Aren’t all the best myths really about the price of information? We have Adam and Eve ousted from Eden for wanting “the eyes of them both [to be] opened.” There’s poor Prometheus, who gets his liver pecked in perpetuity for disclosing the secret of fire and “all manner of arts” to humans. And there’s Odysseus, beckoned by the Sirens’ perilous revelation of “everything that happens on the fruitful earth.” In each case, the moral of the story is the same: you don’t want to know.
It has not stopped us from trying. In the post-Enlightenment era, the continuous acquisition of knowledge has become our prerogative. It’s telling that the different versions of the Faustian myth — one more story about the price of information — fundamentally recast its hero following the Enlightenment. The sixteenth-century playwright Christopher Marlowe, for example, condemns Faust’s hubris and rewards his megalomania with eternal damnation. By Goethe’s time, in the early nineteenth century...
Formerly of McGill University, Krzysztof Pelc is now the University of Oxford’s Lester B. Pearson Professor in International Relations.
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