Hildegarde

Well, let’s start with–John’s post clarifies a lot of things about this discussion.

John says  I see similarities when he sees diferences, but that’s not entirely accurate.

He sees differences, and  I see evolutions. The differences between  classical Greece and twentieth century New York isn’t the difference between penguins and hummingbirds, but the difference between one stage of evolution and another–of the same animal. 

And my point about the wheel was not that the Greeks invented it, but that the  Egyptians of the Pharonic age didn’t.  No technology, even the simplest, is assured.  Even thriving civiliations whose foundational ideas are friendly to scientific inquiry won’t necessarily invent any basic technology, and once the basic technology is invented whether it develops depends on a number of factors, but especially on those foundational ideas.

My guess, though, is that the primary reason a civilization does not immediately invent technology A, even though technology A is simple and would be useful to them, is that they do not perceive that usefulness.   In a world in which travel is slow, communications are insecure and slow, too, it’s not entirely clear that a way to measure time precisely would have any immediate point.   Natural scientists would want to know how motion worked.  Your everyday Roman mill owner wanted to know how to get his sacks of grain to market before they rotted.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge–the will to know just because you want to know, and not because it’s “useful”–is the definition of the liberal arts and a very important part of everything else.  

All societies need the technical applications of science desperately, but the connections between those technical applications and the entirely theoretical “pure” research that usually proceeds them isn’t always evident.  

Your ordinary Roman paterfamilias, even a well educated one, probably looked at  Democritus’s speculations about atoms the way some people here look at the study of literature–a nice little hobby, but really pointless, if you think about it.  Much better be practical and study Homer and  Virgil so that you can advance in the Emperor’s service.  

The relationship between Aristotle and Galileo is evolutionary–Aristotle gave birth to the ideas that gave birth to the ideas that gave birth to the ideas that gave birth to Copernicus that gave birth to Galileo.

If we could find a way to allow students to actually replicate the evolution of mammals, instead of just studying about it from the outside, we’d do it in a shot.  In intellectual history, we can do it.   We don’t have to read a textbook telling us how Aristotle is supposed to have given rise to a particular intellectual evolution.  We can read Aristotle and the men (largely) who followed him, we can watch the evolution happen in front of our eyes, we can recreate it and see what it tells us.

Once an evolutionary path gets started, a lot of things affect it.  Yes, the classical world was one of nearly constant war and chaos, not a good place to sit down and think for the sake of thinking, learn for the sake of learning.  It was also a world in which men and women tended to die what we would think of as young, therefore putting an end to a lot of the talent before it had a chance to get anything done. 

But I think that the real issue, in the evolution of ideas that resulted, eventually, in what we now called “science,” was that it looked to most people of the time as a dead end–a lot of silly wondering about stuff that didn’t matter anyway.   There were more pressing problems, like working out the meaning of “justice” and “freedom” in such a way that the relationships between rulers and everybody else could be regularized, so that people could know and trust how their societies would operate, what they could expect from various acts and transactions, for more than a few years or so at a time.  

Even now, if you go to the people at large, there’s a lot of complete incomprehension about pure research.  That’s why we didn’t build that cyclotron.  We’ve had over two hundred yeas of the scientific revolution, and most people still don’t see the point of looking into what a quark is and how it behaves.

Of course, they don’t see the point of looking into the evolution of ethics and morality either (doesn’t everybody already know that stuff? one of my students asked once–she meant that everybody already agreed on what was moral, so there was no point in nattering on about it.  I think she must be having a very interesting, if highly confused, life).

They also don’t see the point of studying literature, which is, you know, just a bunch of stories, and boring stories about people who lived in ancient times or something.  It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my decision to hook up with the guy with the tattoos tonight, or with figuring out what makes my boss tick so that I can get on better with her and maybe keep my job and get a raise.

I mean, for God’s sake, don’t go on blithering about  Becky Sharpe.   Teach me something practical.

The best way to figure out why Greece and Rome didn’t invent the technologies you want them to is to study Greek and  Roman history, literature, and thought so that you can see how the evolution happened and maybe figure out why.   In terms of replicating that evolution, though, since you’d already have access to the Humanities in their totality, you wouldn’t take nearly as long, since there would be references to the kind of technology you’re talking about and–in people like Liebniz and Newton–even some direction on how to make it.

The other thing the Humanities will tell you is how specific kinds of societies will kill science once it’s started (not just the Islam of the Middle Ages and the Taliban now, but the old Soviet Union) and why and how that happens, which might help you to avoid doing that. 

Of course, in the end, some societies simply choose not to, sometimes quite deliberately. That’s what the Taliban did–they took a good look at what accepting science, technology and all the rest of it would mean, and shut it all down.   And they shut down not only the science, but ver specifically the works of literature, philosophy and history they feared (and they were right) would lead to it.

Ack, I meant to address Cheryl’s flawed heroes–gives me a chance to rant about Achilles, so I’m up for it–and to say something about Gail’s wonderful post, but I’ve got two adolescent boys who want me to cook an enormous turkey for dinner, and since I’m always up for bringing death to turkeys, I’d better go get ready for it.

Okay, so it’s one adolescent boy and one grown man, actually over twenty-one.

But I keep trying to pretend that that last thing hasn’t happened.