Peace Fiction Series: The Knowledge Society
By: Sumeyye Kocaman
Tags: Society, Bias, Knowledge, Subconscious, Peace

Is it possible to have a society where the ability of distilling the knowledge by the discerning critical thinking hearts travels horizontally and vertically cutting through the class and age difference? What would a society where the terms coined by scholars does not stay within the boundaries of the universities look like? No, I am not talking a parrot society talking about the terms like a dictionary, but rather a society where the flow of thought is active. Had we had a social culture of examining terms and words that we use in our daily life or hear around, would the spread of ignorance be this prevalent or populism would find a ground to flourish? I imagine and hope and dream, not.

Had we had the channels to make the words in quotidian life flow, the air they would breath, we would have had masses that can lay out their thoughts as an architect lying the plan of a new or existing project to analyse if everything is in order, if it still makes sense, and if there is a caveat. Had we had a chance to teach such thinking early in schools in a way that new generations would test the time, space, and the historical context of the words and term they hear, say, or encounter, we would have a thinking that is more critical, self-aware, and self-confident, and open to challenge their thoughts and words, develop a discerning eye between sentiments attired in the cloak of thoughts and theories, evaluate and update their inner and subconscious thoughts.

It is not as complicated as it may have sounded. The road to build a knowledge society has a simple recipe: to teach the young minds that we humans are like the fish in the sea, we are surrounded by time and space. What we know now, comes from the recent tides, carried through the most recent words and vocabulary (the modern, the most modern, the post-modern?). However, words are like immigrants. They immigrate, acculturate, sometime assimilate but regardless, change over time in the context of their new homes, the new generations. Like the words, we change many times over of life span, and the same word means many different things to an individual. This raises some awareness that at the zenith of our youth, we assume we know the all, thus we follow create and spread populist images of words and their meaning, thinking that we are synchronised wit our ‘more’ modern times. Yet, it happens in each generation. Each, assumes to be modern, in a word they define, and each is being diagnosed with the popular culture of their times, in fashion, music, food, vocabulary, in the taste of consumption as much as production.

The point is we and our words have limits. We are the fish in an ocean, a sea, a lake, a Meer, a fish tank. We live in time and space, breath the zeitgeist, influence and influenced by the thinking modes in the age we are born, the questions we ask and responses we produce reflect our context. But there is a space of negating all, and it may be attained by practicing critical thinking as much as we can achieve as individuals or a series of thinkers, intellectuals, journos, scholars, and the wisest of all, the children with their philosopher brains and untouched and undestroyed hearts.

Not even every scientist or poet able to cut through the time space barriers and see beyond, but that should be our goal. We shall aim to see the paradigms beyond our times, maybe by taking lessons from how the history has been constructed, narrated, and written and how that applies to our narrative of how we see things now. Learning and knowledge seeking is indeed a part of the infinite journey each human sets in their inner lives. Thus, we need to be humble to know that it may not happen to us this time, but maybe the next day, or the day following. Sometimes what a person, a scientist, a poet sees and claim to be the latest of all, is the colour of their glasses, a piece of hair in front of the eye and not the colour of things or the light of a crescent moon in ultimate darkness.

So, dear reader, the society of knowledge, is composed of the constant seekers. The ones who are humble to know, that there is more to what we know, learn, see, got convinced, and concluded. It is not supposed to end, as knowledge is eternal. So, the knowledge society asks questions such as how to get to the next phase of encounter with the knowledge, when it feels like it is the end of the road. Why? Because, in the the knowledge society, what we know so far, is the end of the floor in the eternally layered edifice of knowledge and there is more. Thus, neither knowledge nor identity is set; thus no one can be defined or identified based on a limited idea or ideology. Yet, I stop here, since the walls built by political ideologies and their lack of in the knowledge society begets more space to explain itself.