It’s been a hectic week, and it’s not over yet.
The regularly-scheduled post is almost, but not quite, ready. I should have it ready in another hour.
If not, it’ll probably show up in about 10 hours. I have got to try getting some sleep.
Enough with the chit-chat. I’ve got a post to proof, and miles to go before I sleep. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Thank you for your patience.
Tomorrow is Halloween. I hope you have a good one.
I mentioned St. Wolfgang of Regensberg, All Hallows’ and All Souls’ Day, and the autumnal equinox last year.
Also Gaelic and Welsh traditions, jack-o’-lanterns, and Easter eggs.
Enjoying my culture’s traditions, within reason, makes sense. To me.
It’s arguably better than bitter bewailing stuff I can’t change: and don’t want to.
I haven’t run across anyone going ballistic over holiday-related rampant wantonness this year. Or is it wanton rampantness?
Anyway, I haven’t seen any of the once-prevalent Halloween angst.
I haven’t looked, either.
There’s plenty of angst, dread and weltschmerz flooding my news feeds.
I see some in social media, but it’s mostly at the edge of public venues I visit. Wading into political and social news is an option.
So is seeking melancholic communities of earnest folks who apparently yearn for something they don’t have. That really doesn’t make sense. Some folks feel otherwise.
What’s yearned for varies, judging from what I hear echoing into my haunts. I don’t know what others think or feel, but opinions and expressed interests give hints.
Some apparently yearn for the ‘good old days’ as they imagine them. That’s generally before somewhere around 1950.
I can sympathize with them, a little.
Particularly the younger ones, who probably got their information from old coots. Folks like me, in other words, but with selective memories.
That era actually was ‘happy days,’ at least for folks who look a bit like me.
Carefully edited memories might focus on Harry Bellafonte’s “Calypso,” and universal harmony among Americans.
That last might require deciding that all decent Americans supported the Truman Doctrine. Or bitterly opposed it, depending on which seems more harmonious.1 That’s not how it was, and that’s another topic.
I remember those ‘good old days,’ and they weren’t.
The ‘science and technology will solve all our problems’ lasted into my youth. I like tech, and enjoy reading ‘science’ news.
When it’s written by someone who knows a little about science, anyway.
Unbridled optimism made no more sense than today’s ‘we’re all gonna die’ lament, and that’s yet again another topic.2
Today’s America isn’t perfect, either.
But in many ways it’s an improvement on the days when ‘she’s smart as a man’ was supposed to be a compliment.
I really don’t miss those ‘good old days,’ and am glad they aren’t coming back.
Remembering that attitude helps me sympathize with folks who don’t yearn for America’s halcyon days around 1950.
Harry Bellafonte’s “Calypso,” and all decent Americans supported the Truman Doctrine. Or bitterly opposed it, depending on which memories get kept.
Some less anachronous Americans may wish that we were back in other ‘good old days.’
Theirs may run from around 1967 to 1991. Or maybe 1972 to 1982.
I’d be urging a return to the dear old days of yesteryear, if I thought we’d ever had a Golden Age. That hasn’t happened. Anywhere.
Some societies supported the common good better than others. A few had laws and customs worth adapting to current needs.
I think folks somewhere, a few millennia from now, will look at what America did.
They may even name some of their new institutions after ours. That’s why we call part of our Congress the Senate.
But what they’re cobbling together won’t be ‘America 2.0.’ I think, and hope, that they’ll have learned from our mistakes: and successes.
That’s why I decided to talk about where we’ve been, not kvetching about stuff I don’t really dislike.
I don’t think we’ll ever make an ideal society, perfectly balancing individual freedoms and common needs.
But I’m convinced we can do better than anything we’ve done to date.
Trying to go back won’t work. Even if we could, there isn’t a perfect era behind us. The only direction is forward.
It will take work, and working together.
Keeping what is good and changing what isn’t in ourselves and in how we deal with others is never easy. If it was, we’d probably make fewer regrettable decisions.
It will take generations, centuries, and we’ll never really finish the job. But I think build a better world for folks who haven’t been born yet is possible.
I think we can make Pope St. John Paul II’s “civilization of love” become more than only a hope. I am certain that we must try.
“…The answer to the fear which darkens human existence at the end of the twentieth century is the common effort to build the civilization of love, founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice, and liberty….”
(“To the United Nations Organization, Pope St. John Paul II (October 5, 1995))
Serious posts, and one that’s not very:
2 Science, technology, and being human:
Pharisees and Sadducees had been important and respected folks for about two centuries by the time our Lord talked about love.
They agreed on quite a bit. Maybe more than they realized. But they didn’t see assorted political, social, and philosophical points the same way. One was Helenization, adopting at least some foreign ideas.
Pharisees didn’t like Helenization. Sadducees thought it was a generally good idea. That attitude reminds of today ‘new ideas are bad’ Christian factions.
As usual, it’s not that simple.
Pharisees and Sadducees agreed that the Torah was “Biblical.”
But Sadducees thought the written Torah was divine authority’s only source.1
They saw the Torah as the only source for worship and everyday life.
That makes me a bit more like the Pharisees. Looking at how they saw Helenization, I’m sort of like a Sadducee.
That may need explaining.
I’m a Christian, so I think “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” So do many Christians who aren’t Catholic.
Studying the Bible is vital to my faith. I think it’s the word of God. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 101–133)
I also think Tradition and the Magisterium are important. Tradition, capital “T,” doesn’t mean trying to live in the past. (Catechism, 74–94)
I thought the Bible was important before I became a Catholic.
What’s changed is how much I know about why it’s important. Another plus is that now I have the full version.
My Bible includes Baruch, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and Wisdom — and the unexpurgated versions of Daniel and Esther.
I certainly don’t mind having a Bible that includes Wisdom.
Some Protestants I’ve known feel that the only “real” Bible is their edited version.
Small wonder some, not all, think Catholics aren’t Christians.
Some Catholics feel the same way about Protestants. I don’t. I also see no point in ignoring what we’re learning about God’s creation, and that’s another topic.2
That, and post-1960s “creation science,” is more of a Protestant fundamentalist thing.
So, I think, is yearning for cultural values that helped make the 1960s possible.
Some Catholics are equally dedicated to nostalgia and ignoring what we’ve been learning about God’s creation. I don’t see a point in unyielding loyalty to pre-Victorian science.
I don’t think faith is a psychiatric disorder, or that religion makes folks hate each other.
I sympathize, a little, with folks who feel that way. I wouldn’t mind seeing fewer venom-spitting Christians. Or none.3
That gets me back to today’s Gospel reading, Matthew 22:34–40.
We see our Lord’s discussion with a “scholar of the law” in Mark 1 :28–34, too. He says loving God and my neighbor the most important commandment in both.
Matthew 22 is where Jesus says “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” He also said ‘I am God.’ (Matthew 22 40, John 8 58, 14 8–9)
I think loving folks is a good idea. It is, or should be, something all Christians believe. But all Abrahamic religions agree on that point, although not on exactly what love means.
Many religions say unconditional and benevolent love is a good idea, including Buddhism and Hinduism. Mettā and Karuṇā are close to what should be the Christian view of love. There’s a considerable gap between “should be” and “is,” and that’s yet another topic.4
I think Jesus is right about love, but that’s not why I’m a Christian.
Neither is an extravagant claim our Lord made. It’s what Jesus did later that matters.
“Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.'”
(John 8:58)
Quite a few folks made similar claims, and some folks believed them. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s not rare either.
Jesus was tortured and executed. Again, noting unusual about that.
Having at least few folks say they saw him a little later also isn’t outstanding.
Elvis sightings were front page news in American tabloids long after he died. I think some folks who thought they saw Elvis were sincere, and mistaken.
What’s different about Jesus is that he eventually convinced the surviving Apostles that they weren’t hallucinating or seeing a ghost. He even convinced Saul, a dedicated Christian-hunter, to become a Christian and start taking crazy risks.
Two millennia later, folks around the world think Saul and Steven had the right idea. Sometimes with pretty much the same results, and that’s yet again another topic.5
I don’t ‘believe in’ science.
I don’t expect it to replace God. That would be a very bad idea. (Catechism, 2112–2114)
But I’m fascinated by what we’re learning about this universe.
I don’t see a problem with interest in God’s creation and taking God seriously. (Catechism, 282–289, 293–294, 1723, 2294)
That’s partly because I think all truth points toward God. (Catechism, 27, 31–35, 41, 74, 2500)
What we’re learning doesn’t always agree what folks thought was so.
That’s meant thinking about why ancient Mesopotamian astrologers and Aristotle didn’t have all the answers. Maybe it’s more work than grimly clinging to increasingly outdated assumptions, but it makes more sense. To me, anyway.
Science and faith both value and seek truth. (Catechism, 31, 159, 1849)
Again, I don’t see a conflict. That’s partly because I don’t expect science to tell me why I’m here, or read the Bible to learn how this universe works.
I also see no reason to fear what we’re learning about this wonder-filled universe:
5 Jesus, the news, and getting a grip:
We’re a lot smarter than flies, which probably helps us swat them.
But the insects are very good at being somewhere else when the flyswatter or newspaper hits whatever they were on.
I’ve run into a few reasonable speculations. One was that flies are hypersensitive to air movements, and feel an approaching object. That may be part of the answer.
Scientists found another piece to that puzzle recently. “Recently” by my standards, that is. Flies live a whole lot faster than we do. Or, in a fly’s eyes, we move in slow motion.
That’s a page from the Aberdeen Bestiary.
Scholars think it dates from the 1100s, more or less. We don’t know who made it.
Its paper trail starts in the Old Royal Library at Westminster Palace, in 1542.
I’ll give England’s Henry VIII credit for savvy. The Aberdeen Bestiary was “rescued” when he took anything worth taking from monasteries in his territory.
Henry’s agents were savvy, too.
Before getting to work, they’d do an inventory of their next target.
Sometimes they’d remove and auction off the lead roofs.
Sometimes they figured Henry would get more by leasing the king’s new property. Those buildings stayed intact.
Quite a few of the monasteries in England dated from a 11th and 12th century European monastic building boom.
They were an integral part of English society, along with the priories, convents and friaries Henry seized. His reasons may not have been entirely selfish. Complaints about monks had been were piling up across Europe.
At least some monks had lost track of their mission by the 16th century. The Catholic Church was hitting another rough spot.
Nothing new it that. Small problems accumulate. Every few centuries we work through the backlog. We hit a really bad patch about a thousand years back. (October 22, 2017)
What made the 16th century one special was, I think, European economics and politics.1
I’d rather live in the early 21st century than the early 11th. I like having Internet access, among other things.
But those ‘good old days’ weren’t all bad.
They weren’t all good, either.
We had wars, plagues, and famines in Europe. Benedict IX was Pope three times: kicked out twice, sold the papacy once.
The latter is a unique achievement. He may be the all-time worst pope. On the ‘up’ side, The Gregorian Reform was slowly dealing with a massive backlog of bad habits.
Meanwhile, folks with marketable skills were moving to the growing towns.
I see increased trade between territories, and with the world, as a basically good thing. That’s partly because I think learning what others think helps everyone in the long run.
Having a little more than what’s needed for survival also lets folks do ‘civilized’ things.
For some Americans, that’s sitting on bleachers and watching other folks play games. Others buy big-screen televisions for pretty much the same purpose. Fast food and information technology are high on our ‘I want that’ lists, too.
Wealth also lets folks, particularly in the more wealthy nations, support arts and sciences.
Again, I see that as a basically good thing.
It’s a lot easier to find data about current research spending by national governments. I think governments have a useful function, but they’re not the only way to get things done.
One of these days I’ll talk about the Hanseatic League, but not today.
I was going somewhere with this.
Let’s see. Monasteries, the Aberdeen Bestiary, bleachers, research. Right.
I don’t yearn for an imaginary Golden Age, or fear that domestic robots like Loomo will destroy civilization.2
I figure the 21st century will be pretty much like the 1st and 11th: good news, bad news, and everything in between. The same goes for the 31st, 41st, and following centuries.
I also figure we’ll keep learning, making mistakes, and learning from them. Eventually.
Some medieval books were written by natural philosophers.
Like today’s scholarly works, they often had illustrations.
A picture may not be literally worth a thousand words, but they’re effective communication tools.
Medieval bestiaries were a bit like today’s coffee table books.
They reflected current knowledge of animals, particularly those in western Europe.
But they weren’t ‘science books.’
For one thing, nobody was a “scientist” until 1833.
That’s when William Whewell called natural philosophers with particular of interests and habits “scientists.”
He might or might not have called St. Hildegard of Bingen a scientist.
Her work at the Disibodenberg monastery helped lay the foundations of scientific natural history in Germany.
She was also a Benedictine abbess.
The firestorm we call the Reformation hit Disibodenberg monastery in 1559.
Between four and a half centuries of no maintenance and being used as a quarry, the buildings are not in good shape.
Hildegard’s work survived though, and so did the Church.
St. Albertus Magnus, another German, was an 11th century Dominican friar and bishop, and a natural philosopher. He’s often called a scientist these days.
Getting back to medieval bestiaries, they described critters like basilisks, bears, deer, dragons and unicorns. Each section was a mix of what we call real and imaginary animals. Each entry described the creature and said what moral lesson it teaches.3
Bestiaries by more recent artists and writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Saul Steinberg reflect their culture’s knowledge and beliefs.
Since medieval bestiaries were a mix of real and imaged critters, some academics decided they were written by ignorant folks.
There’s a little truth to it. We’ve learned a great deal since Hildegard of Bingen’s day.
However, there’s a big difference between wilful ignorance and lacking knowledge that hasn’t been discovered yet.
The ‘ignorant medieval Christians’ attitude started getting traction during the Enlightenment. It’s consistent with viewing religion and superstition as pretty much the same thing.
I don’t see religion that way, but I’m a Christian and a Catholic.
I also know a bit about what’s happened since folks like Anaximander, Confucius, Gilgamesh, Jimmu, and Narmer helped start our civilizations.
I don’t expect everyone to act and think like today’s Westerners.
I realize that seeing a sharp divide between natural philosophy and religion, faith and reason is new. As a default viewpoint, anyway.
Folks in medieval Europe weren’t willfully ignorant. Not any more so than their descendants. But they didn’t see reality quite the same way most do today.
Happily, some Western scholars are beginning to think maybe post-Enlightenment Europeans aren’t the only ones with a legitimate worldview. It’s a start.
My own perspective is a bit counter-cultural.
I think seeing faith, reason, science, and religion as separate things makes sense. It makes studying each a bit easier. I also think they both pursue truth.
Science and religion don’t exist in different realities.
They work together fine, or should. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 159)
Science is the best way we’ve found for learning how the universe works.
It’s not so good at telling us why we exist, or why studying this wonder-filled universe is a good idea. Religion, the Catholic version, shows us being curious is okay, and how we fit into reality. I see it as ‘the big picture.’ (Catechism, 282–289, 293–294, 1723, 2294)
Ideally, understanding that religion isn’t science would also keep oddities like “creation science” from getting much support.4
(From Science Photo Library, via BBC News, used w/o permission.)
“Why is it so hard to swat a fly?”
Rory Galloway, BBC News (September 17, 2017)“Try to swat a fly and it will soon become clear that they’re faster than you. Much faster. But how on Earth do these tiny creatures – with their minuscule brains – outwit us so easily?
“You’ve probably pondered it after chasing a fly around your house and flailing your shoe with repeated, unsuccessful swats. How does it move so fast? Can it read my mind?…”
Flies aren’t very smart, and they can’t read human minds. I’m quite sure about that. Their knack for being somewhere else when we try swatting them comes from having a really fast flicker fusion rate.
Faster than ours, at any rate. We’re perceptive speedsters compared to turtles.
Flicker fusion rate and flicker fusion thresholds are things we didn’t know about until quite recently.
The f. f. threshold is how fast lights flicker when we start seeing them as steady illumination. The same principle applies to images displayed in rapid sequence.
It’s part of scientific revolution’s 19th century phase. Gustav Theodor Fechner organized what we’d been learning about perception in the mid-1800s
He called relating physical stimuli to our conscious perceptions psychophysics. The name stuck, and we’re still finding some answers and many questions about what and how we notice things.
Someone built the first zoetrope in the 19th century. Probably. Maybe.
There’s an ongoing discussion about whether a 5,000 year old bowl found in Iran. It looks like a zoetrope, but could just be a bowl that looks like one.
A zoetrope is like a phenakistiscope with the images and slits on the gadget’s wall.
“Zoetrope” and “phenakistiscope” are words you probably won’t need to memorize. They work like GIF animations. Except they’re mechanical, not digital.
By the time I was in high school, scientists had learned that the flicker fusion threshold for humans is about 50 to 90 times a second. That knowledge helped folks design analog television tech.
Then we started working on new tech. Maybe research uncovered faster flicker thresholds first. Or maybe the research was done to find out why folks noticed annoying flicker with some new display screens.
Either way, we learned that the human fast flicker threshold is somewhere around 500 times a second for displays with high frequency spatial edges. That may or may not be our upper limit. Like I said, this is a fairly new field.
Our tech is improving, too. That helps scientists get more data. Sometimes new tech shows a new aspect of being human. Newly-discovered, that is.
We’re learning about how other animals see the world, too.
So far, scientists are pretty sure that larger animals generally have slower flicker rates than small ones. A critter’s metabolism matters, too. The faster it works, the faster the flicker rate. In general.5
I’ve yet to meet someone who actually said we were “tampering with things man was not supposed to know.”
The attitude exists, however, with varying degrees of severity.
It’s not limited to disgruntled Christians.
Devotees of doom and gloom with secular preferences seem convinced that global catastrophe is just around the corner. Their focus of fear has changed a bit since my youth.
I think some are sincere, others may think scaring folks silly will help their cause. A few may simply enjoy the attention.
I don’t know what goes on in another person’s head. I hope doomsayers are sincere. I’m also quite sure that their more extreme predictions will fizzle and be forgotten.
On the other hand, I think dealing with environmental problems more effectively makes sense. The near-constant angst, not so much.6
More about why I think pursuing truth is a good idea:
1 European politics and Henry VIII:
2 The past; just like today, only different:
3 Faith and reason, science and religion:
4 Different cultures, different viewpoints:
5 Psychophysics, there’s lots to learn:
6 Being concerned, within reason:
I think truth is important, so do many others. Some see truth in ways that doesn’t line up with my views.
Sometimes I can respect how they reached their conclusions. But I still think I’m right. Closer to what’s true, at any rate.
That doesn’t make me one of humanity’s paragons of candor and acceptance. Just someone who wants truth and takes Matthew 7:1 seriously. Also Catechism pf the Catholic Church, 839-848, and that’s another topic for another post.
I like to think that most folks at least try to be truthful. Many may think they succeed.
Quite a few say truth is in very short supply today, at least in American politics.
I see their point.
It’s small comfort that America’s politicos aren’t the only ones having trouble keeping up a plausible public image.
This month’s show of outraged decency over a movie mogul’s professional and personal issues at least reflects a truth.
Maybe everyone who is expressing outrage at the latest scandal really believes that mistreating underlings is a bad idea.
That would be nice. But I’ve seen scandal exposed and outrage expressed before. I could assume the worst, and say so: loudly.
At least this time around I’m hearing precious few echoes of the old ‘boys will be boys’ attitude. I think we do learn. Slowly.
Expressing angst might help me seem like a serious thinker, or someone who cares. I figured writing this post makes more sense.
Accepting a view of truth that matches local conventions may have been easier in ‘simpler’ times.
Dying during a famine before disease did the job was easier, too.
Science and technology won’t solve every problem. But neither will misplaced nostalgia. I don’t miss ‘simpler’ times. (August 11, 2017; July 21, 2017)
Change happened during the ‘good old days.’ New kings took over when disease, war, or assassination removed a regional boss.
Upper-crust clothing styles changed, of course; fairly often over the last millennia at least. Languages and customs changed too, but not usually as fast.
But change was pretty much more of the same thing, over and over. When we weren’t fighting in a war and/or dying from disease or famine, we had time to discuss how we viewed reality. With our closest neighbors, anyway.
We had lots more time to deal with each bit of new information.
Western civilization hasn’t always had kings. We tried emperors, pharaohs, and tyrants on our way to kings and now presidents. “Tyrant” was a respectable title for a few centuries, and that’s yet another topic.
The pace picked up a bit around five centuries back. Technology helped.
I don’t think movable type caused the Thirty Years War or the Enlightenment. But it helped more folks get more information, faster. I don’t see that as a bad thing. We don’t always use information prudently, but that’s on us: not our technology.
The word “dēcadentia,” Medieval Latin for “a falling away,” showed up in the mid-1500s. My language changed it to “decadence,” with pretty much the same meaning.
Fast-forward to the 18th century. Quite a few serious thinkers had been thinking seriously about events of the last few millennia. The Enlightenment was in progress, and “decadence” got it’s current meaning.
A fair number of Europe’s philosophically-inclined folks noticed an empire-collapse-rebuild cycle that went back to Sargon of Akkad.
They figured a decaying in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, or leadership — “decadence,” new style — triggered the empire-collapse transition.
Some creative types got fed up with the Romantic movement in the late 19th century. I can’t say that I blame them. They called themselves Decadents. We got the Gothic novel and Edgar Allen Poe’s work from that.
I’m not a huge fan of Gothic novels, but I like quite a bit of Poe. I don’t see either as signs of impending doom, partly because I know a little history.
Gloominess has been fashionable, off and on, for a very long time. About a century back, a Dutch historian called the artistic and intellectual version fashionable melancholy.1
I like the term, but not the attitude.
I thought displaying a fashionable sense of suffering didn’t make sense when it came back, somewhere around 1970.
I still don’t.
As usual, the new attitudes weren’t really new. I mentioned the empire-collapse-rebuild cycle and “decadence” before.
Starting at least by the late 19th century, quite a few folks thought Western civilization was close to the “collapse” part of that cycle.
Some came up with ideas they thought made sense. I think trying to make this world a better place is a good idea. Basically.
But I also think Marxism and Hitler’s take on national socialism weren’t reasonable alternatives to the status quo, and that’s yet again another topic. Topics.
Serious serious thinkers had a point, though. Social and political structures were seriously overdue for an overhaul. They still are. And that’s nothing new.
The Church hit a really bad patch about a thousand years back. The Y1K debacle included one of our worst papal role models. A little later we got Saint Francis of Assisi. Then, about five centuries back, we hit another rough patch.
I think Europe’s civic leaders helped turn a reform into an upheaval. Propaganda and the Thirty Year’s war arguably made the Enlightenment possible.
It’s a mess we’re still cleaning up, and probably will be for centuries.
Another upheaval, much less catastrophic, started about a half-century ago.
Catholic scholars and clergy had been discussing theological and pastoral issues. Nothing new there.
Many thought that what had worked pretty well in 1870 might not be an ideal fit with the world of the 1950s. That seems reasonable to me.
More to the point, Pope John XXIII thought that talking about changes since 1870 made sense. In 1959 he announced his plan to start formal discussions.
Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council in 1962 and died the next year. The Council closed in 1965, John XXIII was canonized in 2014, and some Catholics are still having conniptions. I’m not one of them.
That’s partly because I think our Lord was telling the truth, and — like I said — partly because I know a little history.
Change is one of the few things in this universe that don’t change. Or is that doesn’t change? Never mind.
Change can be good. Some new ideas, like the law codes of Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, were arguably an improvement on earlier traditions.
That was about four millennia back.
We’re less certain about exactly when Abraham lived. That’s led some scholars to think he’s basically fictional.
I don’t agree, but I don’t think absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It’s not proof, anyway. (March 12, 2017)
I’ve speculated about what we might know about today’s America, around the year 5600 AD: three millennia from now.
Also what scholars brimming with (over-) confidence might assume about my branch of Western civilization. (March 30, 2017)
How fast change happens varies considerably. Some ‘simpler times’ enjoyed pretty much the same routine of famines, plagues, and wars for generations.
Maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the right word.
Then there was the Late Bronze Age Collapse, about three millennia back.
We’ve started piecing together what happened, and when. Almost every city around the eastern Mediterranean was destroyed in the first half-century. Maybe less.
Some people fled burning cities. Some didn’t, or couldn’t. Unburied corpses littering the ruins suggest that survivors had to get out in a hurry. Or that there were no survivors.
Some abandoned cities are still unoccupied.
We rebuilt, eventually.
There hasn’t been anything like it since. Not on that scale, not as swiftly devastating.
We didn’t lose everything, though. Folks preserved bits of knowledge and wisdom over the centuries following the Collapse. Some remembered what Abraham had learned.
I don’t think we’ve gotten a whole lot smarter since Hammurabi’s day, or Abraham’s. We have, however, learned quite a bit. Just as important, we’ve gotten a lot better at recording and using knowledge.
I don’t see cuneiform, movable type, or integrated circuits as threats. They’re tools.
Information tech, old and new, helps individuals find and share more information, faster. That helps us learn what others think, and discuss what what we’re finding.
I think that makes sense. It certainly seems better than some attitudes I’ve seen.
Again, I think truth is important.
Truth, all truth, points toward God. (Catechism, 27, 31-35, 41, 74, 2500)
I think what the Church has been saying for two millennia is true, and hasn’t changed. How we have been sharing these truths keeps changing.
That makes sense to me, since languages and cultures keep changing.
Yearning for an imagined Golden Age, or imagining that we should try to live in a rose-tinted memory of an earlier era? That doesn’t make sense. Not to me.
I’ve said most of this before:
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1 Fashionable or not, it’s hot healthy:
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