form of information technology, characterizing radio as both an enter-
tainment medium and “a kind of nervous information system” (p. 260), not to mention
the basis of the Cold War’s Distant Early Warning system, or DEW line, radar being an
application of radio waves. But for McLuhan, neither information nor television alone
went to the heart of what has defined this new period of our history. Rather, he insisted,
quite rightly, that we are in the age of the electronic media. This pushes back the origins
of our new era to the 1830s and the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph by Samuel
Morse. Indeed, much of what we consider distinctive about information technology and
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 7 of 17
digital media is present, at least in potential, in electricity itself, and its first killer app, the
telegraph [33].
For example, the binary code that is the basis of all computer programming and digital
communications can be traced back to the two basic states of electric technology, on and
off. It is also present in the polarity of electromagnetism, its positive and negative charge.
Moreover, Morse code, the basis of telegraphic messaging, is a binary code consisting of
dots and dashes. And the introduction of Morse code generated tremendous interest in the
study and application of codes and ciphers, in cryptography, cryptology, and cryptanalysis.
Claude Shannon was a cryptographer, as was Alan Turing, who was instrumental in
breaking the codes used by the Nazis via their Enigma machine during the Second World
War, and who also is considered the inventor of the first general-purpose computer, and a
founding pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence. The two developments
are closely connected, as Morse code can be considered an ancestor of computer code,
along with Boolean algebra, also introduced in the 1840s, and adapted for use with electric
technology by Shannon in the 1930s.
Electricity’s two-pronged polarity points to the fact that electrical current forms a
circuit, and this circular pathway stands in contrast to the linearity associated with me-
chanical technology, and mechanistic physics with its billiard ball model of action and
reaction, as well as the linearity of the written word, which proceeds letter by letter, word
by word, sentence by sentence, page by page. The electromagnetic field radiates out in all
directions, as radio waves, the basis of broadcasting. The characteristic of nonlinearity is
central to cybernetics, with its emphasis on the feedback loop found in the electrical device
known as the thermostat, and in all forms of interactive media and technology, including
computer games and hypertext [
34
,
35
]. Nonlinearity is also characteristic of the two-way
transmission of the telegraph and telephone, and the many-to-many communications of
the internet. It takes its most elaborate form by way of the network, particularly decentral-
ized and distributed networks, beginning with the telegraph networks that Tom Standage
(1998) [
36
] dubbed the Victorian internet, to the telephone network that constituted the most
complex form of wiring leading up to the development of the first electrical computers in
the 1940s, to computer networks such as the ARPANET, USENET, BITNET, Fidonet, and all
the rest that converged to form our present day internet and its World-Wide Web interface.
Electricity is, of course, a form of energy as opposed to matter, and sending messages
electrically often involves some form of dematerialization. For example, a message written
down on a piece of paper is given to a telegraph operator, who transmits it via electric
signaling to a distant location, where the signals are decoded and rematerialized in the
form of a paper telegram. Telegraph companies realized that the same process could apply
to money, as a sum deposited in a company’s office in one city could be paid out in another;
Western Union was a leader in these innovations, which became commonplace during
the 1870s, and were first known as a telegraphic transfer, later as a wire transfer; this
introduced the idea that money could be reduced to information. While these early efforts
required a restoration of the item’s physical form, this set the stage for e-mail, e-books,
e-business and e-commerce, electronic monetary transfers, digital wallets, cryptocurrency,
the paperless office, and virtual reality. As James W. Carey (1989) notes [
37
], this better
conforms to the famous quote from the Communist Manifesto,all that is solid melts into the
air, than the capitalist economies that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were critiquing.
Indeed, it is with the telegraph that information independent of any physical form first
becomes a commodity, as soon after its widespread adoption, wire services such as the
Associated Press appear, their business being not to sell newspapers, physical products,
but to sell news, which is to say disembodied information, conveyed telegraphically, to
newspaper organizations.
The transmission of electronic signals, not being weighed down by material substance,
means that communication can take place at or near the speed of light, which is more
or less instantaneous for terrestrial communications. This in turn speeds up operations
throughout the rest of the environment. The expectation of immediate access to information,
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 8 of 17
entertainment, and interaction, has only increased with the introduction of the telephone,
wireless, broadcasting, and the internet. Speed is closely related to the idea of efficiency, as
increased efficiency is generally evidenced by increased speed. During the late nineteenth
century, Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the practice of scientific management, its
practitioners coming to be known as efficiency experts. Over the course of the twentieth
century, Taylorism turned into a kind of ideology in which efficiency emerges as the core
value, indeed the only real value, of what Jacques Ellul (1964) [
38
] termed the technological
society, which corresponds to what we refer to as an information society [39].
To achieve the most efficient end to any given means requires methods of control, and
Norbert Wiener (1950, 1961) [
34
,
35
] defined the term cybernetics (at one time a synonym
for computing) as the science of control, arguing that communication is essential to direct
activities—the military refer to this function as command and control. Control is enhanced
when information about the effects of commands is available, so that the commands that
continue to be issued can be modified accordingly. For this reason, Wiener explained
that feedback is the key to the most effective form of control, and Gregory Bateson (1972,
1979) [
30
,
31
] stipulated that it must be negative feedback, which limits and constrains
activity, rather than positive feedback, which can lead to a snowball or butterfly effect,
that is, a system that goes out of control. James Beniger (1986) [
7
] traces what he refers to
as the control revolution, and the roots of the information society, back to the 19th century,
as a response to the increased speed and power of the industrial revolution. One key
example of this is the use of the telegraph to control the railroads and prevent accidents, as
nothing was faster than a steam-powered locomotive until the introduction of instantaneous
communication via telegraphy; this in turn led to the creation of homogenous time zones,
further controlling and coordinating human activity. Also of great significance was the
late 19th century invention of a machine for the electromechanical tabulation of data by
Herman Hollerith, in conjunction with his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University.
This machine was a forerunner of the computer, and his company was one of four that
merged together to form IBM.
As a form of energy that can be used to communicate at or near the speed of light,
electricity can also be converted into light, and the name that most often comes to mind
as the inventor of the electric light is Thomas Alva Edison, who started out as a telegraph
operator before setting up his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. And if the telegraph
was electricity’s first killer app, electric light was arguably its greatest. McLuhan began
his best known work, Understanding Media, by describing the electric light as a medium
without content, and as pure information [
15
] (pp. 7–8). It is certainly a characteristic of the
information age that we live in an increasingly twenty-four-seven society, and that would
not be possible without the electric light turning night into day. The electric light was
also the main motivation for electrification, which began with the addition of streetlamps,
starting in downtown Manhattan with Edison’s Pearl Street Station power plant. The
electric light was also necessary for motion picture projection, including the Kinetoscope
developed by Edison’s lab, which was the basis of the Edison Studios, with films produced
in West Orange, New Jersey, and in their facility on Decatur Avenue in the Bedford Park
neighborhood of the Bronx borough of New York City. The cinema’s silver screen evolved
into the boob tube’s television screen and video monitors, and from there to the digital
screens of our computers, and our mobile devices; even though they do not use Edison’s
incandescent light bulb, they are all descendants of his electric light.
As for exceptions to the ubiquity of screen technology, such as Amazon’s Alexa, it is
worth recalling that the telegraph is an acoustic medium, the dots and dashes of Morse
code being listened to as buzzes and clicks, and this became the basis of Alexander Graham
Bell’s electromagnetic telephone, invented in 1876, a year before Edison’s phonograph.
Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph or radio telegraphy in 1894 was
also an acoustic innovation, the basis of today’s cell phones, smart phones, and mobile
devices as well as the radio medium, and Reginald Fessenden, a former employee of Edison,
first transmitted speech via radio waves in 1900, a method of communication called wireless
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 9 of 17
telephony or the radio telephone. All of these developments are forms of what Walter Ong
(1982) [40] termed secondary orality, which is essentially electronically mediated orality.
4. The Age of Knowledge and the Advent of Literacy
There is much more to be said about the characteristics of electricity and the electronic
media, and the history of electric technology, but I hope that at this point I have made a
reasonable argument for why the age of information is a product of the electronic media
environment. And I will say again that information itself existed long before Benjamin
Franklin caught lightning in a bottle. But the idea of information as we know it today
cannot be separated from electronic transmission, storage, and processing technology. With
this in mind, we can now consider knowledge as a parallel phenomenon, which is to say
that it is a product of a particular type of media environment. And while knowledge has
not been in existence as long as information, at least insofar as information is understood
by physicists, we can certainly say that knowledge existed well into human prehistory, and
has always been a part of our species. Like many others in the early and mid 20th century,
Alfred Korzybski (1921/1950, 1933/2023) [
41
,
42
] posited that human beings represent a
separate class of life from all other animals, one characterized by time-binding, the ability
to preserve and transmit knowledge from one generation to the next, to evaluate, modify,
and add to the knowledge we have inherited, and identify knowledge that is in error.
Whether knowledge is also characteristic of other forms of life is a question that might
be taken up by anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers and theologians, but not
one that need concern us now. What I do want to point out, however, is that Korzybski
came to understand that human knowledge is dependent on our capacity for symbolic
communication, and for the most past on language. And he also realized that our ability
to engage in time-binding was severely limited until the invention of writing. And it is
here that I want to draw the parallel between information as a product of electricity, and
knowledge as a product of literacy.
Earlier, I noted that we can think of the school as a medium, and following Cardinal
Newman, specifically as a medium for the teaching of knowledge. But education existed
long before there were schools. Most forms of learning and instruction do not require a
formal setting or set of procedures, but rather can operate along the lines of apprenticeship,
which is to say, how-to demonstrations and on-the-job training, whether the task was
hunting or the singing of tales to maintain an oral tradition. The first schools were created
following the invention of the first writing system, cuneiform, developed by the Sumerians
in Mesopotamia some fifty-five hundred years ago. And the function of the first schools
was to teach individuals how to read and write, which begins with learning to sit still, and
learning to focus our attention, and focus our eyes. Schools are the medium for teaching
reading and writing, and arithmetic, which is to say literacy and numeracy. This is true
on all levels, whether what we are reading is Fun With Dick and Jane, or Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, and whether what we are writing are our ABCs or a doctoral
dissertation. Cardinal Newman insisted that the teaching of knowledge was the sole
purpose of the university, but in contemporary higher education, with the typical publish
or perish ultimatum, the college is also a medium for the production of knowledge. And in
complementary fashion, the library is a medium for the storage of knowledge.
Knowledge, then, as we have come to understand it, is based on the written word,
and further amplified by the printed word, supplemented by the reproduction of images.
Knowledge is what we find in books and similar media, and it is what teachers help us
to decode and encode, and otherwise understand. Consider the basic assumptions we
generally have about knowledge: First, that knowledge is cumulative and progressive,
that it increases in accordance with Korzybski’s notion of time-binding. This stands in
contrast to the situation in oral cultures, which Jack Goody [
43
]; see also Ong, [
40
] describes
as homeostatic, in which the limits of human memory require that only what is directly
relevant to the survival of the tribe or village be preserved. In contrast to the carrying
capacity of the human brain, the storage capacity of written manuscripts seems almost
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 10 of 17
limitless. In scribal culture, the preservation of knowledge is not taken for granted, the
burning of the library of Alexandria being commonly invoked as the symbol for lost
knowledge. This problem was for the most part solved by the multiplication and mass
production of copies through typography, what historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) [
44
]
referred to as the preservative powers of print. The accumulation of knowledge also results
in increasing specialization, as a means of organizing that expanding volume of knowledge
into discrete categories, and because no one person is able to read everything that has been
written, and thereby learn all there is to learn.
Second, we think of knowledge as something outside of us rather than a part of us,
as distanced and therefore distinct from ourselves. As Eric Havelock (1963) [
45
] puts
it, writing separates the knower from the known. Knowledge is something that can be
viewed and reviewed, and being detached from ourselves, can be evaluated and criticized.
This is distinct from oral tradition, which must be preserved as is, not questioned, just
memorized and repeated. Progress depends not only on the accumulation of knowledge,
but its appraisal.
Third, we think of knowledge as the property of individuals, as opposed to the
collective memory characteristic of oral cultures. McLuhan (1962, 1964) [
15
,
46
] and others
point to the connection between reading and individualism itself. When we read, even if
we all read the same text at the exact same time, we read as isolated individuals. But when
we listen, we listen all together as one, as a single group, a singular audience rather than a
plurality of readers. As individuals, it is easier to separate ourselves from tradition, come
to our own conclusions, and make our own personal contributions.
Fourth, when we think of knowledge, and schooling, we think of studying, but as Ong
(1982) [
40
] notes, the concept of study does not exist until there are written texts to study.
Studying phenomena other that texts then was based on the practice of reading, which is
why McLuhan (2006) [
47
] traced the origins of science to the ancient study of language and
literature known as grammar, rather than logic and dialectics (see also [
12
]). The argument
made by individuals steeped in theology was that God gave us two books to read, the book
of scripture and the book of nature. Newman’s (1907) [
1
] reference to universal knowledge is
based on the idea that knowledge ought to be arranged hierarchically, based on a particular
intellectual foundation. For some it would be according to the principle of consilience based
on science [
48
]. For others it would be based on a particular philosophy or ideology [
49
].
For Cardinal Newman, higher education ought to be based on theology, which is to say
religious knowledge, and whether or not you agree with him, religion too, as opposed
to spirituality, ritual, cult, and related formulations, revolves around the sacred text, as
well as the prayer book and the theological treatise. The origin of the word religion is not
entirely clear, the Latin word religare is usually said to mean to bind together, but Cicero
(1972) [
50
] argues that it means to reread, in other words to study a text, and that is of no
small significance. Moreover, there is no word for religion in the Hebrew Bible, aside from
the word dat, a term found only in the Book of Esther and believed to be of Persian origin,
which refers to custom or law (ironically, it is also the root term for our word, data). The
Torah, the first five books of the bible, emphasizes law as the basis of religion, and codified
law is a product of writing, as is the sacred text, something to be studied. Knowledge then
forms the basis of what we know as religion, and exegesis (and hermeneutics) gives rise
to theology.
Fifth, we associate knowledge with abstract forms of expression, with facts and figures,
as opposed to stories and songs. As Ong (1982) [
40
] explains, in oral cultures the dominant
mode of communication consists of memorable forms that utilize dramatic and poetic
techniques. The dry, written forms of prosaic exposition, statements of facts, theorems and
postulates, lists and outlines, diagrams and tables, reference works such as dictionaries
and encyclopedias, textbooks, and so on, all are products of literate cultures. And these
forms are accompanied by a shift in modes of thought and expression from the concrete to
the abstract, from specifics to the ability to categorize and generalize, which we associate
with intelligence.
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 11 of 17
Sixth, when we think of knowledge, we think of it as something visual, as being
seen rather than heard. Criticism means viewing things with a critical eye, again based
on the separation of the knower from the known. We follow a line of argument or a
train of thought, metaphors based on the linearity of the written word; logic, as first
developed in ancient Greece by Aristotle and others, is based on the visual organization of
knowledge [
40
,
51
,
52
]. The very word topic comes from the Greek root for place, meaning
to put things, or words in their proper places, or categories. Rationality is closely related
to the word ratio, reason and calculation both being linked to numeracy, the visual forms
of arithmetic and geometry. Objectivity is based on the ability to step back and look at
things from a distance, a form of voyeurism, the detached gaze and fixed point of view
resulting in objectification. Seeing the world objectively means seeing it as made up of
objects, rather than as subjects, as an It rather than a You, and as objects they can be studied,
tested, manipulated, captured, and controlled. All of modern science is based on visualism,
so that even sound has to be turned into an image, graph, or diagram (or sequence of
numerals) to be studied scientifically.
And seventh, when we think of knowledge, we think of it as a thing, not as a process.
We think of it as something we have, or need, or want, not as something we do. As Ong
(1982) [
40
] explains, there is no knowledge without a knower, and knowledge itself is
simply a function of the act of knowing. That is why Ong explains that you know what you
can recall, that true knowledge is what we have learned and retain in our memory, and can
readily bring to mind. This is the only form of knowledge that exists in oral cultures. But
writing thingifies knowledge, turning it into an object, making it something that is stored in
books, that is taught in schools, and that is produced by publications.
5. Wisdom and Orality
What I am suggesting is that knowledge, as we have come to understand it, cannot be
separated from literacy, and is a product of the kinds of media environments associated
with writing and print, the chirographic and typographic media environments. If we now
find ourselves in the age of information, we might say that it follows the age of knowledge,
the vast swatch of human history stretching from the invention of writing to the twentieth
century. And that period of some five and a half millennia pales in comparison to the tens
of thousands of years that preceded it, that we call prehistory because history is a form of
knowledge produced by writing. The kind of media environment that is associated with
that era would be one dependent on the spoken word and human memory, individual and
collective, on the mnemonic techniques that aid in memorization and commemoration, and
on the forms that are most memorable, sayings and poetry, stories and songs. Keeping in
mind the expanded definition of the term medium used in media ecology, we can refer to this
environment as the oral media environment [
14
]. And while the oral media environment is
not characterized by an abundance of knowledge, what it does produce, I would argue, is
wisdom. Indeed, what we call wisdom literature is in fact the collected sayings, proverbs,
maxims, parables, and poetic expressions that are a part of an oral tradition that has been
transcribed and collected.
In an oral culture, there is no separation of the knower from the known, no illusion
that knowledge is a thing, a tangible object. There is only knowing, a process, an activity.
Knowledge is inside us, and increases with age and experience. Understanding that there
is no knowledge without a knower, as Ong (1982) [40] put it, is wisdom.
Ong (1982) [
40
] also notes that you can only really know what you can recall. Similarly,
memory is not a thing like a book or a digital archive or computer memory. Memory is
a process, an activity, a remembering. Understanding the singular importance of human
memory, of the act of remembering, is wisdom.
Individual memory is prone to error, and can fail altogether, but individual fallibility
and frailty is mitigated by the power of collective memory. We maintain cultural continuity
by remembering together, remembering as a communal performance, a ritual of commemo-
ration. Understanding that memory, and humanity, is stronger together than apart, that
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 12 of 17
human communication and the survival of our species depends upon our capacity for
cooperation, is wisdom.
Communities are bound together by communication, and human communication
depends on language, and for most of our history, on speech and presence, on face-to-face
interaction, conversation and dialogue, speaking to the group and sharing within the group.
Respecting the power of words and the need for human contact and co-presence is wisdom.
Thinking in concrete terms, not developing the abstract mindset characteristic of
literate cultures, has its limitations. But it also means understanding the difference between
someone who steals from me or tries to hurt me, and a mass mediated message that says
that someone I have never met, who lives thousands of miles away from me, is my enemy.
Recognizing the difference between firsthand and secondhand knowledge, and the role of
ethos in evaluating secondhand knowledge, is wisdom.
In contrast to the visualism associated with literacy, the oral media environment is
characterized by a sense of acoustic space [
12
,
14
,
53
]. This means seeing yourself as part of
the environment, not as an outsider looking in, at odds with your environment, trying to
manipulate, possess and control it. This ecological understanding is wisdom.
In acoustic space, we are surrounded by our environment, which is a subjective rather
than an objective position. Seeing the world subjectively means viewing everything in it as
subjects, as alive and conscious. We may denigrate this sort of worldview as superstitious
anthropomorphism, but it does require respect for others in our environment, for all living
things, and all of creation. This, I would maintain, is wisdom.
Ong (1982) [
40
] associates orality with a sense of the sacred, and the scholar of com-
parative religion, Mircea Eliade (1963) [
54
], argues that writing tends to desacralize the
world. Recognizing the phenomenon of sacred time and space, acknowledging the spiritual
dimension of human life, and understanding that it is a form of practice, not an abstract
system of beliefs, is a form of wisdom. And we don’t have to agree with this worldview or
accept it as reality to recognize its value.
What all of this boils down to is what Mumford (1934) [
9
] referred to as organic
ideology, as opposed to the ideology of the machine, the understanding that the world is
alive and full of life, and as Bateson (1979) [
31
] argued, that mind is not confined to the
human skull, but can be found throughout nature, in our ecosystems and our environments.
Wisdom is not about things, it is about relationships. To use Martin Buber’s (1970) [
55
]
terms, it is about the I-You, not the I-It. Wisdom is understanding the dynamic relationships
of the natural, more-than-human world, the social and cultural relationships among human
beings, and our relationships to ourselves, to the human heart and mind and body. Wisdom
is understanding the process of relating to our world and ourselves, or in other words, the
process of mediating with our world and with ourselves. And if you will forgive me a bit
of hubris, wisdom also can be found via media ecology.
6. The Future of Knowledge and the Fate of Wisdom
The age of wisdom encompasses the vast majority of human history, and therefore
has stood the test of time on an order of magnitude far exceeding that of the age of
knowledge, and to which the age of information cannot even compare. We also know that
the characteristics of orality are quite different from the characteristics of literacy, so that the
addition of writing results in the loss of certain aspects of the oral mindset, of oral tradition
and oral culture. Similarly, the characteristics of electricity are quite different from the
characteristics of typography, so that the addition of telecommunications, computing, and
digital media results in the loss of certain aspects of the literate mindset and literate culture.
We characterize the electronic media environment as postliterate, and this points to the
increasing emphasis on audiovisual media, and the loss of the habit of deep reading and
sustained attention. And in our time, we are witness to something akin to the death spiral
of print media, newspapers having been the canary in the coalmine of this eventuality.
Similar concerns can be raised regarding libraries, and schools for that matter. If the future
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 13 of 17
of knowledge depends upon the kind of media that emerged out of the chirographic and
typographic media environments, the outlook does not appear to be very good.
Learning how to read and write is potentially a process of lifelong learning, and simply
acquiring competency in these activities is a slow, drawn out process requiring many years
of schooling. Literacy is associated with delayed gratification, as well as taking the time
and achieving the distance for reflection and evaluation. The patience and calm needed
for reading and writing is undermined by the emphasis on speed and instantaneity on the
part of the electronic media. Information is transmitted at the speed of light, but the steady
stream of data leaves little room for thoughtfulness or learning.
What then is the point of information if it goes in one ear and out the other? The answer
can be found in Claude Shannon’s information theory. Information is meant to reduce
uncertainty, reduce possibilities, and reduce freedom. Its function is to close things off, not
to open them up. It demands immediate decision; the bit or binary digit presents us with a
two-valued, either-or set of choices, on or off,yes or no,black or white,do or don’t do. While the
combination of many bits allow for great complexity, it remains a quantitative complexity,
not allowing for qualitative distinction, for the fuzzy, analogical realm of human thought.
We say that knowledge will set you free. Information moves in the opposite direction. This
characteristic of information is closely connected to its role in determining the most efficient
means to any given end. Knowledge and learning are notoriously inefficient.
Knowledge is closely related to the concept of facts, statements that describe some
aspect of the reality and that can be tested for their validity and accuracy, that can be
determined true or false; knowledge also introduces the more abstract notion of the truth
as an essential quality. Information is locked inside the prison house of the binary code,
producing certainty without reference to external reality. It is part of a mathematical,
deductive system, cut off from sensory experience and the empirical method. No wonder
that contemporary generative AI programs are prone to hallucinations, given that they
exist in an environment of sensory deprivation. In this sense, there is no real distinction
between information, misinformation, and disinformation, as it all amounts to the same set
of zeroes and ones, and logarithmic procedures.
Information is the basis of the cybernetic function of control, and this stands in stark
contrast to the idea of the university as Newman outlined it, grounded in liberal arts
education. We call them the liberal arts, from the Latin liberales artes, because they represent
education for individuals who are free, not slaves, and because they represent the free and
unrestricted pursuit of knowledge. This distinction between knowledge and information
corresponds to the distinction between education and training. Training, as a function
of information, is only concerned with how to achieve a specific goal, the practices and
procedures that are most effective, most efficient, that can then be followed more or less
automatically. Moreover, the streamlining of actions into algorithms leads to automation,
the most efficient form of control, people being less reliable than machines. Education on
the other hand, as a function of knowledge, is concerned with understanding the how and
why of those practices and procedures, considering alternatives, being open to reflection
rather than action, to critical thinking, novelty and creativity.
Just a few years ago, the big buzz word was big data. The words information and data
are often used interchangeably, suggesting that there is no clear distinction between big
data and information overload. Admittedly, the DIKW model treats data both as a lesser
phenomenon than information, and as its foundation, so that with enough data we can
get actual information. Bateson (1972, 1979) [
30
,
31
] described information as a difference
that makes a difference, based on information theory, where information is understood
to perform the function of reducing uncertainty; data it follows would be a difference
that does not make a difference, that does not reduce uncertainty, that is signal without
purpose, which in many ways amounts to noise. Postman (1985) [
56
] observes that this
sort of irrelevance that we experience from the flood of electronic messages we receive is
associated with the incoherence in the way that they are presented to us, and leaves us with
a sense of impotence as we are unable to respond in any meaningful way to most of them.
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 14 of 17
Big data then becomes something quite surreal—call it big dada. And this in turn threatens
to leave us in, if you forgive me, big doodoo.
We access all that data and information via search engines. But try to recall what you
obtained from your last Google search. Was it a simple answer to a question, such as who
was nominated for the Oscars, what was the score for a particular sports match, where
you can watch a particular movie, or what restaurants are nearby? Do you even remember
what you searched for over the last few days, let alone what the results were?
We have now moved on from big data to AI. This follows a historical pattern well
known to media ecology scholars. Whenever we expand our capacity for time-binding,
when new communication technologies lead to an explosion of content, the eventual result
is an overload. And that overload in turn leads to the development of technologies and tech-
niques to organize and manage all of that new content [
7
,
38
,
57
]. Thus, we have developed
increasingly more sophisticated computer programming devoted to data management and
information processing, with increasingly more accessible, anthropotropic interfaces [
58
].
The fact that we refer to these technologies as artificial intelligence obscures the reality that
we have never quite determined what exactly we mean by the term intelligence in the first
place [
59
–
62
]. What is natural intelligence? Are dogs and cats intelligent? Are plants and
protozoa? Are viruses and genes? If computer software constitutes artificial intelligence,
can the same be said about other media? For example, to the extent that books serve as
receptacles of knowledge, is a book a form of artificial intelligence?
We externalized human knowledge by transferring it from human memory into books,
with the understanding that that knowledge can then be transferred back to other human
beings, assisted by a teacher, but potentially without one. We have further externalized
human knowledge into electronic databases and digital storage media, accessed with the
help of expert systems and artificial intelligence programs, such as search engines. Does
an AI itself possess knowledge, by which I mean, does it know, is it capable of knowing?
At present, the answer is it does not, and whether our information processing technology
will ever yield the equivalent of human consciousness remains to be seen. Knowing is
intimately bound up with meaning, and for now at least, discovering, determining, and
debating the meaning of things falls to us, as human beings. It is our responsibility, whether
we choose to accept it or not.
We have access to enormous quantities of information, but that does not guarantee
that we have the knowledge or wisdom we need to make sense of it all, to analyze and
synthesize and filter out the signal from all the noise. Technology boosters promote AI
as the answer to all of our problems, but what we are seeing is that these programs are
being used to read and write for us, so we do not have to, and voice recognition and
voice synthesis programming make literacy itself increasingly unnecessary. And while AI
software is relatively adept at summarizing documents, it is often the offhand comment
or minor point buried in a footnote that individual readers find to be most relevant for
their purposes, rather than the main points that might make it into a summary. Further,
written texts represent a truly efficient way to store and access knowledge and information
in contrast to the time-consuming chore of watching videos and listening to podcasts and
other audio recordings; in this instance, AI again comes to the rescue by watching videos
and listening to audiovisual material for us, so we do not have to. The electronic media
made us postliterate, while these new technologies threaten to make us aliterate, and
nonliterate, and potentially post-knowledge, post-meaning, and post-responsibility.
Almost a century ago, Sigmund Freud (1961) [
63
] argued that modern technology
turns us into prosthetic gods by extending our bodies and minds. The problem is that they
amplify both our best and our worst traits, and resulting in effects that are far-reaching
and often impossible to predict. Technology provides us with powerful tools, without
a doubt, and there are many benefits that they have to offer. But they come with a cost,
and we ought to have a look at the price tag, and carefully consider if, when, and how we
adopt them.
Philosophies 2024,9, 160 15 of 17
During the postwar period, scholars realized that we had moved beyond the industrial
revolution, and began to refer to postindustrial societies and postindustrial economies. Of
course, this kind of designation only tells us what such a society and economy is not, and
not what it is. One of the characteristics typically identified as postindustrial, however,
is that knowledge increases in value. As a form of capital, knowledge is said to displace
machinery and material possessions and real estate, and this is consistent with the tendency
towards dematerialization characteristic of the electronic media. And it is true that we
have seen a shift away from blue collar labor, but nowadays the idea of the postindustrial
economy has been supplanted either by references to the information economy, not the
knowledge economy, or by references to the service economy. And while service can be
laudable activity, it also gives us a gig economy where most gigs are in some sense servile,
doing the work that servants used to do, as well as serving the needs and directives of
our servomechanisms, our algorithms, automated machinery, and AIs. Peter Drucker
(1968) [
64
] envisioned a future that emphasized the importance of knowledge workers, that
valued intellectual acumen and creativity, but frankly that designation does not seem to
fit the folks driving Ubers and renting out Airbnbs. Arguably, the only true knowledge
workers are educators, as employees, Isaac Rabi notwithstanding, of our colleges and
universities and schools.
7. Conclusions
While I have been emphasizing the negative effects of the electronic media environ-
ment, I want to acknowledge that they have given us many positive ones as well, and
that what we need to do is to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs, and achieve
some kind of balance and sustainability. McLuhan (1964) [
15
] suggested that the electronic
media are retrieving a new form of tribalism, and therefore some aspects of the oral media
environment. This does not extend to human memory, which seems even more atrophied
in the age of information than in the age of knowledge. Neither do the electronic media
enhance our experience of co-presence, although they do extend our sense of community
in other ways. And, to their credit, they have restored a much needed ecological sensibility
associated with acoustic space, and we can only hope, and pray, that this has come soon
enough to blunt the worst potential effects of industrial technology. If not, the future of
knowledge will indeed be bleak, and the future of information too.
Assuming we avoid such apocalyptic endings, what I want to suggest is that the future
of knowledge is dependent on the fate of wisdom, and that to restore the knowledge we
have lost in information, we need to restore the wisdom we have lost in knowledge. By
this, I mean the wisdom to understand the interdependencies that we are a part of, the
network of relationships that connect us and contain us, and the deep history that precedes
us and surrounds us. And the wisdom to find meaning, to maintain balance, and to fulfill
our mission to heal our broken world. And the wisdom to understand our own limitations,
so that we can move forward with humility rather than hubris.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is
not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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