[lit-ideas] Re: More places to nuke
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:04:56 -0800
Eric wrote re 'progress':
I am repeating a point Arthur Koestler makes somewhere...I think it is
_The Ghost in the Machine_. He argues that technical achievements wax
and wane with civilizations, stating, for example, that Euclid knew more
about geometry than people did 1,000 years later, Da Vinci knew more
about making pigments than any contemporary painters, the Romans
developed water-resistant cement and this was lost for 800 years, etc.
Sometimes this technical knowledge is rediscovered; sometimes it is
lost. For the most part, he argues, the only continuous line of
development in the last 5,000 years is in making weapons. Nobody forgot
how to build Roman siege machines in the Dark Ages.
If Koestler said these things he was apparently speaking as a fairly
insular Western European. Whether Da Vinci 'knew more about making
pigments' than painters do today is one thing; but the alleged loss of
mathematical knowledge after Euclid is another. Mathematical knowledge
was alive and well in Arab lands, and the great Arabian mathematicians
made advances (e.g. in spherical geometry) that went beyond Euclid. That
this knowledge was unknown in the West doesn't mean that it disappeared
and had to be re-invented. It simply had to be recovered in the West
through scholarly exchange, as did the great works of Aristotle.
'…Euclid knew more about geometry than people did 1,000 years later,' is
an unfortunately ethnocentric sentence, and understood literally, it's
plainly false.
When there's a power blackout in New York, the lights may still be on in
Fargo.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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