Collaborative Knowledge & Ordinary Heroes

Did you hear about the team of math and computer whizzes who just solved the 120-year-old E8 symmetry puzzle? They built a theoretical structure described by Discovery News as "geometric origami that comes in 248 dimensions" that will be used to test theories about the structure of the univese.

This integrated intercontinental collaboration would have been impossible without two key inventions: the high-speed computer (for cranking out complex calculations) and the internet (for facilitating collaboration). These two inventions--the computer and the internet--are expanding not just what things we happen to know, but even what things we are capable of knowing. This increase in our capacity to know now gives us access to knowledge about things (like the human genome) that otherwise would be beyond our reach. They make possible meticulous collaboration and integration of knowledge by hundreds, if not thousands of educated people dedicated to discovering new truths.

As cutting-edge as this amazing science is, it reminds me of the way the fifth-century Christian saint Augustine of Hippo thought about human knowledge—especially human knowledge about God. No one person can get it absolutely right about God. We're all human; we have our blind-spots and projections that limit what we can see in others. But when we put our experiences, impressions, intuitions, insights, and hard-earned wisdom together--carefully coordinating our thinking and working collaboratively, like those scientists did on their 248-dimension geometric origami--we usually end up coming much closer to the truth.

The fact is, we need each other. And not just because we're not physically self-sufficient or because we're constituted as "social animals" who crave each other's company. We need each other because only together do we come to know at all. And we know only what we learn from our experiences and conversations with one another. The quality of those experiences and conversations has a profound impact on the quality of our knowledge.

Descartes got mad because he believed his teachers lied to him; what he was taught turned out to be bunk! So he resolved never again to listen to others--only to "think for himself." Rousseau was incensed at the depravity of 'civilized society.' He, too, retreated--not into his mind, like Descartes, but into a romanticized version of ‘nature’ something like Eden before the fall. Here, unsullied by a corrupt 'civilization,' his natural goodness and innate rationality would emerge strong, pure, and free.

Unfortunately, both were wrong. Yes, Rene, teachers sometimes lie--or, what is just as bad, mechanically repeat the same untruths and mistakes that were mechanically repeated to them, without ever bothering to ask why. Yes, Jean-Jacques, society can deform as easily as it informs and reforms. And the harm suffered by those innocently subjected to such deformation is as tragic as it is difficult to cure. Yet these defaults are no reason to abandon teachers or society altogether. If the poor quality of the input yields a poor-quality output, the solution isn't to abandon all inputs, but to improve their quality. We should work toward a better way of teaching and organizing society--not retreat into the solipsistic isolation of our minds or the imagined delights of untamed nature.

Which brings us back to the 248-dimension geometric origami. Contemporary collaboration spans time as well as space. While this particular conundrum may have been solved by people in America and Europe, it undoubtedly drew on fundamental axioms and methods discovered long centuries past in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The simple truths that later generations take "for granted" were once the hard-won innovations of our ancestors. Isaac Newton got it right when he said, "If I have seen farther [than others], it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

But it isn't only giants on whose shoulders we stand. Ordinary women and men, girls and boys--people who day in and day out continue to act on the assumptions that truth is real, goodness matters, wisdom is worth striving for, compassion is part of being human--the daily humility of these simple, unobtrusive people, who go about living with truthfulness, goodness, and decency, also form the humus on which we all stand, for better or worse.

Our world often focuses on the 'giants' among us, maybe because they are easier to see. But if you look a little harder, you'll find that there are a lot more 'little people' who make it possible for all of us to do what we do--even the giants. Our culture's social and economic rewards often favor stand-outs over communal achievements. But which is harder: pursuing your own pet project isolated from others or subordinating your personal preferences and prejudices to contribute meaningfully to a team investigating a common problem? How will academic departments assess the tenure-prospects of the young scientists (not to mention research assistants) who served on this team? How can they document what part of the project's success was attributable to them? What are the rewards these 'little people' will receive--and what were they seeking?

Maybe our society needs to rethink the social utility of its obsession with anointing superheroes. Maybe what this time in our history requires is a lot less 'superstars' and a lot more solid, dependable team-members--a lot less grand-standing and a lot more quiet collaboration. We hear these days about the need for heroes. I admit, as a child of Watergate, I have a hard time thinking of any heroes. I was too young for JFK or Gandhi; too young, really, for MLK.

So where are our heroes now? Perhaps we've been looking in the wrong places. Maybe they're all around us--so close that we can't even see them. Perhaps they're the water we swim in without even noticing. If a few dozen scientists working on two continents could solve a 19th-century math puzzle just by working together, imagine what all the ordinary heroes around the globe might achieve, if we finally realized that we're all on the same team--and tried playing the game together.