Slow Knowledge

Abstract

Between 1978 and 1984 the Asian Development Bank spent $24 million to improve agriculture on the island of Bali. The target for improvement was an ancient agricultural system organized around 173 village cooperatives linked by a network of temples operated by “water priests” working in service to the water goddess, Dewi Danu, a diety seldom included in the heavenly pantheon of development economists. Not surprisingly, the new plan called for large capital investment to build dams and canals and to purchase pesticides and fertilizers. The plan also included efforts to make idle resources, both the Balinese and their land, productive year-round. Old practices of fallowing were ended, along with community celebrations and rituals. The results were remarkable but inconvenient: yields declined, pests proliferated, and the ancient village society began to unravel. On later examination (Lansing 1991), it turns out that the priests’ role in the religion of Agama Tirtha was that of ecological master planners, whose task it was to keep a finely tuned system operating productively. Western development experts dismantled a system that had worked well for more than a millennium and replaced it with something that did not work at all. The priests have reportedly resumed control. The story is a parable for much of the history of the twentieth century, in which increasingly homogenized knowledge is acquired and used more rapidly and on a larger scale than ever before and often with disastrous and unforeseeable consequences. The twentieth century is the age of fast knowledge driven by rapid technological change and the rise of the global economy. This has undermined communities, cultures, and religions that once slowed the rate of change and filtered appropriate knowledge from the cacophony of new information. The culture of fast knowledge rests on these assumptions:… • Only that which can be measured is true knowledge • The more knowledge we have, the better • Knowledge that lends itself to use is superior to that which is merely contemplative • The scale of effects of applied knowledge is unimportant • There are no significant distinctions between information and knowledge • Wisdom is an undefinable, hence unimportant, category.