“The biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press,” says cultural critic Ted Gioia. It’s a shift on the scale of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In such movements, “the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place.”
This new cultural phase doesn’t have a name yet. So Gioia says, “Let’s call it The Collapse of the Knowledge System.”
The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once. If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case. The crisis has spread into every sector of society that relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.
(1) Scientific studies don’t replicate. Gioia points out that 40% or more of published scientific research cannot be replicated by other researchers. By the canons of the scientific method, that means they are invalid. Not only that, according to a study he links to, non-replicable research is cited 153 times more often than verifiable scientific research, reportedly because the phony findings are more interesting than valid findings!
(2) Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before. What with what we were told about COVID, the constantly changing pronouncements about what is good for us and what isn’t, the flagrant bias of academia, and the conflicting messages of our online authorities (my examples), people just don’t trust the professional class of experts. Gioia observes,
The only experts who still possess authority are blue-collar ones. The public still wants to hire the best plumber or car mechanic or hair stylist, and will pay more if these workers have established a reputation for expertise. But the expertise of white-collar professionals is derided at every turn.
(3) The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many have only unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation. We blogged about this in this week’s Monday Miscellany, with our item entitled, “Unemployment Rate for Computer Engineering Grads Is Double That of Art History Majors.”
(4) Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector. This is not just a matter of the Trump administration cutting grants to woke universities. It is happening more broadly. Private funding sources for scientific research is also drying up. Observes Gioia, “Even the huge corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists.” But science and technology require ongoing research.
(5) Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies. As tuition soars, the value of a degree plummets. And all sides of the general public are angry at universities, with their bloated bureaucracies, elitist attitudes, self-serving curricula, and indifference to students.
(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels, from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard’s president. But the authorities just take it for granted. “A healthy knowledge system requires honesty and accountability, and not long ago this was taken for granted,” observes Gioia. “But plagiarism is now everywhere and taken for granted.”
(7) AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted. “The people running the knowledge system complacently accept all the deceit, lies, and hallucinations. They do so without any ethical qualms or even anxiety.” The public recognizes this irresponsibility of the experts who control this new knowledge system. Thus,” the very speed and intensity with which new tech is implemented actually accelerates the collapse of the entire knowledge hierarchy.”
(8) Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve. Gioia gives an abundance of examples that we could all no doubt come up with ourselves.
(9) Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, Covid, etc.). “Tech start-ups were once admired, praised, and emulated. But they are now treated with intense scrutiny and skepticism. There have been too many scandals, too many frauds, too many cover-ups. These are so common that the media hardly even reports on them anymore. . . .But nobody is shocked anymore. [The public] lost trust in knowledge tech industries long ago.”
(10) We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science.” Gioia uses a Google word frequency graph to show that the phrase “fake science,” which we now hear all the time and all sides use it against each other, didn’t really exist until the 21st century. In the 20th century and before that, if information was “fake,” it wasn’t science. “In those days, science was considered emblematic of truth.”
But when the knowledge structure collapses, science loses its privileged access to truth. At the final stage, it gets harder and harder to distinguish science from propaganda. We are now living in that nightmare scenario.
Let me add a few items to this “nightmare scenario” of the collapse of our knowledge scenario:
—The failure of our public schools. Gioia thinks our higher education as practiced in our leading universities is bad, and he is right. But our primary and secondary education, as practiced in our public school system, is far worse and impacts a broader sector of our population. In many cities and communities, despite a huge, expensive, and entrenched educational establishment, children are just not getting educated.
—The dead end of contemporary thought. If truth is relative, knowledge is impossible. If the true, the good, and the beautiful are nothing more than impositions of power on the part of the privileged class in order to oppress marginalized groups, the only meaningful pursuit is politics, by which your group can seize power so that it can oppress the former oppressors. These principles explain why the whole range of our educational institutions has replaced the acquisition of knowledge with political indoctrination. Such axioms of contemporary thought–which have been busy challenging and subverting our traditional knowledge system– are intellectual, moral, and aesthetic dead ends.
—“True science” is leading to less understanding rather than more. There is, in fact, true science as well as fake science, which is making huge advances. But what quantum physics is disclosing about nature is that reality is far more complex, mysterious, and unfathomable than Enlightenment-era rationalism and materialism ever expected. This is not a fault of our knowledge system but a demonstration that our former assumptions about the explanatory power of science was naive and incomplete. We are in need of a larger worldview.
So is Gioia right, that our knowledge system is collapsing? If he is, what comes next? Let’s talk about that tomorrow.
Publicity photo of Ted Gioia by Dave Shafer via the Ted Gioia website. “This photo can be used for media and publicity purposes.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In