The Post-Knowledge Society.

What we know, and how we know what we know.

“There is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offenses, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing. This second kind of ignorance, when possessed of power and strength, will be the source of great and monstrous crimes.”

Plato, Laws (Book IX, 863c–d).

I want to talk about what we know (knowledge), what knowledge is (epistemology) and how we know what we know (education). And to do all three I’m going to use my own experience (autobiography).

I was born in 1974. I went through the very standard British education system. I went to a comprehensive school, which are generally inferior to selective grammar schools. By the time I was being educated in the British state school system, there had already been a considerable destruction of our educational standards. Teachers were already predominantly leftist, heavily unionised, and themselves often ignorant of the subjects they were teaching.

My best teachers at secondary school were my History and English teachers. These were also the subjects that most interested me. I had an English teacher called Mrs Williamson who was the kind of teacher who appears in heartwarming movies about the impact an incredibly kind, engaged and inspiring teacher can have, who I will remember fondly to my dying day. Back then things were still formal enough that I never had any idea what her first name was or knew it so fleetingly that I’ve since forgotten it, even though she devoted a lot of time and effort towards me.

I don’t remember any teacher from my primary school years except for Mrs Rand, who seemed to hate me. Her son went to the school as well, and wore very pointed shoes. I knew how pointed those shoes were, because he once kicked me as hard as he could in the balls. I was probably 10 years old at the time. It was a genuine take a run up, full swing, put your whole body weight into it kick like an American football player (not soccer) or a British rugby player would make. At nursery level I was a year behind learning to read, and at primary schools I had a stubborn habit of completely refusing to do things I considered boring. One school did country dancing, which I loathed and considered a ‘girls thing’. I kicked a teacher who tried to physically force me to take part. At that school I mainly spent my time drawing sharks and monsters, and don’t remember learning anything. Presumably something happened, because I could read by the time I left.

The primary school where Mrs Rand was my teacher and my balls received a sharp lesson on the nature of bullying came after that and was in a quite posh village in the Essex countryside, which had a big park right next to it. I mainly recall we all used to play football with tennis balls on a concrete playground at lunchtime, or pretend to be members of the A Team (very popular on British TV at the time) jumping off a tiny ‘hill’ in the school grounds and running through a ‘wood’ that consisted of four trees. Both the hill (barely more than a two foot incline) and the ‘wood’ (those four trees) served as an imaginary, sprawling battlefield. Again, I don’t really remember learning anything from the teachers. The only things I especially liked were the school library and the times when we were given projects where we could pick the subjects we ‘studied’ and make a little booklet with cardboard covers stuck together with felt and glue and a few pages of writing. I did one on the history of boxing which included some information on the Ancient Greek Olympics. I was pleased that I found stories about boxers being killed with a single punch. The topic choice and this pleasure might have been partly inspired by thinking about what to do in response to my balls being kicked.

The library was a wonder of the world. It was an open plan school where each classroom sort of bled into the next with very few doors or corridors between them. The library was the only seperate and mysterious kingdom. It was on two levels. The bottom level was a sunken shadowy cave, below the level of the classrooms. It felt hidden and quietly sacred, like the cave of an oracle. The upper level was the opposite, but equally wonderful. It was reached by a wooden staircase with open air gaps between the stairs (somehow sophisticated and important) and had a waist high balustrade around it at the top but was bright and open and above the rest of the school, like a well lit watchtower. You could look down on the people in the classes, like Zeus observing mortals from Mount Olympus. Whenever you were allowed to go to the library it was freedom, because you weren’t being directly supervised.

At both primary and secondary school level the bulk of my learning did not come from school. The comprehensive school system taught history and culture inadequately and fitfully, with huge gaps in the periods covered and no chronological national narrative at all. Holst’s The Planets was played at the start of assemblies, and never mentioned in music classes. Music lessons didn’t teach us to read music. We played around with the automatic settings of a Casio electronic keyboard and were told about one song from 1892 (daisy, daisy, give me your answer do….) and Imagine by Lennon. We had a choir. We didn’t learn to play a single instrument. My singing was notably bad.

This was the story through most of it, across every subject. Geography lessons didn’t teach us the counties of England. We didn’t learn where any towns and cities were. We didn’t learn the capital cities of other nations. We didn’t learn where other nations were or ever look at a globe. We did get a lesson on permafrost. And another on clouds. We didn’t learn the geological ages or the Earth’s history.

History, within the way the curriculum was formed, was the worst. Mr Jones was bearded, sarcastic, and interesting, popular for his ability to offer cutting remarks that were quite funny. Mr McCloud was genial, affable, and primarily interested in talking about wine. The curriculum was the main problem.

A wise commentator recently pointed out what the British history curriculum primarily consists of. It can be summarised in one word.

Guilt.

We teach The Romans simply as ‘the greatest European civilisation was built on slavery’ and ‘the Celts lived in huts’. Both things degrade parts of Western European heritage.

We teach 1066 without having done much of anything on the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons are who the English are. We don’t learn about Alfred the Great. 1066 without that prior knowledge suggests that Europeans were more advanced because they conquered us. In reality, England was a prize because it was wealthy and advanced and well administered.

Then we jump to the Crusades, which are taught as ‘Muslims were far more advanced than Europeans and Europeans were primitive aggressors’. We miss out centuries of Muslim aggression and barbarian conquest of more advanced civilisations. We might also get ‘St George was a Palestinian’ in this segment of idiocy.

The Tudors (‘oppression of women’, nothing on Drake and Elizabethan heroes).

English Civil War (‘Monarchy and tradition is stupid, hold to any traditional view and it creates war’).

The Triangular Trade (‘slavery, nothing on Britain ending the international slave trade, white people committed the worst atrocities in history’).

The Industrial Revolution (‘grime, squalor, Victorian hypocrisies, have we told you about Climate Change yet’).

World War One (female rights leading up to the Suffragettes as heroines, patriotism and a culture of deference and nationalism leads to mass slaughter’).

The Nazis (‘nationalism is Nazism, white people have committed the worst atrocities in history’).

That’s pretty much it. You can take a Russian Revolution unit (‘no condemnation of Communism, no link to current Communism, no moral stain on leftism’) or a Wild West unit (‘stolen land, injustice to Native Americans, white people committed the worst atrocities in history’).

There’s no national narrative. No patriotic intent. No discussion of English liberty. No praise of English or British achievements, no national heroes, no Drake, no Nelson, no Alfred the Great, no Venerable Bede, no Gordon of Khartoum, no Wellington, no continuity, no chronology, no uniting theme, no pride or positivity.

And no Classics. No Greek. No Latin.

Very little Christianity. In my secondary school an RE teacher didn’t know the difference between the Roman names for Greek gods and the Greek ones. Nobody left school having read the Bible or become familiar with it. Thankfully my schooling took place before three quarters of the RE teaching became ‘The Wonders of Islam’. But neglect of Christianity and ignorance of Classicism was already there.

Despite one great teacher, and a smattering of good ones, school was not where I did the bulk of my learning.

The bulk of my learning came from both my parents reading for pleasure habitually and passing that to me. From talking to them and learning from them. And from being a self-taught geek who at the age of 9 discovered authors like Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliffe and Roger Lancelyn Green and at the age of 10 was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons which taught me more real world mythology and history and love of knowledge, learning and imaginative educational discovery then the formal school curriculum ever did.

At 13 I read everything by Arthur Conan Doyle in a few weeks.

Between 10 and 30 I was a voracious reader with eclectic tastes picking up broad and odd knowledge independently (I’m much lazier now).

This gives me far more real knowledge than is usual in our society today. And far more than is possessed by most teachers or journalists or politicians. I don’t excel at pub quizzes or TV quiz shows (because many of the topics are contemporary trivia). I am very poor at many skills and that hurts in a ‘skills economy’ (I have the general computing skills of an octogenarian Luddite).

But if you want knowledge of real things from past culture and a fair chance of a person simultaneously knowing the name of Odin’s horse and who deciphered the Rosetta Stone while having read everything that survives from Suetonius, Edgar Allan Poe and Philip K.Dick, that’s me. If you want a reference based on actual knowledge referring to The Cloud of Unkmowing next to one based on the films of Tony Hancock, that’s me.

This isn’t boasting.

I have huge gaps in my knowledge. I can’t read or write Greek or Latin. Anglo-Saxon schoolboys could. I have no foreign languages at all. If you were well educated through most of Western Civilisation you’d be fluent in 2-8 languages. The general standard of the presentation of an argument by the most obtuse of 19th century journalists or politicians is better than that of almost anyone writing today, including myself. If you look at what privately educated children of the 18th or 19th century could produce, as well constructed and composed pieces of writing or as musical accomplishments or as natural history sketches, drawings and descriptions, it often exceeds that which professional adults in related fields produce today.

11 years olds in 1900 were passing maths tests where most of us today (including myself) if the same paper were handed to us, could not comprehend the questions, let alone answer them.

It was bad when I was a child. It’s a lot worse today as a 52 year old looking at education, media and entertainment and wondering if my generation were the last to have any hope of knowing anything.

Technology speeds the degeneration of our intellectual capacities and our real knowledge base as individuals. University students are ignorant and dishonest enough to hand in purchased essays or AI generated essays. Their teachers are too ignorant to spot that these answers are computer generated. Ideological insanity is so dominant in the humanities, and the peer review process so corrupted in the sciences, that spoofs and intentional mockeries, from people who at least retain enough awareness to know how idiotic the whole thing has become, are published, unknowingly, in esteemed and respectable publications.

Half the content of The Lancet is self-admitted nonsense, and all the content of an average Western university syllabus is too.

We sneer at Medieval scholars for discussing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. They memorised entire books line for line and produced beautiful manuscripts and were routinely fluent in multiple languages. None of us can build a cathedral. We have enormously improved technology and produce vastly inferior buildings even when those buildings are supposed to be modern marvels with great investment in them. The unknown 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing was a much superior philosopher and thinker to a Derrida, a Foucault, or any postmodernist. There’s more wisdom in Boethius (early 6th century, On The Consolation of Philosophy) than in 10,000 modern books of popular pop psychology, motivational literature, New Age waffle, or self-help charlatanism.

The culture of the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Arena) has no right to sneer at the culture of Westminster Abbey. The culture of Obama’s Library has no right to sneer at the culrure of Monticello. The culture of Barack Obama and Mamdani has no right sneer at the culture of Washington and Jefferson. The culture of Tony Blair, Ed Davey, and Keir Starmer has no right to sneer at Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli. Richard Dawkins is a considerable reduction from Charles Darwin, and Alastair Campbell was a reduction from Francis Walsingham that would make one suppose we are speaking of an entirely different species of mammal. Isaac Newton was rather more significant and intelligent than Neil DeGrasse Tyson is.

And yet still we sneer at the past. The greatest thinkers of our past approached their past with humility. Bernard of Chartres coined the phrase “a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants” in the 12th century when referring to the thinkers of his age compared to the Ancients. The Ancient Greeks who far surpassed the Ancient Egyptians in many fields were respectful towards Egyptian antiquity and achievement. Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants when writing to Robert Hooke in 1676. The poet George Herbert said “a dwarf on a giant’s shoulder sees further of the two”. The Romans admired the Greeks. The Greeks believed in a lost Golden Age. Plato admired Socrates, and Aristotle admired Plato.

The Neo-Classical movement produced beauriful buildings emulating the Classical World. The Pre-Raphaelites looked to an older artistic tradition. The Victorians looked to old codes of chivalry and to Medieval and Biblical stories for inspiration. The artistic conflagration of the Renaissance was fanned by a flame carried from Constantinople.

Today, our ‘greatest director’ says that we have far too much respect for the past, and he wanted to change that.

We are the people who know nothing and respect nothing.

We are the people who call a line like “our age of Bronze is ending” put in the mouth of a Bronze Age character, a line of such stunning stupidity that Mel Brooks just fifty years ago would have written it cleverly in a spoof, part of a masterpiece.

The British comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did a spoof sketch on the historical epic films of the 1960s. They had the characters using modern thoughts and language, but with scattered “hey nonnies” and histrionic delivery supposedly evoking the Tudor Age. They had the director going on long walks with his dogs and smoking a pipe as ‘proof’ of his agonised wrestling with creativity and his intellectualism. They had the writer weighing the script on a scale to judge whether it was good enough. It was all hysteria and pomposity and self-regard failing to disguise ignorance and hackery.

But the 1960s historical epics were spectacularly good compared to what is delivered today. The 1960s and 1970s comics had a much smarter appreciation of what makes things absurd than the acclaimed directors and critics of 2026 possess.

Mel Brooks could have written Nolan’s Odyssey, but he would never have been dumb enough to think it was serious. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore predicted Christopher Nolan.

We are the people who don’t learn the Classics at school, and haven’t since the 1960s. We are the people who only speak one language, and reduce that to a clunkingly retarded travesty stripped of metaphor, allusion, poetry, eloquence and subordinate clauses.

The ‘lol’ and ‘whatever, dude’ generation now have their historical epic. The people who outsourced their thinking to modern totalitarian ideologies and who never learned anything real and never read independently, the people whose knowledge is on the Cloud rather than in their own heads, now determine what is and isn’t a masterpiece.

And they create a thing which has a director saying he wants to appeal “to emotion, not intellect”. They produce a thing which decides that the language of the 15 year old who has never read a book is the language appropriate to a historical epic set in the Bronze Age of Greece. It’s not just a modern idiom, it’s the modern idiom of the least knowledgeable generation for the last two and a half thousand years.

Information rich, surrounded by technological glories that should make knowledge instantly accessible, but devoid of the patience or wit to look for it, care about it, respect it or retain it. Every one of us has access to many more texts in an instant than the Library of Alexandria held. We can easily have 1,000 books on a phone.

And yet we have scripts produced now where the characters have to shout what they are doing in the dumbest possible way for the dumbest possible director and the dumbest possible audience to ‘know’ what is happening. “Come on!” yells the Greek hero, just a whisper away from landing on a shore with a “Let’s Roll!”. “You’re pining for a daddy…” says the Greek villain, with more insanely inappropriate idiom and more fantastically stupid exposition.

Knowledge is more out there, and less in us, than ever before.

Our minds are in the Cloud, but far from Heaven. Our masterpieces are spoofs unaware of it. Our buildings are deliberately ugly. We have never had so much knowledge at our fingertips, and so little knowledge in our heads.

We are not only a post-knowledge society, we are a society in which ignorance is celebrated and knowledge is a furtive or despised rebellion, where knowing what intelligent and profound dialogue is, or knowing anything at all about our ancestors, is the thing to be mocked.

All this is the end point of 80 years of leftwing control of education, technological developments that outsource knowledge, and ideological developments that despise true knowledge.

My readers are no doubt bored of how much I’ve been referencing the Odyssey in the last four or five articles. But it’s so huge an example of the Idiocracy we are in, and that idiocy is the determinant of all of our political woes even more than corruption and networks of malign influence are. Idiocracy, by the way, was itself idiotic. It correctly identified cultural decline and IQ decline. But it was extraordinarily dumb regarding who to blame. The film’s corporate targets were a tired unthinking cliche of all dystopic satire. The writer, director and producer (Mike Judge) and the co-writer Etan Cohen both unthinkingly assumed that a dumber society would be a more capitalist society (rather than lowered IQ making Communism more attractive, which is the more prevalent real-world outcome). Both showed themselves personally incapable of escaping the received opinion idiocies of their class, and both stated that Trump Presidencies prove that the US is an Idiocracy already (but would never recognise that the careers of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris prove it, or that Nolan’s Odyssey proves it).

In other words Idiocracy got the symptoms right and the causes wrong because it is ALSO an artefact of the Age of Idiocy. It too possesses the learned stupidity of the general culture. It’s blind to the way experts can be idiots, or technocrats and administrators are, and that intellectuals are often the very dumbest people of all and hardly an escape from the general decline. It doesn’t understand that anti-intellectualism is smart when the intellectuals are dumb.

You need that pervasive cultural stupidity (that’s in the Idiocracy that produces Idiocracy) for the political malignancies to work. The body must already be weak before the tumour has a hold on the mind of modern man as well as the outer limbs.