When Everyone Knows: Pinker unpacks the power of shared understanding

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

by Steven Pinker

Published by Penguin

384  pages ₹1,099

  In his latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Harvard cognitive scientist and psychologist, Steven Pinker, takes us on another profound journey into the human mind, a subject that he has explored in other celebrated books, including How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct and Rationality. The present work puts forward a framework for dissecting the nature of knowledge, from how its diffusion determines the choice a  couple makes of a rendezvous location to how  it may trigger an overwhelming popular revolution. Dr Pinker makes a crucial distinction between private knowledge, say, X, which resides only in an individual’s mind and common knowledge, where everyone knows X, and everyone knows that everyone knows X, and so on ad infinitum. What is significant here is that it is common knowledge that enables individuals to coordinate their actions and collaborate for mutual gains. Communities, from a tribe to a nation and on to a multilateral institution, collaborate on the basis of common knowledge, which provides a consensual basis for collective action.

 

Dr Pinker introduces another important concept, conventions, in elaborating how common knowledge works. Conventions are arbitrary rules of behaviour that become widely accepted because they are common knowledge. They enable coordinated activity. For example, driving on the left side of the road is the convention in several countries including our own, but it is entirely arbitrary and could well have been the opposite. But since everyone in India knows that everyone knows that everyone knows which side to drive on, it serves as common knowledge and enables safe driving.

 

Though Dr Pinker mentions this in passing, an example from recent Indian history explains clearly the distinction between private knowledge and common knowledge. During the British colonial period every Indian knew that just a few hundred Britons, no matter how powerful, could not subdue the collective strength of 350 million Indians. But this was a private, first-order truth, though known to millions. The transformation or the “trigger” came when Mahatma Gandhi publicly articulated this reality and made it common knowledge. This enabled the mass movement for Indian independence in defiance of British colonialism. Before this, few were ready to risk defiance for fear of retaliation and unaware of whether their private knowledge of British vulnerability was shared by others. Gandhi made this common knowledge and the basis for coordinated non-compliance. While common knowledge becomes the basis for coordination and collaboration, it is language that is the medium through which it is enabled. This includes not only the spoken or written language but also what is popularly known as “body language”. Facial expressions, gestures and rituals all form part of the repertoire of human communication. This brings us to the more fascinating and illuminating exploration of how prevention of common knowledge often enables benign relations to continue between individuals as between nations. Too much honesty may not necessarily be a good thing. Pretence is sometimes the price of peace, for example, in a marriage. Dr Pinker cites the example of colleagues who collaborate well at work going out for a congenial dinner. On the way home, the man asks whether his colleague would like to stop by his apartment for a drink or a late-night coffee. His intentions are ambiguous, her reactions equally so. If she believes he has something more than a drink in mind, she may politely decline, giving the false excuse that she has an early morning appointment the next day. Neither side has been “outed”. The benign relationship may continue as before. But it cannot if he suggests something more explicitly intimate and she declines. The cover of ambiguity is lost.

 

Ambiguity and plausible deniability are also well known diplomatic stratagems. Israel has nuclear weapons but Israel itself and the world maintain the fiction that it is a non-nuclear weapon state. This enables its rivals in the Gulf and West Asia not to confront a disturbing reality and existential threat with anything more than expressions of suspicion and innuendos. If the private knowledge of Israel’s nuclear weapons became public knowledge then its rivals would have no escape route. They would have to react by pursuing their own nuclear weapons to restore some semblance of balance of power. Or they would have to acquiesce in Israeli hegemonism, which would be an anathema. So preventing private knowledge of Israeli nuclear weapons from becoming common knowledge suits everyone.

 

What for me is the most important learning from Dr Pinker’s extraordinary book is that while common knowledge enables coordination and collaboration in our species, equally, in some circumstances, common knowledge has to be prevented or even denied “hypocritically” to enable the collaboration to continue. This is why evolution has made our species a bundle of feelings, inhibitions and emotions and their expression in facial clues and gestures that play an important part in maintaining the social compact. “The evolutionary niche of Homo Sapiens is one of massive interdependence,” he writes.

 

Awareness of this existential reality or it becoming common knowledge is what is needed to heal our fractured world.

 

  The reviewer is a former foreign secretary