I used to tell my students that I would carefully label the three kinds of knowledge I would offer them so that they could make up their own minds about how much they could trust to what I said. The first kind of knowledge I would offer would be consensus knowledge, which is what all experts in a field would attest to. An example of that in sociology is the general belief among sociologists that immigrant groups assimilate into American society within two to five generations of arriving on these shores. That is different from what happens in Indonesia, for example, where three separate groups-- the original Polynesians, the Muslims and the Chinese-- have coexisted in a three tiered caste system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The second kind of knowledge I would offer is where there is a strong difference of opinion, contending sides, in an intellectual debate. That kind of knowledge is represented by the debate over what are the causes of continued poverty in the Black community. There is one school of thought that poverty is the result of cultural forces. Poor people got that way because of historical conditions but by this time have internalized dysfunctional relationships and so poor people are overcome by anger, poor child raising habits, inadequate family life, and other cultural forces that make it difficult for people to compete in a market economy or simply to hold down jobs. The alternative hypothesis is that the continuing social structures which engulf people are the forces that keep people from prospering. There are not enough men in Black urban areas to go around so as to provide young women with partners to set up stable families. That is because young men who might otherwise settle down are either dead or in prison. The two theories converge in that one can be a precursor of the other but they are still distinct in that the causal factors are independent of one another. The third kind of knowledge, I offered, was my own educated judgment, something not shared by other sociologists, but a point for which I thought I could make a good case. An example of that was when I argued that the reason Black poverty from the Sixties on was not better dealt with was that LBJ’s War on Poverty did not deal with male unemployment but rather with providing benefits for women who had to raise children without the benefit of a spouse. During the New Deal, there had been work programs for Appalachian white youth. There were no such programs for Black male youth a generation later. Some sociologists have caught up with this view in recent years.
The experiences of knowledge by consensus, knowledge in dispute, and knowledge that is singular or limited to a few, are quite different from one another, those differences not depending on exact number but on the sense of whether a situation is one or another of the three. Scientists by and large work by consensus so that new theories have to spread far and wide before they are accepted and so scientists are confident that they are right. That means that climate deniers, those who say that the consensus of climate scientists is wrong, are regarded as ludicrous figures or as people who have ulterior motives, possibly political ones, for thinking the way they do. People who, on the other hand, say they are supporting one side of an argument have some solace from the legitimacy that a group opinion provides. The old social psychology finding that a single confederate on a panel makes it alright to disagree with the opinion of the vast majority just means that two is a sufficient number to identify a faction and so a legitimate alternative opinion, that number possibly much greater without being a majority, and so the key finding is not the single person who joins with the outlandish opinion but that it takes only two to make an opinion no longer outlandish. Juries and discussion groups work that way. Knowledge that is singular or possessed by only a few is, for its part, regarded as saintly or diabolical, inspired or insipid, depending on the charismatic standing of the holder of the very minority view.
This theory that there are three kinds of knowledge, depending on what parts of a population agree to it, applies beyond the realm of academic discourse. It also applies to other institutions, such as the religious and the political ones, and to culture at large, that great amorphous thing that seems to have no form. Let us work our way up to that ultimate object.
The nature of knowledge in religions is easiest to grasp because religion is a set of organizations as well as a set of beliefs and so has organizational enforcement mechanisms identified by name and function. Ernst Troeltsch’s carefully defined term “church” provides a way of seeing what it means to have a consensus about religious knowledge. People in a church do not have to believe exactly the same thing or have equal levels of devotion in order to be considered members of the church. There are theologians and lay people, peasants and aristocrats, only Easter observers and people who go to mass regularly. What they all have in common is a subscription to the basic dogma of the church, however they may interpret that. There is room for disagreement about things that are minor in that perspective, including whether the priesthood should be celibate. A church defined so extensively rather than exclusively can welcome in all members of a community and so there is no need to become heretical in order to hold a contrarian view about one thing or another. Some members will emphasize liturgy or fellowship; others will deeply experience the idea of Mary or the awfulness of the Original Sin that everyone carries around with them; others will identify belief with living respectable lives. All are part of the church.
The alternative to consensus in religion is not the one Troeltsch posited, which was “sect”, because that referred to the numerous groups of true believers, all of the members of a sect equal in their passion and conviction and with no use for what they regard as the half-hearted positions that were allowed in a church. Rather, the proper term for those who create a faction opposed to that of the church is “heretic” if the disputant is one or a group of people not legitimately entitled to go their own way, or “schismatic”, for those whose authority is legitimate because they have been appointed to bishopric office in the appropriate way, however much they may disagree with the central church on doctrine, custom or feeling. So the Eastern Orthodox Church is schismatic while the Albegensians were heretics, as were the Protestants. Luther had not been a bishop but simply a priest.
The third kind of knowledge is that which only some proclaim, and these may be insiders in that they have credentials within a church or a schism, or are without such credentials and so are self-proclaimed in that whatever are their characteristics are taken as validating their claims. Jesus was such a figure in that he had turned into a virtue what would previously have been thought a disability for becoming a Messiah: He had died. So Jesus is properly thought of as a charismatic figure because His authority is self-proclaimed and self-validated, as was also the case with Hitler, who did not look very Aryan and did not have Prussian aristocratic roots. For some reason, some charismatics catch on, but it is to be remembered that most do not. Charles Manson did not leave behind a tradition of helter skelter murderers.
The three kinds of knowledge are very well understood in politics because since Aristotle started what we call political science, politics and political institutions have been understood to be based on number. Moreover, the thinkers of the Democratic Revolution that moved through Europe and America in the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Century very self consciously examined the role of numbers. Most Enlightenment figures castigated the singular rule of a Monarch who, like the church, imposed a supposedly unitary consensus government which was in fact dependent on favors offered and delivered between supposedly subservient aristocrats and their monarch. Rather, parliamentary regimes and then the American three branch idea allowed for a conflict between what the Founding Fathers called factions even if the Founding Fathers looked unfavorably on factions. Democratic regimes since that time prize themselves on having evolved into two party systems, which means there are only two factions, and so one knows which side to take on an issue by looking at what other members of the faction are doing. Every issue has one side or the other, even if sometimes a third party intrudes for a while into the binary division. Mostly, Tories and Liberals get replaced by Tories and Labor, just as Whigs and Democrats get replaced by Republicans and Democrats. Rule by a single charismatic figure was also decried by the theorists of democracy because such a figure was accountable to no one for as long as that figure could manage it, Hitler and Mussolini not brought down until their armies were.
Now to culture, which we sometimes think of through the lens of consensus. In that case, we divide culture into periods, such as the Romantic, the Victorian and the Modern, which posits that most of those working during the period, whether painters or novelists or poets or social thinkers, have the same preoccupations, whether that refers to conventions of representation or philosophical meaning or even of the role of the artist in society. Or we may think that culture operates through factions, and for that we reserve the word “movement” in that Realism, Impressionism and Pre-Raphaelite painting and literature vied with one another during the course of the Victorian Age, it not clear why an artist or writer decided to take up one or another of these causes rather than another. And there are those outliers who listen only to themselves and so are not properly part of any school at all, and these would include Van Gogh in the world of art, even as Picasso, at least his equal as an artist, is clearly indebted to the entire Western tradition of art. I am hard pressed, however, to find a literary figure who is as independent of influences. Some, like Ibsen, are initiators of a tradition but they have many followers and so Shaw correctly identifies Ibsen as the originator of Ibsenism. The best I can come up with is Samuel Johnson who is best known for his lesser accomplishments, such as his Dictionary and serving as the key figure in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” rather than for his still undervalued accomplishments in “Rassales”, his anti-utopian pamphlet pretending to be a novel, and his “Journey to the Hebrides” which is presented as a travel diary when it is an early example of sociological analysis. The solitary figure may not be recognized for his or her true virtues precisely because he or she is a solitary figure.
The importance of this set of categories about knowledge is that it finds a different way to deal with numbers than is usually the case in social science where inferences are drawn from applying probability theory to aggregates of data points as they have been sorted into multiple categories. So old people vote differently than young people. Rather, I suggest we consult the experience of numbers: what it feels like to be in a consensus, or a faction, or off on one’s own. It is not easy to draw psychological correlates to these three states. One can be smug because everybody agrees with you that everybody has to have ultimate values and so in some sense must believe in God-- or at least that lasts until one confronts someone who does not assent to that platitude. There is the smugness of the faction member who thinks he is exercising independent judgment in finding Trump not guilty, only the other side engaged in bad motives. There is also the smugness of thinking one’s own conscience the final judge of everything, even though people who take part in culture may pretend to that, proclaiming themselves to be novelists or poets or cultural observers who make up their own minds, may in fact share some factional or consensus feeling. So underlying politics, religion and culture is that experience of number, which leads one to think that it is a basic experience of human life as well as a basic structure of social life.