Three levels of knowledge for lasting prosperity
Knowledge is the key reason why humans distanced themselves from nature and built an artificial society. Knowledge (or intelligence) is of three sorts:
1. innate knowledge,
2. technical knowledge,
3. moral knowledge.
Innate knowledge originates from nature through the interweaving of diverse strands of life. Knowledge increments take place very slowly, coming from the genetic potential of past generations interacting with the environment. Innate knowledge is expressed instinctively and ensures the survival of species. Birds fly, fish swim, rabbits run — one life feeds on another. The swirling of living structures follows natural laws and weaves them into varied, constantly changing patterns.
If an animal is unable to enact its innate knowledge adequately, it won’t survive. A fish that doesn’t swim well will soon end up as food.
Humans have innate knowledge too. Such knowledge creates a strong foundation for all other knowledge. Innate knowledge is the basis of knowledge, but it is also whimsical, unpredictable, and impulsive if you don’t upgrade it with technical knowledge.
Technical knowledge arises from the extra intelligence and the capacity for self-reflection that separates humans from other species. At first, the increase in technical knowledge has been slow — much faster than in the case of innate knowledge, but still slow. As small communities grew into civilizations, technical knowledge began to increase exponentially.
Without technical knowledge, there would be no ingenious musicians, painters, sculptors, mathematicians, craftsmen, cooks, etc. It enables them to assess and predict hundreds of details particular to their field of expertise and, most importantly, they’re masters of consistent repetition.
Innovating and repeating create an interplay. An invention’s greatest value is exhibited when it’s universal; when everyone can use it and reach a predictable result; when it can be repeated consistently. Technical knowledge is at the heart of all scientific progress, but on the other hand, it is cold, impersonal, mechanical, and heartless if it’s not accompanied by moral knowledge.
Moral knowledge recognizes the relationship between people and their environment and sets constraints to innate and especially to technical knowledge, using qualifiers, such as good/bad, right/wrong, acceptable/unacceptable, allowed/prohibited, etc.
In every single society, setting constraints is partially rigid and partially flexible, thus determining the always-changing boundaries of the entire culture. As technical knowledge advances, new possibilities stretch the old constraints, often leading to cultural collisions, wars, and increased extraction from ecosystems.
Moral knowledge is not automatically good, it’s always relative. The way it sets constraints is limited by cultural biases. At one point, a society may justify genocide and even encourage it, but at another point, it may seek reconciliation at new boundaries between maturing cultures. The threat of global destruction is the ultimate moral motivator, especially the threat of self-destruction.
Between the extremes of self-destruction and self-preservation, you may notice moral knowledge at every step, for it sets constraints to various technological inventions. While in the past, moral knowledge defined the identity of various cultures uniquely, globalization has made it unavoidable to try to respond to moral questions universaly.
The interplay between technical and moral
Moral knowledge keeps an eye on the harms that may come as side effects of new technical inventions and tries to set constraints on how we use them. I stressed “tries to” as it’s extremely hard to enforce limitations when a new promising technology emerges. Think about dynamite, DDT, asbestos, internal combustion engines, plastic bags, nuclear energy… Initially, it was hard to imagine how hazardous they will turn out to be.
All instructions for use (especially the warnings written in bold) fit in the category of moral knowledge. Other examples are the behavioral norms, laws, regulations, statutes, provisions, orders, standards, religious commandments.
As ancient systems of technology and morality keep fading away, many cultures are under immense pressure to give up their well-tested moral knowledge and replace it with some modern, global version of morality. The wise elders have good reasons to be suspicious of the ultra-rapid and uncontrolled technological development, but they don’t have the appropriate moral knowledge to constrain it.
Moral knowledge is clumsy and it reacts slowly. One part of it remains stuck in backward cultural traditions, while another is lured by the promise of technological advancement and prosperity. Go to Abu Dhabi, Bengaluru, Rome, Cairo, or Kyiv, and you’ll see both these forces in action in a very strange fusion of the old and the new. If you look carefully, you can see it everywhere.
Moral knowledge cannot keep pace with the whoosh of technological progress. It’s easy to take advantage of moral knowledge, as it depends on how it is interpreted. On the basis of one and the same religious morality, one person may kill, and the other save lives.
Levels of a knife
Let me illustrate all three forms of knowledge through the use of a knife.
At the level of innate knowledge, you use a knife pretty much as a claw, as an extension of your body. You’re not savvy at all, relying on the same “techniques” whether you dig a hole or stab an animal.
At the level of technical knowledge, you use the knife with skill. You may be a chef chopping an onion finely in five seconds, an artist carving a statue from wood, or a mercenary skillfully murdering a man. The skill doesn’t only change how you use the knife, you’ll change the knife itself to serve you better.
At the third level, the knife becomes a symbol. That symbol tells you to use any weapon within a specific framework. A knife emblem may remind members of an indigenous tribe to hunt only with cold weapons, thus constraining how many animals they can catch. In war, a symbol of a knife may mean that the aggressor must be stopped without mercy. In an extreme case, such a symbol can be used to incite ethnic cleansing. It can be a symbol of precision for a ham business because customers adore perfectly sliced ham. Or it may serve as a reminder to descendants of war victims that violence leads to suffering and should, therefore, be avoided.
Moral knowledge determines in which directions you close or open the constraints of your behavior.
Harmonizing levels of knowledge
In recent centuries, technical knowledge has exploded. The antiquated moral knowledge lags behind by centuries. The consequence is a wound in the environment, and the inadequacy of moral levers: laws, regulations, norms, etc. Just look at the impotence of climate negotiations.
Innate knowledge, when that’s the only knowledge you have, needs no constraints, because nature itself takes care of it. Technical knowledge, on the other hand, urgently needs to be constrained lest it becomes cancerous and self-destructive.
The larger the group of people involved in the chain of activities, the greater the cumulative impact of their knowledge. When a group of 70 or 7000 people gathers resources from nature — with very few tools and machines — it won’t do much harm. However, when 7 billion people unite, relying on millennia of their ancestors’ inventions, and when they start extracting raw materials with gargantuan machines, while their bosses are intoxicated with power, then the environment will end up under immense pressure.
Thus we come to the central idea of this article: Technical knowledge needs adequate moral knowledge to constrain it. It’s impossible to regulate modern technology with morality from two thousand years ago.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
- Isaac Asimov
The dominance of technical knowledge is evident from the way it dominates school curricula, while moral and innate knowledge are marginalized as inferior or relative. The school system tries to keep up with new developments in the field of technical knowledge, but there’s no attention to innate knowledge, while moral knowledge is patched together from ancient ethics and laws without being in touch with real life and nature. It is important to note that good moral knowledge does not reject technical knowledge, it actually channels it to perform useful services and minimize collateral damage.
The solution is neither suppression of technical knowledge (a return to the primordial “paradise” when humans only had innate knowledge) nor extremely rigid morality (prohibiting technical knowledge with coercive structures). The solution is to get down to the heart of all three types of knowledge.
What’s the benefit of knowledge?
In the case of innate knowledge, it is essential to ask: What is biologically right and natural for humans? The innate knowledge contains the capacities of survival, procreation, self-affirmation, healing, and elementary satisfaction.
At the level of technical knowledge, the key question is: What does an invention facilitate and how?
Throughout human history, an important function of technical knowledge was protection from the crude forces of nature, securing provisions, defeating foes, and conquering new territories. In it, we look for efficiency, we aim to make our lives easier, richer, healthier, to have fun, and expand our knowledge for its own sake.
Technical knowledge about things (managing “natural resources”), enhanced by technical knowledge about human groups (managing “human resources”) leads to some powerful individuals (chiefs, rulers, bosses) using people as chess pieces to fight against other powerful individuals’ chess pieces. Tribes grew into kingdoms, countries, and corporations.
The power, stemming from technical knowledge, became an end in itself, detached from any other purpose. It doesn’t make our lives easier nor is it fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
We should ask ourselves; to what extent does technical knowledge still increase efficiency? Does it really simplify and enrich our lives? Does it enable learning and deep satisfaction? Does it consider all people equally? Not only the end-user of a product, but also the miner in Africa, the factory worker in China, the Ukrainian technician on an ocean liner, the Turkish trucker who brings the product to the mall, and the local saleswoman sitting at the cash register, and listening all day to peep, peep, peep, peep…
True learning never loses touch with simplicity. Wise people see how much suffering comes from complicating life and they keep their lives as simple as possible. That’s the spiritual dimension of moral knowledge.
A key challenge for the whole of humanity today is bringing all three levels of knowledge in alignment. Technical knowledge has to join hands with innate and moral knowledge to facilitate humanity’s sustainable and lasting prosperity. All that moral knowledge has to do then is to apply the K.I.S.S. principle: “Keep it simple, stupid!”