On Wells, Polanyi (Michael), Foucault, and the necessity of Synthetic knowledge

Almost a century ago, in the middle of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, H.G. Wells gave a lecture to the Weekly Evening Meeting of the Royal Institution, November 20th (a Friday), 1936, in London. I quote a passage:

I doubt if there is anybody here tonight who has not given a certain amount of anxious thought to the conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern knowledge and—how do I call it?—trained and studied thought in contemporary affairs. And I think that it is mainly in the troubled years since 1914 that the world of cultivated, learned and scientific people of which you are so representative, has become conscious of this ineffectiveness.—World Brain, “World Encyclopedia,” pp. 18-19

To be precise, Wells (1866-1946) diagnoses how there is an obstacle to allow ‘modern knowledge’ to guide the ‘art of government.’ Now, alerted by, say, Oakeshott (a decade later), you may expect that Wells finds ‘modern knowledge’ wanting. But that’s not Wells’ diagnosis. He is quite explicit that “it is science…that we want to enlighten and animate our politics and rule the world.” (p. 27)

He diagnoses two obstacles to science’s role in the art of government. First, “men of science” are in virtue of their specialization not suited for guiding policy:

Because—I hope you will acquit me of any disrespect for science and) philosophy when I say this—we have to face the fact that from the point of view of general living, men of science, artists, philosophers, specialised intelligences of any sort, do not constitute an elite that can be mobilised for collective action. They are an extraordinarily miscellaneous assembly, and their most remarkable common quality is the quality of concentration in comparative retirement, each along his own line. They have none of the solidarity, the customary savoir faire, the habits arising out of practices, activities and interests in common that lawyers, doctors or any of the really socially organised professions for instance display. A professor-ridden world might prove as unsatisfactory under the stress of modern life and fluctuating conditions as a theologian-ridden world. A distinguished specialist is precious because of his cultivated gift. It does not follow at all that by the standards of all-round necessity he is a superior person. Indeed by the very fact of his specialisation he may be less practised and competent than the average man.—p. 26

In fact, in a subsequent thought experiment Wells goes so far as to suggest that a random selection of “unspecialised” men are better suited that scientific specialists for running things.*

But this deepens the problem: it is impossible to have those responsible for creating ‘modern knowledge’ guide the ‘art of government.’ So, there have to be intermediaries between science and policy that are not scientists.

Second, the nature of modern knowledge is intrinsically specialist and so distributed among specializations: “like pieces from a complicated jig-saw puzzle.” (p. 27) This makes it difficult to access for any governing class.

Wells’ solution is “a new social organ, a new institution—which for a time I shall call World Encyclopaedia, is the means whereby we can solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding, and into effective reaction upon our vulgar everyday political, social and economic life.” (p. 27)

Wells was, of course, not the only person at the time to think that what was needed was to bring specialist knowledge together effectively. Most professional philosophers are aware of the effort put into The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which can trace its origin to the Vienna Circle and first published Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Because I dabble in the history of economics, I am also familiar with the ambitious Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Both encyclopedias had already started publishing and had attracted non-trivial intellectual and financial support. (Neither is mentioned by Wells in World Brain).

I mention the two encyclopedia projects because clearly Wells’ diagnosis and proposed remedy are not unique to him, even if Wells’ plans are even more ambitious than the two aforementioned encyclopedia projects. Contemporary theorists of the internet trace their ideas back to his plans:

As the core of such an institution would be a world synthesis of bibliography and documentation with the indexed archives of the world. A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date. (Wells (1937) “THE IDEA OF A PERMANENT WORLD ENCYCLOPAEDIA,” p. 75)

Even assuming that the hyper-specialist knowledge can be successfully centrally archived and indexed it does not follow it is actionable, and can be recognized as such when it is needed (in real time). Wells must have felt the objection because he thinks that such a world encyclopedia can be the basis of a shared ideology that makes conflict dispensable (and so lowers the urgency of some knowledge).

About that another time more. Needless to say that the post world war II think tanks and scientific advisors to government have not solved the problem that Wells diagnosed. It’s an open question whether that’s due to the demand-side (governments are not asking for the right knowledge) or the supply-side (there are inherent limitations to modern science) or the mediation efforts between the two. The previous sentence is compatible with the idea that we have more skillful and better guided by knowledge government than the mid 1930s.

After the pandemic I am not so sure. Vaccine development and distribution was a great marvel of our time. The rest was underwhelming.

That the response to the pandemic was so mediocre is not wholly surprising. One oddity of our age is that where we have global knowledge (say about climate change) we find it so difficult to act on it (often treated as a collective action problem). Perhaps this is an instance of a more disturbing oddity that those societies with incredibly massive research universities seem to govern themselves without much skill since, say, the great financial recession. (Obviously, the great financial recession itself may also be evidence for the absence of skill prior to 2007-9.) In addition, while I don’t think things are as bad as 1936 globally, there is a non-negligible risk that we will sleepwalk into a great power war: “World military expenditure increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023, reaching a total of $2443 billion. The 6.8 per cent increase in 2023 was the steepest year-on-year rise since 2009 and pushed global spending to the highest level SIPRI has ever recorded.”

Perhaps the previous paragraph exhibits myopic expectations. Maybe it’s just a feature that the growth of science has outpaced what we can do with it. Back in 1978, when Foucault was in Japan, he remarked the following in an interview with M. Watanabe, April 2, 1978, (in Sekai, July 1978, pp. 312–332):

I think that knowledge in our societies has become something so vast and complex that it is in fact becoming the unconscious of our societies. We don’t know what we know, we don’t know what the different effects of knowledge are. —Translated by Alexia Trigo

As I have noted, on 1 February 1978 during the fourth lecture of his Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978, Foucault introduces his interest in the ‘art of government’ as an actor’s category when he discussed raison d’État, cameralism, and mercantilism. So, by April 2, Foucault had just spent two months lecturing on the history of the ‘art of government.’ The following year, he was going to lecture on how liberalism and neo-liberalism handle this very problem.

However, in the Spring of 1978, he proposes a ‘solution’ in his own voice in the next sentence: “so it seems to me that the intellectual can have the role of transforming this unconscious knowledge that rules over our society into something conscious.” (Translated by Alexia Trigo)

Importantly, for Foucault this intellectual is not (as Watanabe correctly diagnoses) the “universal” one, but a more “specific” kind. Foucault is recorded as saying,

There are things happening now in the organization of health, in censorship, in the liberation of sexuality, the environment or ecology. There’s a whole series of events where I think the intellectual is competent; the atomic physicist, the biologist for the environment, the doctor for medicine have to intervene to help us understand what’s going on, to diagnose it, to predict the dangers, and not simply to make a systematic, unconditional, global judgment.—Translated by Alexia Trigo

Foucault here is echoing Michael Polanyi’s emphasis on specialist "influentials." (See, especially, (1941) “The Growth of Thought in Society” Economica, p 441ff.) Influentials mediate between the self-governing intermediary societies that have a complex inward-looking dynamic and a complex outward-looking dynamic (recall); and also here). Since Polanyi discusses this in The Logic of Liberty (a text we know Foucault read (see here some of his annotations) presumably in preparation of the 1979 lectures), it’s not wholly impossible Foucault is, in fact, inspired by Polanyi (although perhaps just converging with him).

Of course, it is not obvious that solving the intermediation problem is sufficient to tackle the problem diagnosed by Wells. For, how to select and how to know which specific intellectual or influential to listen to, and then, how to turn their “warnings” into collective agency remain to be resolved. Wells himself noted that the diagnosis of this set of problems goes back to Plato, and I agree with him as I shall argue in London this Monday.

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*As an aside, Wells’ high estimation of the “socially organised professions” anticipates Michael Polanyi’s alertness to their significance as a bulwark against fascism.