kind of about wikileaks

Here's a link to the war logs, the most important cache Wikileaks has published.  It works today, not sure it will tomorrow.  And here's something I wrote almost a decade ago (!) in Outspoken.  It was an introduction to a section about a doctor who lost his job for reporting on a dangerous new lung disease he uncovered and a firefighter who sued Los Angeles county over his right to read Playboy at fire stations, but it seems relevant to the current brouhaha over publishing diplomatic cables.  Please note: I'm not equating Assange with Galileo,  just commenting on the costs of knowing things -- and the all-important question of how we'll deal with that.

Knowledge is frequently unwelcome.  From bad news to images of cruelty to scary science, who at some point hasn't wanted not to know?  (Or is it that we want it both ways: to want to know everything and to want what we know to be nice?)  Sometimes we need to push the boundaries of knowing -- for safety, judgment, social cohesion or progress, the historical record.  Sometimes we simply desire to know.  But curiosity is not an unalloyed good.  There is hubris in pursing risky knowledge, arrogance in insisting on knowing more than we have a purpose for, and the relentless thrum of information that engulfs us is more than we can possibly use.

In Forbidden Knowledge, the late literary scholar Roger Shattuck lists six categories of knowledge that have, in various times and places, been off limits.  Under knowledge that is dangerous, destructive, or undesirable, he includes technology, sexual cruelty, and violence, and he recommends that such material be lablled and restricted.  The walls erected to keep knowledge out also keep ignorance in, though, and such barriers seldom withstand the test of time.  So from carnal knowledge to scientific discovery, the pressing issue is how we will deal with the consequences of knowing.

In 1633, Galileo Galelei was called before the Inquisition in Rome to disavow what his judges believed to be heresy and he believed to be truth: that the Earth rotates on its axis.  Nearly 70 years old, sentenced to house arrest, and banned from publishing his work for the rest of his life, Galileo knelt before his censors and recanted.

"And yet," he is said to have whispered as he rose slowly from his knees, "It turns."