During a recent panel discussion at the World Economic Forum on Green Energy, former American Secretary of State John Kerry made the following rather disconcerting statement:

There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc…But look, if people only go to one source, and the source is sick, and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to our ability to just hammer it out of existence.

A cursory look at history shows that attempts by authorities to limit the public’s access to information—even demonstrably false information—have a middling record of success.  Technological innovation, and the innate curiosity of the human mind, cannot be so easily suppressed; and the latter will always deploy the former in the service of its inquisitiveness. 

Consider the history of English translations of the Bible.  We take vernacular translations of the Bible today with hardly a thought, but for many centuries the holy book was remote and inaccessible to the layman.  Its secrets were shrouded with the dual veils of language and enforced scarcity.  In the west, only the Latin Vulgate existed, and it was written in a tongue only educated elites and clerics could understand.  Copies could only be produced through the labor of scribes or churchmen, a fact which severely limited their circulation.  The authorities of the Church were suspicious of attempts to render the sacred scriptures into common speech, rightly fearing that individual lay comprehension would transform every man into his own bishop or pope.  Yet with the growth of population, commerce, education, and religious reform in the late Middle Ages, the demand for vernacular translations of the Bible grew.  This demand began as a trickle, and grew into an unstoppable torrent.      

The reformer and priest John Wycliffe is generally credited with the first comprehensive effort to render the Bible into English.  For him, translation was inextricably linked to the reform of personal and institutional morality; if the common man were able to read and ponder the teachings of scripture, he believed, betterment would inevitably follow.  The so-called Wycliffite Bible appeared around 1382, and was revised by John Purvey in 1388.  As much as an achievement this was, the book nevertheless suffered from drawbacks that were outside of Wycliffe’s control.  As the art of moveable type had not yet appeared in Europe, each volume of Wycliffe’s Bible had to be arduously copied by hand.  Literacy was still not widespread.  The Reformation was still a century away, and vernacular translations of the scriptures were not viewed favorably by the ecclesiastical authorities.  Finally, Wycliffe’s Bible suffered from having been translated from the Latin Vulgate—not the original Hebrew and Greek texts. 

William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament appeared in 1525 in the midst of extremely different social circumstances.  His book was published in Worms and smuggled into England.  Tyndale, unlike Wycliffe, had access to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, as Erasmus had just published his landmark edition of the Greek New Testament in 1519.  Tyndale spent much of the rest of his life on the run from the authorities, as religious fervor in Europe erupted on all sides with the advent of the Reformation.  He was never able to produce a translation of the Old Testament.  Tyndale became a marked man; he was eventually betrayed, tried for heresy, and executed in October 1536.  But additional English translations appeared in the 1560s.  The “Geneva Bible” and the “Bishop’s Bible” were inexpensive and could be produced with relative ease; they remained standard texts until the advent of the immortal King James edition in 1611.  Biblical historian David Whitford relates an anecdote pertinent to our discussion.  Tyndale was once angrily challenged at a dinner table by a man outraged at his desire to produce the Bible in English.  Tyndale calmly responded, “I wyl cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of Scripture than thou doest.”  In this he was as good as his word. 

The diffusion of knowledge cannot be suppressed.  It is like the downhill movement of a fluid mass which can only be banked and channeled, but not halted entirely.  Those who wield authority are advised to harness and employ new technologies and techniques, instead of attempting to stifle in fright the diffusion of knowledge. 

We take printed books so much for granted today that the brilliance of their invention is nearly lost on us.  Many have heard the name Johannes Gutenberg, but few truly grasp the nature of his contribution to the diffusion of knowledge.  Let us, then, spend a few moments describing this elusive German and his achievement. Of his life and motivations we know very little.  Perhaps, as a practical tradesman concerned with producing and selling his wares, he had no time or inclination for the luxury of scholarly contemplation.  He was born in Mainz during the 1390s and in time became a member of Strasbourg’s guild of goldsmiths.  This background gave him experience in metallurgy, and by the 1430s he seems to have begun experiments in printing.  He became ensnared in legal troubles connected with business partnerships, but these do not appear to have deterred his work.  To appreciate Gutenberg’s contribution to the history of knowledge, we must understand exactly what he did, and did not, innovate.

For many centuries, books had been produced by copyists or printed using woodblocks.  The Chinese and Koreans used woodblock printing regularly for religious scriptures and classical literature.  But the old methods were cumbersome and impractical for the new societies that were developing in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Each page of a woodblock book had to be carved individually, and this method was obviously ill-suited for a book containing hundreds of pages.  Moveable type was a significant improvement, but it was not a Gutenberg invention.  The Chinese had developed moveable type using porcelain in the eleventh century, and metallic moveable type in bronze appeared in Korea in the early thirteenth century.    

Gutenberg’s innovation was to advance the technology used in creating and using moveable type.  It must have taken him years of arduous trial and error before he discovered the best techniques. He created his type using a steel punch, which was a significant technological advance.  A letter or ligature was cut in relief on the end of a short steel rod; this was then pounded on a copper sheet.  This cavity was then filled with a proprietary mixture of molten lead, antimony, and tin.  Using this process, Gutenberg was able to cast the Roman alphabet in upper and lower cases, along with various ligatures, symbols, and punctuation marks.  The type was arranged to create words and sentences; sheets were printed; and then the type was then rearranged to create another printed page. His blended metallic type held ink extremely well, and produced letters that were clean and crisp. What made Gutenberg an important figure in the diffusion of knowledge was this technological and technical innovation.  He did not invent moveable type; he used his superior metallurgical and casting skills to improve it beyond anything that had preceded him.  He also benefitted from the fact that paper was more readily available in his day than at any time in the past, and that there was a hungry market for printed material of all kinds. 

Quite literally, Gutenberg struck at just the right place and time in history to make a permanent impact. The production of printed books was nothing less than revolutionary.  Books could now be truly mass produced. The arrival of printing in early sixteenth century Europe bears some similarities to the introduction of the internet in the early 2000s.  The relative percentage of misinformation and mindless drivel produced by the printing presses of the sixteenth century is certainly equal to, and perhaps exceeds, the nonsense generated by the internet today. In both cases, the speed of the diffusion of knowledge, and the public’s access to information, increased exponentially.  Like so much else in history, these revolutions were Janus-faced, in the sense that they generated both goods and evils.  But attempts to limit the spread of knowledge were as unsuccessful in 1524 as they have been in 2024.           

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Take a look at the annotated, illustrated translation of Cicero’s On Moral Ends, which was published in 2018.