Knowledge Is Powerless The Catholic Thing

By David Warren
But first a note from Robert Royal: I'm extremely grateful to everyone who responded to the first day of our mid-year fundraising yesterday. Thanks to every one of you for your commitment and generosity. I wish I could respond to each of you individually but numbers make that impossible. We received donations from every state in the union and foreign countries from New Zealand to Ireland to the Czech Republic. One donor was kind enough to say, "Thanks for holding true to our Catholic values. It's getting difficult to find that anymore."
Yet the phrase, or some near variant, may be found in the Hebrew Book of Proverbs, and here and there over the many intervening centuries. The difference was that Bacon, and his secretary, Hobbes, used it like thugs. They meant political power - the power over others. They did not mean the power to fuel virtue.
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That "information" is power was a decisive step down, into mediocrity. It seems to have come about when the generations of advertising salesmen co-opted the phrase, and began using it in their promotions.
Now for today's column...
Scientia potentia est - "Knowledge is power" - was launched upon the world by Francis Bacon, and entered flight with Thomas Hobbes. The phrase was among the watchwords of the new, post-Catholic, "scientific" order, or "Reformation" as its exponents came to call themselves. They had a new, nominalist, appreciation of technology.
"Information is power" was among the clichés by which my little mind was poisoned, when I was very young. This was towards the end of the 1960s, and for a few years thereafter. Even today, I still hear it - this deathless cliche - though often from a speaker who is trying to be droll.
I will concede some specialized application. When a piece of information is discovered, that can serve as blackmail bait, I must allow that the knowledge has potential power. If the victim is Christian, however, he may refuse to pay, to save the blackmailer from Hell - making the knowledge useless.
The contrary assertion, that "power is information," usefully reveals the essential nonsense in the phrase. These are two things located on different planes, and the "THIS is THAT" does not work, even metaphorically - except in the Blakean sense, that when you have power over someone, he knows you.
My own first attempt at defending myself against the cliché was to ask, in a high school class of all places, a simple question of the teacher who used the phrase: "Does it make any difference if the information is true?"
(I was then accused of being a smart-aleck, and had to explain that I wasn't being one, for a change. For I had recently learnt that Socrates was NOT a know-it-all.)
In my subsequent thinking on the topic, I realized that the truth didn't matter to the user of such a phrase; and moreover, that it still doesn't matter to his kind. For, like any glib statement, it only matters that a truth-alleging noise be uttered, which will evaporate before it can be examined.
The relation between "information" and "truth" is an irrelevance except for those who take life seriously. To those who do, however, it is a source of vexation.
The "big lie" (which has now become a popular phrase among little liars) would "theoretically" work as well, as any truthful information, but only if those who hear the "big lie" let it pass by. This they may do from fear of punishme