Once upon a time there was an era in which knowledge was increasing at such a rapid rate that the average citizen could not keep up. And in this era there was a learned man who, in an effort to explain the circumstance, pointed at the recent proliferation and seeming necessity of knowledge outlines and summaries from which the average literate citizen could better connect with deeper thought. This thinker / writer observed that “human knowledge had become unmanageably vast.” And he further described this diabolical challenge saying,

“The gap between life and knowledge grew wider and wider; those who governed could not understand those who thought, and those who wanted to know could not understand those who knew. In the midst of unprecedented learning, popular ignorance flourished and chose its exemplars to rule the great cities of the world; in the midst of sciences endowed and enthroned as never before, new religions were born every day and old superstitions recaptured the ground they had lost. The common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.”

Now this man could be describing Google and Wikipedia and our belief today that we are all experts and have no need for bona-fide authentic experts or deeper thinking. And this man could be describing our government and our rulers and our superstitions and our feeble, uninformed hopes. But this man did not write these words yesterday, nor even ten years ago. This man who was called Will Durant spewed this wisdom in a far-flung era more than 80 years ago. These words are from the preface to his 1943 edition of “The Story of Philosophy” and I interpret his remarks (as he meant them for his contemporaries) as an encouragement for the average, literate citizen to attain a base knowledge by using the aforementioned outlines and summaries of knowledge and to thoughtfully connect with and listen to expertise to make better, more well-informed decisions. And though this interpretation, (as the moral of a good story often does), also applies to our time and place, in addition Mr. Durant could be describing our increasing ignorance today as an entrenchment and he could be foreseeing our certainty as a threat to our survival as a species.

We could go on to suggest further prescience by recognizing that this gap he describes between life and knowledge has spawned other gaps that also continue to grow wider and wider: the wealth gap – the income gap – the opportunity gap – the health and well-being gap – the gender-pay gap - the housing gap – the education gap – the healthcare gap – the childcare gap – and then there is the exponential impact of the perpetuation of any one of these gaps on all the other gaps.

In this story, our story, there are good guys with faults and there are bad guys with redeeming qualities, and there are complications and hurdles and challenges, and there is hope and love and sadness and anger and oppression and liberation and imagination and hostility and division and ignorance and expertise. In this story, our story, the average, literate citizen, (as suggested by Mr. Durant), must rise up and rebel against those rulers of our great cities who are wealthy and powerful and comfortable and who think they know; and the average, literate citizen must take heroic action and reach out and work hard to listen and to learn and to understand and to connect. And for this story, our story to end happily ever after, the average, literate citizen must then rise up and rebel against convention and tradition and bureaucracy and certainty.

Certainty is a solid presence, overwhelming, stifling. Privation, hardship, imposed or chosen, is unnecessary, gratuitous, indefensible. Doubt is possibility and potential, leaving room for imagination. To embrace certainty is to defy one’s impermanence. To embrace asceticism is to defy possibility. To balance presence and absence is to invite beauty, profundity, mystery.