The Story

THIS IS
THE STORY OF THE THINGS WE KNOW THAT ARE
TOO FUNDAMENTAL TO CONSTANTLY NOTICE BUT
TOO IMPORTANT
TO CONTINUE TO FORGET

AS IT WAS REDISCOVERED
BY
A. M. LOEWI

Creative Commons

The Story by Alexander Martin Loewi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 2009
It is free for distribution and reproduction, but not licensed for commercial purposes.

This is the story of the things we know too well to remember. There is no one for whom it is not meant.

This is the story of the things that we could not possibly give all of the attention they deserve, because they drench every second of our lives; and how in their overwhelming presence, we have repeatedly overlooked their depths. But it is also the story of how some people began to look systematically at what we must most take for granted, and the world changed. How it became better, because of what they saw. And how, finally, it is our turn to look, and not look away again.

A professor excavates layers of data that have been building for a hundred years, and as familiar a thing as community becomes a profound, and urgent, focus of study for fields from sociology to economics. Another gathers decades of her own experience, probes decades more of other people's with exhaustive interviews, and with it all, shows us how well we understand the people we talk to. She is awarded a MacArthur fellowship, the “genius” grant. A scholar describes with meticulous detail the architecture and arrangement of our most mundane routines, and her insights become "the most influential book written on urban planning in the 20th century." Every one of us has known community, of some kind. We have talked to people since we could talk, and, billions of us, lived in cities since we were born. That we might have missed a single one of their subtleties seems absurd, but then when someone forgoes this assumption, the scale of their power over everything we do is unveiled, and takes us forcefully by surprise. So look closely- these ideas were unexpected because they are all facets of one, even subtler idea, that describes a thing more pervasive than sidewalks, than community, than people.

Information- is the only thing that is actually everywhere. Voluminous, complicated, information, by which we live every moment of our lives: what things look like, how to be a doctor, what the person you didn't understand before actually means. They are pieces we have in front of us, or pieces we learned years ago. And this is the reason we can not remember all of it! We know too many things to remember how we ever learned them, that we ever learned them, how someone else could possibly not know them, and so we forsake the ways in which we learned, and then we are confused when the world is not the way we expect it. Look again at the scholarship: what these studies tell us is not about community, but how much we need many people to share the information with us that we are welcome among them, before we can share all of the other information we need. They show how different the information that two people have can be, and how we must have the same information to understand one another. They show how hard it is to get the information we need when we live in places whose design isolates us from one another, and from it. They show us that not all information can be written down, or drawn, or even said, so we must exchange it in person to get all of it. That if we do not exchange it, we do not have it. That if we do not have it, we do not understand. And then what can we do? Things we know, and so can only have forgotten.

The too-long time our recollection has languished is exacerbated by the fact that we hesitate to accept how something that affects us deeply is both simple, and easily mutable. We do not want it to seem insufficient in measure to the emotions it has inspired. We feel there must be a deeper reason for a deeper hurt, or have the greed to want our happiness to not only be happiness, but also be unique, and look for majestic mechanisms where they may not be. So we tilt, errant, at windmills, while the true causes of our joys and pains look on bewildered, and beg for our attention. We have no reason to be reluctant to listen to them, because what they say, despite the few words in which it can be put, are the unabridged origins of things that are as powerful, and beautiful, as anything we can imagine. And there is nothing so sadly infuriating to watch go neglected, at the cost of fulfillment, and health, and lives.

In the past, even those who did see the pattern may have forsaken it for its complexity. But now, the world is different. Now- we have tools, that do not forget. Tiny, crude, ubiquitous, marvelous, electronic, memories. They are the very last piece of this vast, vital, puzzle. If we, with them, were to take the thorough, scrupulous approach of science: of tables and statistics, of computers and sensors, of interviews and ethnographies, of maps and timers- we would gain knowledge of historically unparalleled acuity, and necessity. With our mathematics and our literature and our GPS, we must look at the whole, and let ourselves be awed by the full pattern of what at the individual, anecdotal level, is obvious. There are too many of us, and we are too important, and too dangerous, and too prone to forget, to not examine who among us knows what we are doing, and who is being given even the chance to know. Let us record what we will never remember: What we know. Who we talk to: only our friends? How much we talk to them. What we talk about: only ourselves? Who they talk to. How deeply we truly understand the effects of the problems faced by the people whose lives we are unquestionably able to improve. What the informal glances reveal is already clear, and dire, but without the strength of detail to change what they nervously apprehend. As we do this, we will tie tightly together, and shed bright light on, business networks- and governments- human rights successes, and human rights atrocities- and works in more disciplines than political science education economics biology philosophy anthropology history, and peer beneath the first layers of hatred, and love. From “sophia”- knowledge- let sophology be the science of the study of information.

These are the words of a person who has, through literally hundreds of books and years of research, come to the one realization that arrests ones thoughts so completely as to trump whatever else they have believed they knew, overturning it with as little difficulty or emotion as a strolling foot does dead leaves- that they recognize what they know in the world that they see. With this, in my desire to accurately describe reality I could yet only fall short by failing to marshal the vehemence that does the magnitude of its importance justice. So this is my foul, swearing, demand, indifferent to your comfort, my exhortation, of whose force I refuse to be ashamed; this is my calm, assured, statement of objective fact; this is my pitiful, desperate, plea: The information that we have, and give to one another- this familiar, mechanical, mesh- is still as raw, and basic a structure as anything there is for what lives we have, and those that we could ever hope to achieve. We- all, globally, for ever more- must have the humility and courage to accept that what we do not know, about one another, and the world, is huge, uncharted, and the limit of our hopes to survive what disasters we face, and foment- before we cause the whole fragile buckling frame to collapse unredeemably under our collective, groaning, weight.