Chapter 5 - How Knowledge Became Power

Summary

Chapter 5 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the relationship between cities, knowledge, and power, arguing against the casual link scholars often make between cities and “civilization,” a concept with too many congratulatory overtones. Referring to cities around the world, the chapter shows how urban monumental architecture and the mass processions and ceremonies that monuments were designed to accommodate repeatedly served to disseminate state-sponsored propaganda glorifying authoritarian rule and violence. It also traces the role of smaller spaces in cities in generating “Axial Age” knowledge that was skeptical of state propaganda, noting that authoritarian rulers sought to coopt or contain such knowledge to support their continued rule by building universities, libraries, schools, and temples and other spaces of worship while censoring ideas they deemed too critical. In this way, cities did help spread new knowledges and technologies, making it possible for smaller-scale cults and schools of philosophy to become the kernels of later “world” religions and secular knowledge systems. Throughout the pre-modern era, however, the spread of knowledge was subject to sharp boundaries delimited by the urban-centered infrastructure of basic literacy, even as city-based technologies often acted as a force in expanding the human population on Earth.