We are living in The Information Age.
That’s fine, I guess, but we’re a long way off from The Knowledge Age.
The Alignment will explain.
In our pockets and purses, we carry mini-computers that give us instant access to almost limitless information. This is very useful if you need to settle a dispute over who won the 1947 American League batting title. (Ted Williams, in case you’re wondering.)
But what do we know? Our minds are filled with information, to the extent we retain any of it, but how much of that gets converted to knowledge?
Philosophy PhDs and linguists might not affirm my definition of knowledge, but that’s not my concern. Knowledge, as I define it, is information that is deeply absorbed and then transformed into a belief, which then often leads to action.
The yawning gap between information and knowledge often has tragic consequences.
I was reminded of this recently when reading “The Escape Artist,” Jonathan Freedland’s riveting biography of Auschwitz survivor Rudolf Vrba.
In Freedland’s telling, Vrba’s main motivation in executing a daring and improbable escape from Auschwitz was not to save his own skin, but to tell the world the truth about the genocide of the Jews.
Vrba naively assumed that, once the information was disseminated, the Allies would bomb the train tracks leading to the concentration camps and the Jews of Hungary would do anything to avoid deportation. Problem solved, right?
His information, which he meticulously documented, did reach high places in Europe and Washington. But, for the most part, it was never converted to knowledge. Heads of state and even leaders of the Jewish community treated the information as exaggerated, or, worse, relatively unimportant. The Holocaust continued apace.
For most of his post-Holocaust life, Vrba struggled to accept the reality that information and knowledge are two different things. It was a brutally hard lesson, to be sure.
To bring this around to one of the main preoccupations of The Alignment, we can look at all the information about the benefits and imperative of a vegan lifestyle that has permeated the mainstream media. By now, most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have at least heard that bad things are happening to animals in factory farms, that beef production contributes to the climate catastrophe, and that eating more fruits, vegetables and whole grains benefits our health.
But most people treat this information as exaggerated, as relatively unimportant, and/or inconvenient.
Our challenge, as vegan advocates, is to convert this information into knowledge.
To achieve this, I only know of two methods:
Appeal to people’s emotions. Life would be a lot easier to navigate if we could count on everyone to act rationally. The reality is, people are governed by their emotions as much as or even more than by their brains. We have to describe to people how animals are suffering in our food system and even show them graphic photos, when possible.
Give them the tools to make a dietary transition. If people dismiss a vegan diet as too inconvenient, we need to show them how easy it is to be vegan, and show them how to do it. This is exactly why PETA and other like-minded organizations give away vegan starter kits.
So what can you do as an individual? Share your reasons for adopting a vegan lifestyle with your friends, neighbors, co-workers and relatives — and show a little emotion. If your reasons are ethical in nature, all the better; you are representing the suffering animals. What would the animals want people to know?
I didn’t say this would be easy. But we have no choice. We have to build a bridge over the gap between information and knowledge. So let’s put our hard hats on and get to work.