Knowledge

Knowledge is power

Historians attribute the phrase ‘knowledge is power’ to the philosopher and statesman, Sir Francis Bacon, overlooking the inconvenient truth that these exact words appear nowhere in the great man’s work.

Bacon’s approach to the acquisition of knowledge through observation, induction, and interpretation, with a healthy dose of scepticism thrown to stop us getting carried away with spurious ideas, remains the backbone of the scientific method. Much of what we understand about the world has been gleaned through the thought process pioneered by Bacon five centuries ago.

Early attempts to collect knowledge in one place date back even further. The first libraries appeared 5,000 years ago in that part of South West Asia described as the cradle of civilisation, roughly centred on what is the modern-day border between Iraq and Syria. Libraries remained a privilege of the wealthy and the powerful until well into the 19th Century when the push for ‘public libraries’ gathered momentum. Slowly knowledge, and ultimately power, began to trickle down to ordinary working people in the rapidly developing economies that grew from the industrial revolution.

‘Libraries gave us power…’, the opening line of ‘Design for Life’, the signature song of the Welsh rock band, Manic Street Preachers’ captures the sentiment perfectly.

Today the Internet has displaced the role of the public library as a ready source of knowledge for ordinary people, but there’s a snag.  Good libraries need good librarians.  There are no librarians on the Internet.  Search engines do not differentiate between good and bad data, or between useful learning and myth. Fake news is a phenomenon of the modern age.

Cogent Content holds a passionate belief in useful learning. Here we have curated a selection of our favourite information sources, policy papers, news sites, good reads and other stuff that makes us think.