Dec. 17, 2006
Power to the People
By Harry T. Cook
Francis Bacon evidently thought the principle so important that he uttered it first in Latin: Scientia potestas est: “Knowledge is power.” Bacon, as he once said, preferred to begin with doubt and end in certainty rather than begin with certainty and end in doubt. He had such respect for actually knowing what the facts were about anything that mattered that nothing took precedence over knowledge and its acquisition.
What Bacon meant by “power” was the ability to make choices and decisions in the political and personal realms, which would reflect what was true. He once remarked that it was an ill-fated traveler who upon seeing only the sea decided there was no such thing as land. Often that which cannot readily be seen or otherwise discerned and rationalized turns out to be the very thing that matters.
About 200 years after Bacon laid down the knowledge-is-power principle, the Irish statesman and orator John Philpot Curran said: The condition of [man’s]
liberty . . . is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime. Vigilance and the quest for knowledge, then, are indissolubly wed. Without both operating together, power and liberty are seriously diminished.
A case in point would be the 29 libraries maintained – at least up to now – by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that bete noir of the current conservative political establishment. A citizen with knowledge of these libraries’ existence could go to any of them and find information on incinerators, the storage of toxic wastes and the fruit of research into the pollution-health nexus.
Well, guess what? Pleading shortage of funds, the Bush Administration – which apparently has not yet figured out the full meaning of the recent election – has moved to close most of the 29 libraries and effectively deny the public information about global warming, industrial pollutants and health hazards. The EPA’s main library in the nation’s capital has been closed to the public. Other regional collections have been closed altogether.
It has nothing to do with money, except perhaps for the king’s ransom that is spent daily to fund the tragic, pointless war in Iraq. The libraries have been closed because knowledge is power, and the Administration and its industrial cohort want to do all they can to prevent the American people from learning the truth about the wanton pollution of our part of this fragile planet – all to ensure the continued profit of the petroleum, chemical and electrical power industries. The question now is whether Congress will restore the libraries and reopen them to the public.
On another information front, Congress has effectively restored funding for the federal agency that has been conducting oversight of the spending of billions of taxpayer money for the rebuilding of Iraq in the destruction of which the U.S. is deeply implicated. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction had been quietly written out of existence by stealth legislation.
Why would the government want taxpayers to be ignorant of how badly they have been and are still being ripped off by fraud? Because knowledge is power, that’s why. Ignorance serves the malign ends of corruption and staves off revolt. The Halliburton Boys have to be kept happy.
The deliberate perpetuation of ignorance has long been a tool of religious hierarchies, in particular of the Roman Catholic curia. Its 15th and 16th century popes were loath to have the Bible translated from Latin into various vernaculars because they knew knowledge was power. When the people could actually read for themselves what the Bible said, as opposed to what the hierarchy wanted them to believe it said, reformation, yea, revolution was in the air.
So here’s the question: Why do so many people in 21st-century America prefer ignorance (and therefore captivity) to knowledge (and therefore freedom)? No fewer than 50% of Americans polled appear to believe that Earth is a mere 6,000 years old and that Charles Darwin and his fellow evolutionary biologists are the spawn of Satan.
I have no hard figures as to how many people believe every human being is the vessel of an immortal soul, and no idea of why people believe it. I can tell you, though, that such an evidence-less belief is what makes it easier for the Roman hierarchy and its allies of convenience on the Protestant Religious Right to maintain their Luddite edge against embryonic stem-cell research.
St. John wrote that men love darkness because their deeds are evil (3:20). I get that. What I don’t get is why so many people prefer to live in the darkness that evil loves.
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ENDNOTE: The main headline in Wednesday’s New York Times read:
White House to Delay Shift
On Iraq Until Early in 2007
My version?
Peace on Earth Postponed
Until After Christmas
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