Know It All

The Volume Library. God love you, Dad. When you signed on the dotted line for that scam, you were trying to do the right thing. Your blood sugar may have been on the way down and you just wanted your three kids to stop pestering you. The book wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t going to break the bank. You were smart enough to know that it would sit on the shelf, never touched, except to get dusted each week. You were also smart enough to know that you weren’t likely to win this battle and you’d go to jail if you physically removed that weasel of a salesman from your house. But what about Mom? Why was she being swayed? That was certainly unusual. We’ll never know the the truth and the book is long gone. If there’s any justice in the world, its pages have been gnawed by mice, who would have used all that useless propaganda information for bedding. I admit it, “propaganda” is a bit extreme. The math sections likely weren’t propaganda. Maybe the geography ones. History, though? Assuredly.

Hey, I found a picture online, from a Rubylane listing, and amazingly, the book got sold to someone. From this image, the history section began on page 963, and it looks like there are plenty to follow. It must have been—what—2,000 pages?

Why am I going here? Good question. Maybe a better question: why on earth would I think about, much less write about, some lousy, encyclopedic book that was supposed to hold all the answers? Ah, there’s the key: does any book hold all the answers? No. Sorry, not even the Bible. Pin the heretic label to my chest if you must, but the Bible is not an instruction manual. If it were, it would be one of the worst ever written. Ask twelve people to interpret a significant passage in the Bible and see if you can even come close to a consensus. Now think about this: if I ever wanted to use the cleaning function on my oven (I don’t), I would be horrified (and likely, overwhelmed) to open the manual and find that I could go about the task in more than a dozen ways. Instruction manuals are supposed to be black-and-white, do it this way, not that.

Again, what is my point? Epistemologies. Epistemologies: plural; that is the point. It’s a big word, and I readily admit that a week ago I could not have accurately told you what it means. But I can tell you now. Epistemologies are ways of knowing, and there are many of them. What’s more, the chosen epistemology has everything to do with what can be known. The Volume Encyclopedia used one way of knowing: a paradigm reflective of a Western civilization heavily invested in “science.” I remember that the book salesman’s pitch revolved around how complete The Volume Library is. With this book, he alleged, we’d possess all the knowledge we’d ever need and my brother would breeze through his high school studies. I’ve got news for you: he breezed through them with no help from The Volume Library (same for my sister and me).