“What Do You Know?” It has been said that we live in the midst of the knowledge revolution. At the beginning of the 20th century knowledge doubled every 50 years, by the beginning of the 21st century it doubled every 10 years, and now it doubles every year! Of course who knows if it’s true, but it sounds good. It is true though that we have unprecedented access to data, information and knowledge. Yet there are some questions that perplex the human mind. For instance:
We ponder these things and it maybe occurs to us that perhaps we don’t know so much. But it strikes me that sometimes in our lives that the problem isn’t what we know or don’t know, but rather the problem is what we know that isn’t so. Jim became a leader who distinguished himself by learning everything there was to know about everything. Jim learned to love computers when he worked for IBM and then he went to work for Federal Express and developed their computer system to track millions of packages at a time. Jim was flying high and was very proud of his ability and knowledge. He ran his companies by telling people what needed to happen and making sure it happened. Jim was gregarious and joking and good natured----as long as you did what he said—otherwise it was off with your head. It wasn’t long before Jim had an empire and he was known far and wide as the fair-haired CEO who could do anything. Well, this was when Jim had the opportunity to get in on the ground level creating a new web browser in the burgeoning internet industry. So Jim put together a team of nerd warriors who were some of the mightiest in their fields. These warrior nerds could take 1’s and 0’s and weave them into the most fantastic codes that would make anything you wanted appear on the screen. Jim loved what they were able to do and as long as the warrior nerds could keep adding to what the magic browser could provide, Jim was happy. If the nerd warrior somehow failed to what CEO Jim wanted though, they were consigned to the software dungeons where the only jobs were boring and low paid. It did not take long before the practiced wisdom Jim’s company was to tell him what he wanted to hear and to give him what he wanted to have. So, the web browser seemed to sail and it made more and more money. Jim dressed his browser up in all kinds of fancy Boolean browser clothes (that’s software jargon). It could perform default searches, proximity searches, truncated searches, field searches, limited field searches---everything! Jim would have had it fix your coffee in the morning if he could have, but he couldn’t figure out how to get the coffee down those internet tubes. Jim’s company was flying high, but he didn’t see that the world was changing. Jim didn’t care. Jim knew what he knew, and what he knew was that he was the best. He knew he didn’t have worry about other dot coms because, after all, how could they compete with him? If Jim was in doubt he would ask his board of directors (whom he hired) and they would tell him, “Oh, we have the perfect system and it can only get better!” Well , it seems that one day his company hired a fifteen year old boy –actually they didn’t hire him—they let him work there for the experience. This boy was put to work in the software stables shoveling out untidy code. The boy, named Blake, worked hard because he wanted to help. One day Jim saw Blake working and said, “Boy come to the board of directors meeting and see how things are done.” Blake was excited so he attended. While they were having the meeting Jim though he would demonstrate his magnanimous disposition so he introduced Blake and he asked Blake what he thought about working there and how he liked their fantastic product. Blake stood up and looked around and said that he loved working there and it was all very exciting, but if they really wanted to know, their product “sucked” (oh the ways these young people talk). Blake said it’s cumbersome and slow. In the helter skelter of the internet it’s a plow horse trying to run with thoroughbreds. Well, the directors were shocked, Jim was shocked, the secretaries were shocked, the stockholders were shocked—and Blake was told in no uncertain terms to get right back to the software stables. Well the upshot of the story is that in two years the web browser company was overwhelmed by its innovative competition. It couldn’t keep up, it was hard to use, its searches confused themselves and the company went out of business. and such is life. True story-- Jim Barkesdale was the CEO of Netscape and Blake Ross was the fifteen year old who later founded the free web browser Firefox. And is he’s now 25. He’s now the one who knows everything about everything. While education and experience are great assets in the living of life, one of the problems is that they can cause an accretion of mental plaque that prevents new learning. It’s like our previous learning prohibits us from changing our minds. This why when Magellan sailed around the world there were some flat earthers who claimed he just didn’t sail far enough. It’s why a good number of people still think the U.S. invaded Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction, why the “birther movement” still claims there’s an Obama cover-up, and why some claim we’re overtaxed—all claims that are made even though the facts demonstrate conclusively that WMD’s were an invention of Dick Cheney, that Obama was born in Hawaii, and that we’re at the lowest rate of taxation since Harry Truman! It used to be that we could trust the information we received from public figures as being their best estimation of what the truth was. We knew that there were value distortions and that incomplete knowledge sometimes skewed the information, but other than that we trusted our news outlets and leaders as honest brokers of the information. That however is no longer the case. I really noticed it in the Reagan era when hired mercenaries in Central America were called freedom fighters and a submarine with enough fire power to destroy the world was called Corpus Christie, or the Body of Christ. But it really took off in the 1990’s with heightened knowledge in neuroscience. It’s now at the point where word doctors, like the conservative Frank Luntz, frame arguments with no regard for the facts and news outlets have become partisan propaganda spin-meisters . Before reform legislation was ever introduced, the argument against it was framed as “another wall street bailout” when in fact it was the opposite. It was the same with debates about “death panels” and numerous other places where white has been called black, up-down, right –left, and on and on. What this means for us is that in terms of opinions and understandings we are always on shaky ground because we don’t even know what the facts are. This requires us to adopt a sense of skepticism about everything we think we know and everything we are told. This makes it difficult to move with any confidence into the future Perhaps, the best solution is to develop the skill of walking in quicksand—it’s what Bob Johanson at the Palo Alto Institute for the Future would call having strong opinions weakly held. I personally would rather say “tentatively held” but that’s quibbling. The point is that we develop viewpoints and directions on the best available knowledge and at the same time we remain open to new points of view and information. We argue strongly and yet are willing to change with new knowledge. We stay aware of our propensity to be calcified in our thinking and work to incorporate new thinking and new points of view when justified. In the world of faith this had to happen with our attitude toward the Bible, God, Jesus, and world religions. It happens in terms of our self definition, our relationships. There is always a new world to be discovered, a new fact uncovered, a new transformation to be experienced! "Rabbit’s clever," said Pooh thoughtfully. "Men are born ignorant, not stupid;
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