Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday's truths suddenly become today's fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge – even in extremely narrow fields.
'You can't possibly keep in touch with all you want to,' complains Dr. Rudolph Stohler, a zoologist at the University of California at Berkeley. 'I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what's going on,' says Dr. I. E. Wallen, chief of oceanography at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Dr. Emilio Segre, a Nobel prizewinner in physics, declares: 'On K-mesons alone, to wade through all the papers is an impossibility.' And another oceanographer, Dr. Arthur Stump, admits: 'I don't really know the answer unless we declare a moratorium on publications for ten years.'
New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, 'I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford in 1931.' Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, 'I realize that not only can I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involve knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated.' And Dr. Robert Hilliard, the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: 'At the rate at which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the world will have been learned since the time he was born.'
Granting that definitions of 'knowledge' are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions.
Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the immediate interests of the ordinary man in the street. He is not intrigued or impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds – something that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this knowledge may have an impact on him when it is embodied in new technology, until then, he can afford to ignore it. A good bit of new knowledge, on the other hand, is directly related to his immediate concerns, his job, his politics, his family life, even his sexual behavior.
A poignant example is the dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of childrearing.
At the turn of the century in the United States, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behavior. Mothers who had never heard of Darwin or Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the world views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these world views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that 'bad children are a result of bad stock,' that 'crime is hereditary,' etc.
In the early decades of the century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Watson and Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behaviorism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid prolonged dependency.
A study by Martha Wolfenstein has compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of
Parenthetically, at the same time that Freudian images of the child were altering the behavior of parents in Dayton, Dubuque and Dallas, the image of the psychoanalyst changed, too. Psychoanalysts became culture heroes. Movies, television scripts, novels and magazine stories represented them as wise and sympathetic souls, wonder-workers capable of remaking damaged personalities. From the appearance of the movie
By the mid-sixties, however, he had already turned into a comical creature. Peter Sellers in
This sharp reversal in the public image of the psychoanalyst (the public image being no more than the weighted aggregate of private images in the society) reflected changes in research as well. For evidence was piling up that psychoanalytic therapy did not live up to the claims made for it, and new knowledge in the behavioral sciences, and particularly in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic. At the same time, there was a great burst of research in the field of learning theory, and a new swing in childrearing, this time toward a kind of neo-behaviorism, got under way.
At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different times in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle.
In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events – as distinct from research as such – also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in black ghettos only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that blacks are 'happy children' content with their poverty. After the Israeli blitz victory over the Arabs in 1967, how many still cling to the image of the Jew as a cheek-turning pacifist or a battlefield coward?
In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-put, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself.
This impermanence is reflected in society in many subtle ways. A single dramatic example is the impact of the knowledge explosion on that classic knowledge-container, the book.
As knowledge has become more plentiful and less permanent, we have witnessed the virtual disappearance of the solid old durable leather binding, replaced at first by cloth and later by paper covers. The book itself, like much of the information it holds, has become more transient.
A decade ago, communications systems designer Sol Cornberg, a radical prophet in the field of library technology, declared that reading would soon cease to be a primary form of information intake. 'Reading and writing,' he suggested, 'will become obsolete skills.' (Ironically, Mr. Cornberg's wife is a novelist.)
Whether or not he is correct, one fact is plain: the incredible expansion of knowledge implies that each book (alas, this one included) contains a progressively smaller fraction of all that is known. And the paperback revolution, by making inexpensive editions available everywhere, lessens the scarcity value of the book at precisely the very moment that the increasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge lessens its longterm informational value. Thus, in the United States a paperback appears simultaneously on more than 100,000 newsstands, only to be swept away by another tidal wave of publications delivered a mere thirty days later. The book thus approaches the
