Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge

Introduction

1 ,฀ IntroductIon Francis Bacon knew his books, but he got one thing wrong: knowledge is not power. the control of knowledge is power. In any university office one is surrounded by people whose brains are bursting with knowledge yet who have no meaningful power. But people in a position to withhold knowledge are powerful. the intelligence analyst who withholds information from a policymaker, the doctor who fails to explain a diagnosis to a patient, a president who distorts events in speeches to congress or the nation, the corporate executive who misrepresents accounting methods to Wall Street analysts —all of these people are enhancing their power by preventing others from acquiring the knowledge they themselves have acquired. the most basic tool to acquire knowledge is literacy, and in the Western world the powerful long acknowledged its importance by denying it to others . the first line of defense is to prevent people from becoming literate. As late as the nineteenth century, in parts of the American South it was illegal to teach a slave to read. But people do learn to read despite enormous barriers . once that happens, the best method of control is to limit the material available to readers through language, price, or censorship. Most people learn first to read the language they speak, but early European books were in the dead languages of learned discourse: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. christian churches used language to limit access to knowledge of God. In the Western world, the way to know God was to read the Bible, and until the renaissance and reformation only those who could read ancient languages could acquire that knowledge independently. Laypeople depended entirely on the clergy. translating the Bible into vernacular languages was often contentious. In England, when John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, his works were banned. In 1428, more than forty 2฀฀ introduction years after Wycliffe had died, the pope ordered his bones exhumed and burned. William tyndale’s English translation formed the basis of the King James Bible, but by then he was dead, executed for his work in 1536. In nineteenth-century russia the clergy used a Bible in old church Slavonic, a language that few russians continued to speak. When a translation into modern russian was begun, the clergy resisted, and a modern version became available only toward the end of that century. the printing press and vernacular literature, both sacred and secular, advanced together, and by the sixteenth century a well-read person had no practical need to know an ancient language, though such knowledge continued to carry considerable social cachet. Being able to read gives immediate access to free information, but little information (let alone knowledge) is free. official information—government decrees, news of royal deaths and successions, of wars and conscription —was freely distributed not only to those who could read but, through public oral reading, to those who could not. (understanding of the meaning of those decrees and events, much less the opportunity to influence them, was limited to those who were well enough educated to read critically and discuss events with others.) once literacy was fairly widespread, information was made available in newspapers, periodicals, and other printed matter . Print expanded access, but not as much as you might think. Printed material of all kinds was expensive, not only because the technology was new and the materials costly but because governments frequently taxed those materials and the finished products heavily, further raising the price. Even after printing became more economical and taxes were lowered or eliminated, books especially were far too expensive for working people. only in the nineteenth century, when printing technology advanced and a used book market and free or inexpensive lending libraries were established, were books readily available to large numbers of people. Even then, there was much discussion among the elites about what sort of books should be made available in cheap editions or placed on library shelves. reading suitable for the ruling classes might not be suitable for their servants. (class distinctions about suitable reading died hard: when paperback books flourished after World War II, “objectionable” language and passages deemed acceptable in the cloth editions might be expunged from the paperbacks, with or without the authors’ knowledge.) once vernacular publishing took hold, churches and governments sought ฀฀introduction฀ 3 to restrict access to knowledge by controlling the press. In England, the Stationers’ company until 1710 licensed printers and decided what they...