Humans rely on two distinct systems of knowledge, that are both parts of our evolutionary heritage. The one concerns our perception and processing of the reality around us, our physical environment. We need to accurately map the opportunities and risks, and judge our capacity to operate in that environment, locating food sources, avoiding predators, judging distances, and countless other calculations we have to make each day. In the modern world the typical calculations—avoiding traffic, finding internet access—are different, but the basic engagement with an external world remains the same.
The other system of knowledge concerns our knowledge about each other, and how we regard each other. We are fundamentally social beings, with a long period of infant and childhood dependency, that teaches us to be reliant on, and reliable to, others. Human language and symbolisation provides the communicative infrastructure through which we build our social relationships. Moreover, we survive collectively, as members of groups, that are capable of highly complex and yet flexible forms of social organisation, which further realise the goals of the first knowledge system, increasing our collective adaptability to environments exponentially. But in this second knowledge system, information and signals about the trustworthiness and loyalty to the group of its members, are often as if not more important than the knowledge it produces about external reality.
We depend on both these knowledge systems. But the second one is not just a practical extension of the first. We acquire and develop both in the first instance, as simultaneously physical beings in a material world, and social animals in a social world. But the former has a certain endless extendibility, as new environments are encountered, whereas the latter is somewhat attenuated by our limited capacity to genuinely handle more than a limited number of social relationships. Although as moderns we sit in extended webs of communication with much of humanity, the actual extent of social relationships we can cognitively and emotionally handle is not that much greater than what our foraging ancestors normally encountered in small scale societies.
One result of this is that it is easier to build up an image of a common world through the first system, through knowledge practices such as science and shared assumptions about a common objective reality, than it is through the second system. This is because the second system depends on belief and trust in each other, in a shared moral universe of obligations and expectations regarding behaviour, among the group in question. The reality that most matters is not the objective material one, but the subjectively experienced emotional fabric of relationships.
Where am I going with this? We need, and have to survive, through both these systems. But the modern, post-Enlightenment world has increasingly institutionally separated them. Certain institutions, universities, science, professional journalism, primarily serve the former, while the need for social solidarity is primarily served by diverse groups based on shared friendship, religion, ideology, activism, and so on. But in some contexts these two systems can come into conflict with one another, instead of reinforcing each other, precisely because they confound a certain beneficial functional separation.
I am thinking especially of the context of the university (although there are others). Much of what academics do is premised on an assumption of the first system taking precedence. We operate on the assumption of a common ground of objective reality, about which we make competing truth claims, some of which are superior, and some inferior. This is not just true of physical and natural sciences, but the humanities and social sciences as well. No matter what one think of Dickens’s novels, they have to exist for there to be rival interpretations. No matter what we think of political ideologies, there has to be some underlying agreement that there is something there to debate about. For this process to work, beyond the basic rules of the game of scholarly good-practice, the need for the second system of emotional and moral knowledge about one’s peers is limited. We can have good and productive engagements with people we thoroughly dislike. Often for years on end.
However, beyond narrow scholarly practice, universities are also places where people live much of their lives, and seek friendships, and purpose, and moral meaning. This is unavoidable. There is a constant liability that the second knowledge system will grow and displace the first. Many of the conflicts and disputes that characterise universities these days have to do with a confusion about whether the main purpose of the knowledge being produced is to engage an objective reality, or to distinguish between those within and outwith the morally bound community. One is increasingly met with the message that the most important thing about the truth claims one makes is whether they mark you as morally acceptable or not. And the believability of one’s truth claims is pegged to and subordinated to this higher principle of social solidarity. The setting becomes more like a confessional congregation, in which one is either in or out, and less like a zone of respectful contestation (which of course includes alliances, teams, and friendships).
This is an environment injurious to serious social inquiry.
Uneasy Essays 