Getting to “I Don’t Know”

From Father Knows Best to Mother Knows Sex, being in the know keeps us searching for the digital grail.  We study, memorize and measure our accumulated tidbits from pre-school to Phd and beyond.  The more erudition in our cerebral athenaeum, the higher it seems our esteemed albeit imaginary self.  The egoic mind is all about data mining and in this case size categorically matters.

But in our overloaded Wikipedia pastiche culture, I wonder if we haven’t sacrificed innate wisdom and natural curiosity for Google-news-bytes and revisionist propaganda.  How many times has our science books changed since we were in school?  Not to mention how many politically corrected versions of historical events have been edited (or removed entirely) over the years.  What I learned as fact back in the 1960’s and 70’s has been disproved, overturned, augmented, refined or thrown out entirely in order to shape the new world view.

At any given time, all we know is based on the limited information within our reach.  Yet, we still stand as if on solid ground insisting or refuting what passes for our reality in any given moment.

The age of information brings the illusion of fact or fiction to our fingertips … Google-it! has become a call to arms so common in our conversation that we now place a higher value on our search-engine than on our social network including our doctors, lawyers, politicians and Nobel laureates.

I consider myself among the data warehouse workers, spending most of my time trying to learn as much as I can and when I’m not actively in pursuit of Incipit Vita Nova, I am hammering after my kids to do their homework.  But admittedly I do both with just a little less enthusiasm and appreciably less fulfillment than before.  What once seemed important to remember, adjudicate, or extol now appears empty and void of meaning.  Long gone are the days when I believed with conviction the content of my own stories.  I can’t say that I have come to be curious, but I have come to understand that there is very little that I really do know for certain.  And in this place of not knowing, there seems to be a combination of trepidation and freedom in just watching what comes next.