excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
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A great article. Facts matter.
www.takimag.com
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Jared Diamond’s 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies offered a straightforward materialist explanation for why Europeans conquered so many non-Europeans.
Much of Diamond’s analysis was prefigured in books by historian Alfred W. Crosby about the impact of Christopher Columbus on world history, such as The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (the West sent wheat, smallpox, and yellow fever to the New World and brought home potatoes, corn, and syphilis), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, and Germs, Seeds and Animals.
In Crosby’s little-noticed 1997 book The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, however, he dared take a step beyond what Diamond was writing at the same time and ask: Could it be that Europeans won because they developed better ways of thinking?
...
Rather, Crosby argues, around 1250 at the peak of the Middle Ages, when the West had finally achieved an impressive level of civilization after its long Dark Ages, instead of subsiding into self-satisfied stagnation as most civilizations would, Europeans kicked off a new revolution in habits of thought.
For example, around this era, people began reading silently to themselves. The first library rules stating that patrons must be quiet date from the 1400s. Before then, almost everybody read out loud all the time. One famous exception to this rule in late antiquity was the theologian St. Ambrose, who, as St. Augustine marveled, read without speaking.
Not surprisingly, silent reading is faster. So it’s plausible to speculate that if there had been written verbal IQ tests back then, the spread of silent reading over the last millennium would have led to a sizable Flynn Effect of rising test scores.
But Europeans’ new, improved ways of thinking extended beyond simple tricks like silent reading. By the 16th century, according to Crosby:
To a Foucault or a Said, the West’s vast enhancements in the practical power of its habitual ways of thought were sinister. What matters is not how well a task is done, but who holds the whip hand. To Crosby, though, better styles of thinking are…well, better.
According to The Measure of Reality, Europeans began replacing their emotionally satisfying qualitative model of reality, which had been good enough for Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, with a quantitative approach that was globally unprecedented.
...
Of course, during the Woke Era, contradiction of your fondest wishes is intolerable, so this 750-year-old white male legacy of quantitative thinking is fading in prestige.
One of Crosby’s more difficult concepts is the revolution in thinking about time. In the 1200s, after centuries of untimed Gregorian chants that lasted as long as it took to intone their words, French musicians began to conceive of:
Crosby argues that Europeans invented the first really effective way to measure time—the mechanical clock—around 1300 because they gave up trying to measure time as a flow:
Thus, Northwestern Europeans were inspired to invent the escapement that makes clocks tick. (Many of the subsequent awe-inspiring discoveries of the Western mind, such as Mendelian genetics, quantum mechanics, and Claude Shannon’s demonstration of all that electronic machines could do just with digital 1s and 0s, reflect how fundamental reality is often more discrete and less of an analog continuum than we assume.)
...
Jared Diamond’s 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies offered a straightforward materialist explanation for why Europeans conquered so many non-Europeans.
Much of Diamond’s analysis was prefigured in books by historian Alfred W. Crosby about the impact of Christopher Columbus on world history, such as The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (the West sent wheat, smallpox, and yellow fever to the New World and brought home potatoes, corn, and syphilis), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, and Germs, Seeds and Animals.
In Crosby’s little-noticed 1997 book The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, however, he dared take a step beyond what Diamond was writing at the same time and ask: Could it be that Europeans won because they developed better ways of thinking?
...
Rather, Crosby argues, around 1250 at the peak of the Middle Ages, when the West had finally achieved an impressive level of civilization after its long Dark Ages, instead of subsiding into self-satisfied stagnation as most civilizations would, Europeans kicked off a new revolution in habits of thought.
For example, around this era, people began reading silently to themselves. The first library rules stating that patrons must be quiet date from the 1400s. Before then, almost everybody read out loud all the time. One famous exception to this rule in late antiquity was the theologian St. Ambrose, who, as St. Augustine marveled, read without speaking.
Not surprisingly, silent reading is faster. So it’s plausible to speculate that if there had been written verbal IQ tests back then, the spread of silent reading over the last millennium would have led to a sizable Flynn Effect of rising test scores.
But Europeans’ new, improved ways of thinking extended beyond simple tricks like silent reading. By the 16th century, according to Crosby:
To a Foucault or a Said, the West’s vast enhancements in the practical power of its habitual ways of thought were sinister. What matters is not how well a task is done, but who holds the whip hand. To Crosby, though, better styles of thinking are…well, better.
According to The Measure of Reality, Europeans began replacing their emotionally satisfying qualitative model of reality, which had been good enough for Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, with a quantitative approach that was globally unprecedented.
...
Of course, during the Woke Era, contradiction of your fondest wishes is intolerable, so this 750-year-old white male legacy of quantitative thinking is fading in prestige.
One of Crosby’s more difficult concepts is the revolution in thinking about time. In the 1200s, after centuries of untimed Gregorian chants that lasted as long as it took to intone their words, French musicians began to conceive of:
Crosby argues that Europeans invented the first really effective way to measure time—the mechanical clock—around 1300 because they gave up trying to measure time as a flow:
Thus, Northwestern Europeans were inspired to invent the escapement that makes clocks tick. (Many of the subsequent awe-inspiring discoveries of the Western mind, such as Mendelian genetics, quantum mechanics, and Claude Shannon’s demonstration of all that electronic machines could do just with digital 1s and 0s, reflect how fundamental reality is often more discrete and less of an analog continuum than we assume.)
...
