An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Evolution and innovations

The hundred-years horizon of culture and the labyrinth of change

We are struck with the terrible curse of conscious death, but we are also blessed with the ability to ‘recall’ deceased loved ones, and even talk with them and hear their soothing voice. An elder who buried a lifelong companion has no other solace left than the evocation of a friendly face; an adolescent who suddenly lost her mother will only find consolation behind the intimacy of her closed eyes, when the image almost reaches out to ease the unbearable pain of solitude. But all those merciful enchantments end within a hundred years.

The hundred-years horizon within which we live is the rule-of-thumb to discern between myth and reality. Only assertions about the last hundred years can be verified, and the people we are responsible for do not live before this frame.

We do not really know the whereabouts of our relatives before this boundary. If we want to go beyond we must rely on second hand sources such as storytellers and history-books, entering the reality of myths and epics merely produced to charm, to assure or to convince. Claims of one hundred years old cannot be proven, or can be proven by various rivalling parties at once.

What happened more than a century ago happened in another world, where none of the living bears responsibility, owes anything, or can find identity or pride. There is no reason to expect satisfaction or benefit from events one or more centuries ago, in an age beyond our own reach or merit. The deeds of old dead corpses taken to be our forefathers happened in another world, where none of the living bear responsibility, owe anything, or can find identity or pride. Fantasies of old have nothing to say in favour of someone living today, and nothing can be delivered to the past. No one living today carries a pledge coming from behind the hundred-years horizon.

Culture

Animals change their foraging routines when imposed by circumstances, and finches sing in other dialects in different territories. The evolution of any life form is embedded in an immense labyrinth of change, and all life forms in their turn transform the environments of all others.

Ever since life exists on our planet, life and environment transform incessantly. All earth’s free oxygen available today, which each of us breaths every minute of our lives, is the excretion of bacteria and algae who ruled the planet a billion years ago. Abounding limestone rocks are deposits of shels and skeletons of sealife prospering half a billion years ago.

Evolution of genes leads to transformation of environments, environments influence cultures and cultures lead to further evolution of genes.

Religious people claiming preferential treatment are appalled by the idea that we belong in nature. Yet, the bible leaves them no hope: we are made of mud and will return to mud. The Latin word homo – man - is etymologically akin to humus – earth. We are humus sapiens sapiens: very worrying mud.

Human physical characteristics have not altered during the last forty thousand years. Adaptations to different environments as hair grow, skin colour and body size are literally superficial.119 Compared to older ancestors our skull is no longer built to support strong muscles, and allows a larger cortex. This is true for all human populations living on the earth today, even for the strongest or the dumbest among us. Since we have a great talent for maltreating the divergent, the absence of human variants proper could be appreciated as a blessing; on the other hand, it might have been exactly this talent that exterminated humans of a different species, and racism might have been invented only to provide surrogates for them.

Our physical stability of the last forty millennia has been matched with an immense cultural diversity. The same humans can live near the North Pole and in tropical forests; forage on either mammals, plants, fish or shells; live happily in bands of fifty individuals, or in cities of millions. Those differences prove that cultural variation and transformation is innate to human nature, and is even its most striking characteristic. It is the fabulous gene that turns all our other genes irrelevant.

A tale of the African Khoisan – one of the last foraging peoples - goes that a long time ago a lion could build a nest in a tree and fish could live on land. Then Heitsi-Heibib gave each animal its own way, and left only humans free to choose their actions. It is remarkable that the same Idea pops up in the Intalian Renaissance, when Mirandola has the creator revealing to Adam:

The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws we laid down; you, by contrast, not impeded by such restrictions, may [..] trace for yourself the traits of your nature.120

Explorers always introduce their written or filmed reports about exotic natives with a reference to a ‘thousand years old' culture, even if they were never there before, and even if the remembrance of the natives do not surpass the hundred-years horizon. Anthropologists are used to describe foreign cultures in a deterministic, almost botanical way, as if beliefs and customs are immutable. Yet wise men continuously alter food taboos if supplies become scarce, invent new ceremonies to press idle demons or initiate migration when resources run dry.

Prehistoric bands built alliances by gifts, among which women were highly appreciated. Exogamy - the offering of women – allowed to combine variations in behaviour into broader language, notion, understanding and industry. In this way, otherwise short-lived cultures blended into larger, more viable tribes, and eventually into the cross-breeds we call nations.

At first a limited aggregate of sounds, words, images and techniques was confined to isolated bands of hardly more than fifty individuals. Most of those bands disappeared forever, but where different customs mingled, and complexity of language inevitably followed fusion of cultures, the variety of tools and crafts grew. Isolated primeval bands were unfit to survive, let alone to contribute to long term cultural evolution and enter history.

But where exchange occurred, progress became possible. The few living bands of foragers we know today give proof of two ways of exchange: the past exchanges that made them survive up to the present moment, and the present interaction with explorers, tourists and anthropologists.

Culture embraces the most trivial as well as the most sophisticated human activities. It is how populatio ns live and think day by day, including skills, customs, world-image etc. Culture has neither organization nor borders: it is a dynamic multi-layered amalgam of historical, geographical and intellectual influences, and can only be frozen by ideology and repression.

All animals have culture. Less complex animals alter their culture slowly, while humans dispute all the time about how their culture should be. Civilizations can house various cultures, and cultures can span more civilizations. Cultures try to make the best of given circumstances. They necessarily change over time because circumstances change.

Cultures are not equal. Every cultural expression is a human choice right or wrong, never a spell of ancient folklore. There are differences in individual dignity, in communication, in mutual aid etc.… Those differences are not related to race or nature: all populations have somehow proven to be able to exploit possibilities for the best as they rise.

Ideologists claim to be keepers of culture, invest it with antiquity and spread panic about its fading in order to prolong their own power. In the process they produce a mix up between terms like ‘a civilization’, ‘to civilize’, ‘culture’, ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’. But culture itself is not threatened by interactions the way bureaucracies are - change is even the blood in its veins. There is no loss in a culture disappearing or changing by the choice of the individuals living it.121 The volatility of culture implies that no free society remains multi-cultural for long. People freely and prosperously living together necessarily evolve to one skeptical, lively meta-culture, an eclectic collection of altering individual choices.

History demonstrates time after time that people easily accustom to new habits, and can learn any skill, in only three generations. The first generation is stuck in the old frame; the next understands the new but is still tributary to the first, feels stranded between; but the third generation is the natural child, candidly confronting the new environment.

Every living being is entitled to an enjoyable life, with or without profitable stories about the past. We have no excuse for bragging over deeds of old dead corpses taken to be our forefathers, while we should take pride in our own conduct right now, as an individual responsibility in which neither holy books nor history can help us.

We must not ask ourselves if our deeds are compliant with the wishes of dead people we do not know, because we never lived in their company. We must ask ourselves instead if we make a world where we, and those who lived or live with us, or will live after us, enjoy their lives.

We are always tempted by ideologies to make terrible, irreversible mistakes while appeasing ourselves with backward reasoning, preferably in the safe haven of a mutually reinforcing group. To protect ourselves from those terrible mistakes we must stay aware of the difference between ideological nonsense and reasonable sensibility. Ideological nonsense claim definite certainty and demand sacrifice. Sensible reasoning yields only provisory knowledge and demands caution.

Innovations, David Landes and the myth of Western superiority

David Landes brands the view that the actual scientific progress is indebted to anyone else but Europeans as ‘the new myth’ or ‘the new gospel’. He wrote:

The myth is misleading by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making, especially that breakthrough of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that goes by the name “scientific revolution”. 122

Indeed the vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making: this is even a tautology, because in this sentence both ‘modern’ and ‘Europe’ refer to one and the same place and period. One might ask what exacly Landes wants to gain by this assertion. If he would want to make up a theory, where would he go from here? His statement is as true or false for Europe today as for Persian Babylon in the sixth century BCE or for African Alexandria in the third century CE. It proofs only something to people who manage to believe that history had never an other goal than their own little moment in their own little spot. The rest of humanity regards the argument meaningless, and finds no basis to attribute the human talent for progress and modernity to one small but arrogant group.

Until we find suffcient comparable planets, modern scientific accomplishment remains unique, and therefore average per sé.

If Constantius Chlorus had kept his hands off a nice girl in a Serbian inn where he had stopped for the night, Constantine had never been born to make Christianity the leading religion of Europe. We will never know if the result would have been more progress or less. We only know that Europe knew breakthroughs, for instance the two centuries referred to by Landes, as well as stand-stills, for instance the eight centuries between the condemnation of Nestorius and the condemnation of Roger Bacon.

There has never been declared a science contest with a finish set in the year 2000 CE. Nobody ever planned or wrought scientific revolutions. Our scientific knowledge is the accumulation of whatever remained from many futile trials in many places and times. If there is a contest at all, it is not a contest in deep space travelling or electric teeth brushes, but in supporting and furthering modernity, which is the valuing of every individual. And to this goal all civilizations, including this one, are obstructions, while all cultures of humanity have contributed to it.

Trial and error

Scientific knowledge grows with trial and error. This implies that erroneous theories are as functional in this process as are accepted theories. Scientific progress depends not on the presence of correct theories, but on the ability to replace one theory by a better one. It depends not on claims of definitive truth, but on the overturning of claims of absolute truth.

It is pointless to interpret history as a race towards twentieth century science, predictably won by the West. Ancient hypotheses, even if expressed in a magical or mythological frame, are the very substance of progress. Without considering them, a realistic understanding of the nature and evolution of knowledge is impossible.

The perception that present-day science is above suspicion is contradicted by the almost daily stream of corrections published in scientific journals. Those corrections do not ridicule modern science. Rather the contrary is the case: they stress that knowledge – as opposed to ideologies - is fluid per sé. Science advanced because it was wrong all the time, not because it was truth forever.123

Western authors easily trust that their society has dealt forever with naïve superstition and tradition, and, contrary to the rest of the world, is founded on nothing but science and pure reason. Yet in reality none of us can escape from the natural order of primates, from the therein fitting family of hominids, and again from the there included sometimes clever, sometimes frankly stupid human species. Instead of investigating ancient documents and artefacts and to classify stages knowledge in relation to circumstances, those authors devised a firm watershed between science and superstition. This division is then mapped on continents, civilizations and races to establish the myth that somewhere on the fringe of Europe a few heroes started to use brains for the first time ever, and engendered the triumph of humanity. But since more than a century, sufficient ancient texts allow an improved judgement to whoever wants to. It has become absurd to maintain that non-Greeks only told myths while only Greeks reasoned.

Progress towards more effective science requires the continuous disagreement between science and ideology, between curiosity and traditionalism. This disagreement is present in all societies and all people. But when a civilization wants to establish its power on firm ground, it shifts towards convention; when central power fades, minds shift towards openness and curiosity. A scientist knows he might be wrong, a priest can’t be wrong; a scientist is delighted by a new idea, a priest is offended by it - and most scholars of all times are a bit of both.

A valuable history of science must not only include the beginning of writing and granite cutting, but also investigate why this beginning happened at that place and time, and for which categories of place and time this instance is exemplary; it must also investigate how such innovations engender new requirements and possibilities. To proclaim geniuses is mythology; to trace series of encounters, exchanges and changes is history.

The sudden burst of innovations in the West needs to be explained by external factors: leaning on Western peculiarities to explain the same Western peculiarities is circular reasoning. To claim superior morals, character or genius for Europeans, emulates the superstition Western science claims to have shaken off.

One example of how superstition can be used to explain modernity – or how tradition can be used to explain innovation - is given by David Landes when he wonders: ‘why this peculiarly European joie de trouver? This pleasure in new and better? This cultivation of invention?’. He then summarizes four reasons he found in the works of various scholars. Predictably, three out of four praise the Judeo-Christian tradition.124

The Judeo-Christian respect for manual labour

The first reason for European inventiveness presented by Landes is the Judeo-Christian respect for manual labour. He gives the following example:

when God warns Noah of the coming flood and tells him he will be saved, it is not God who saves him. “build thee an ark of gopher wood,” he says, and Noah builds an ark…

But God gives a painstakingly detailed work order to Noah, and this order must be followed without conceited thinking or inventing – such disobedience is exactly the sin of the people that will perish in the flood. Whatever Yahweh expected from Noah, it was certainly not a ‘joie de trouver’. The way the ark was built is no proof of respect for labour, and certainly no cultivation of invention. It is rather the way of mindless slaves. After all, the Bible leaves no doubt that God sent the flood to punish man for his arrogance, not to stimulate his inventiveness:

every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.125

The Bible book with the story of the flood, Genesis, has many stories to illustrate that man should not try to understand or create anything – not surprising if one remembers that the book is written by religious fanatics upset by the superiority of Persian scholars. To Adam and Eve, knowledge was forbidden formally. If the Bible had ever influenced human curiosity, then the command that ‘of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it’ points out that this influence was definitely negative. Adam was sent forth from Paradise to till the ground not as an endorsement, but as a punishment.126

The labour spent on the Tower of Babel caused divine fear and outrage because it was self-directed, and Yahweh destroys human initiative once more:

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.127

Prophets, church fathers and reformers in their sermons never explained the legend of the flood as a praise of manual labour, and certainly not as a praise of initiative or inventivity: from Paradise to Babel, men were punished for the sin of pride and ambition.

The Judeo-christian tradition is not marked by respect for labour, but by labour as a sin and as a punishment. Other religions respect manual labour more, either with or without ‘pleasure in new and better’, for example in this Zoroastrian text:

It is necessary for man that he be continuously employed on his own work, and then the work becomes his own. For it is declared in revelation, that every one who hereafter becomes employed on his own work, if in the midst of that work any trouble and discomfort happen to him, obtains in that other world twelve recompenses for every single instance.128

The Judeo-Christian subordination of nature to man

Landes’ second reason for the growing number of inventions in the West, is the Judeo-Christian subordination of nature to man, a notion stemming from Hegel.129 This subordination of nature to man certainly refers to farming, which existed for thousands of years before the beginning of a Judean or a Christian tradition, and even before immigrants brought it to Europe.

Landes continues: ‘this is a sharp departure from widespread animistic beliefs and practices [..]. No one was listening to pagan nature worshippers in Christian Europe’.

Nature worship is today mostly found in adventure books for boys, or in Tarzan movies when the heroe sneaks along a tribe of blacks dancing silly by the moonlight to rescue another white woman. This ‘nature worship’ is invented in the eighteenth century by people who imagined that it would fit degenerated savages who had forgotten their divine (monotheist) creator, and in their desperate confusion pray to stones and animals. Hegel for example, with his talent for bad observation, derided a baloney ‘Hindu nature worship’ as a primitive stage on the path to Christianity:

Everything, therefore - sun, moon, stars, the Ganges, the Indus, beasts, flowers - everything is a god [..]. And while, in this deification, the finite loses its consistency and substantiality, intelligent conception of it is impossible.130

Expecting exotic people to worship the Western concept ‘nature’ is as ridiculous as hoping to discover an isolated band of electrical engineers in the Amazon forest. Many myths and legends elucidate on rain and crops, but rain ceremonies never worshipped rain, and season festivals never worshipped crops. Ancient tales connecting celestial bodies to gods are explanatory, using the semantics at the time available. In their particular manner, religions tend to recuperate natural singularities as signboards of personal gods. Like the Egyptian Ra was associated with the sun, the Bible says that Yahweh ‘thundered from heaven’,131 but this does not mean that the physical sun was Ra or that the Israelites worshipped thunder. Medieval Europe associated Jesus Christ with a lamb and the Madonna Immaculata with the crescent moon, but they hardly worshipped a lamb or the moon. Divinities are persons per sé. Until Columbus, the vast majority of the world population, including Europe, faced nature roughly in the same way: sometimes as a frightening defeater, sometimes as a frail victim, sometimes as a pleasant shelter.

Neither the Bible nor historical records offer any foundation for the racist viewpoint that Christian European worship had a different, less ‘savage’ nature than religions of analogous societies. Animism is a magical world-image, not a religion. It was the predominant world-image of ancient hunter-gatherers and early farmers on any continent. When farming intensified from the New Stone Age on, animism was progressively pushed back by the worship of forefathers, who in their turn led to covetous war gods and finally to civilization lords with universal posturing. In Europe as everywhere, remains from animistic times lingered between official religion, and even provided the substrate for it.

Andrew Dickinson White has demonstrated and illustrated medieval animism beyond doubt. Georg Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy, believed that gases in mines were manifestations of either 'malignant imps, who blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who simply tease the workmen in various ways.' One of these spirits killed twelve miners at once in Saxony. Mines were abandoned because they were possessed by evil spirits. It took centuries to depart from such 'widespread animistic beliefs and practices':

In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena, the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a solemn protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty was "only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our guard, will finally turn away from us the blessing of God."132

The following quote is an excerpt of a bull written by pope Sixtus IV to authorize the Inquisition. It was written just a few years before Columbus reached America, while Erasmus was desperately defending understanding between human beings:

[Persons] give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage [We grant to the inquisitors that they] may exercise against all persons, of whatsoever condition and rank, the said office of inquisition, correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising, according to their deserts, those persons whom they shall find guilty as aforesaid.133

This bull appeared at the head of every copy of the Malleus maleficarum, a famous handbook for inquisitors. To the question ‘whether witches can by some glamour change men into beasts’ this handbook answers:

Our bodies naturally are subject to and obey the angelic nature as regards local motion. But the bad angels, although they have lost grace, have not lost their natural power, as has often been said before. And since the faculty of fancy or imagination is corporeal, that is, allied to a physical organ, it also is naturally subject to devils, so that they can transmute it…134

Demons and witches disguised as all kind of animals appear in any of the hundreds of transcripts of inquisition interrogations. The devil appeared as bats, toads and goats (especially the three-horned kind). Witches changed in all kinds of animals: in crows and cats (mostly black) to spy on people; in hares destroying crops on the fields, in bees, butterflies, spiders….

On the average, every two years someone in Europe dies from exorcism, a worldwide relict of animism.135 In Europe it is present among Muslims and Christians. An exorcist course was still organized by the Catholic Vatican University in 2005 CE.

The Judeo-Christian sense of linear time

The third reason, following Landes, is the Judeo-Christian sense of linear time: 'Other societies thought of time as cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again'.

But again Landes provides no observation nor proof for his statement, and the assumption that Judeo-Christian tradition handled time different than any other comparable culture is manifestly wrong.

Myths about a beginning of time existed from primeval bands to the greatest civilization.

Myths about a great imminent victory are common among farming tribes. In Egyptian texts linear time is especially documented with regard to Osiris and immortality, and from there it reached Persia. The Persians transposed myths about tribal victories to the measure of their nearly universal empire. From there it was mixed with eastern imageries and eventually inspired the authors of Genesis. Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as many religious factions in the East, adopted the imagery of the End Times, which is the most linear notion of time around.

A cyclical time concept is indispensable to farming and herding societies whose life follows seasons, including Judeans: the introduction of the seventh day Sabbath made Judean time possibly more cyclic than neighbouring civilizations, and agriculture in Europe thrived on recurring seasons and feasting days as in any other agricultural society.

On the other hand every metropolis, no matter its place or time, recorded the past to claim longevity, thereby necessarily implying, and even manipulating, linear time. Sacred texts assign to the own civilization a significant place in a progressive time frame by means of a justifying historical account. The chronicles composed by all civilizations of the last five thousand years are meaningless without the sense of linear time. A kingdom can not exist without a history culminating in the victorious ruler, and time is just one of the lines that converge in the metropolis. Assyrian king lists go back to 1700 BCE, Sumerian king lists to 2400 BCE. Ancient Chinese chronology goes back to 2700 BCE, and the chronology found in the Egyptian Turin Papyrus goes back to the first Egyptian dynasty of 2900 BCE.

An Irish prelate by the name of James Usher calculated about 1650 CE that the biblical creation must have happened on Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE, a date generally accepted until the nineteenth century CE in Western academies. Depending on when you expect to be surprised by judgement day, this date results in a linear time of six or seven thousand years. One millenary before James Ussher, the Central-American Mayas calculated their history in millions of years, and the Indian Vedas calculated a linear lifetime of the actual universe of 864 billion years. In the Christian and the Vedic cosmology, the ‘linear’ period of time ends with a cosmic catastrophe, but only in the Vedas a new Brahma will be born after another time span of billions of years, and a new universe will arise.

Clerks have always conceived reasons why their own civilization was the exceptionally blessed culmination of progressing history. The line from the ‘beginning of times’ to the present is certainly not invented by Hegel. Also in this respect the Bible is not the oldest composition, and Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations not the last. The misreading by Landes might have been excusable before ancient Asian and African texts were translated, but today scientists have to take such texts into account, not only because of their influence on the much younger Bible, but because without them we can not understand long-term cultural evolution of humanity as a whole. The Judeo-Christian peculiarities summed up above are prejudices, not confirmed by careful comparison with other periods and cultures.

A general theory of innovations

A correct understanding of innovations can only be based on a general theory, not on premises specially devised for the occasion, tailored to characteristics found in one favoured civilization. Such a general theory must be evaluated in various cultural settings, including, but not promoting, the Western. The theory established below is in accord with cultural observation, and confirms that scientific evolution does not depend on super races or superior morals, but, much as all of nature, is driven by consecutive circumstances and interactions.

Innovations occur when three conditions are met simultaneously: the first condition is the availability of material resources; the second is the availability of mental resources - ideas; the third condition is that the innovation yields a positive cost-benefit balance to decision makers. In other words, innovations need to be feasible, conceivable and acceptable. Innovations are produced and maintained by none but those three conditions, and only if they are present simultaneously.

The three conditions for innovations cumulate throughout a network of exchange embracing prehistorical and historical times. Materials and ideas are acquired by means of techniques and skills created by previous innovations, locally or elsewhere, and so on. Therefore the probability of innovations grows together with the change and exchange of cultures. The richness and variety of our joint vocabulary and imagery could only emerge under a condition of always altering divergence and convergence.

Without continual change and exchange progress is impossible.

Innovations disappear again when one or more of those conditions fail for a hundred years, since behind the hundred-years horizon the necessary knowledge dies out. Even if objects and texts remain, the interpreter has disappeared. In 1938 CE Wilhelm Konig described a two thousand year old jar found near Baghdad, which resembled an electric battery: it was sealed with asphalt and pierced by an iron rod covered with copper. Dr. Arne Eggebrecht, experimenting with a reconstruction of such a battery, suggested that ancient works of art might have been gold-plated with it. Europe employed the wheeled plough seemingly from the eleventh century CE on, but a millenary before, Pliny the Elder reported wheeled ploughs being used in Cisalpine Gaul.

Archaeology risks to underestimate the frequency of short-lived artefacts, because it can not perform random sample excavations on an intercontinental scale. Thankful for every occasion to discover, it is not in the position to pick arbitrary sites or perform blind trials otherwise. As a result, archaeology always risks to fulfil its own prophecies, and too often takes absence of proof for proof of absence, especially when large areas are left out because nothing is expected, or, even worse, because results would compromise the ruling ideology.

Materials

As stated above, the first condition for innovation is the availability of base materials. The impressive scientific advances in Alexandrian times had been impossible without the papyrus growing in the marches of the Nile delta. The famous library of Alexandria was purposely erected in the midst of this delta, and the influx of papyrus was as essential to it as the influx of scholars.

Materials can be replaced. Papyrus has been replaced by parchment, and parchment by paper. Coal has been replaced by oil, and so on. This does however not mean that materials are less irrelevant. Even if replaced after a short time, they were often essential in the network of exchange of innovations, and their replacement was an innovation by itself.

In Medieval Europe, books were more expensive than paintings, and only when cheap paper became known it made sense to intensify the production of books and start printing. Metallurgy required fire, and electric light required coal workers.

Despite the romantic imagery of creative starvation, this need for materials, among other things, makes wealth an important factor in the development of arts and crafts. This is more true in every new decade as modern science requires ever more expensive equipment. One example is the fraud case of Mostafa Mansour Imam, an Egyptian scholar working in Saudi-Arabia. After publishing several photographs of fossil algae, he sent an article to a Spanish journal where a stunned editor identified the presented photographs as his own. Although his study was valuable, Mansour Imam had lacked funds to acquire the expensive photographic equipment. After sending an e-mail with excuses, he died from a heart attack.136

Many innovations happened in China long before they arrived in the West, but novelties did not continue to appear within China at the same rate. Because of the presence of vast plains of loess deposits, farming was less centralized along river banks, and China was less pressed for accumulation of power and wealth in a few single spots. Those conditions, and not some racial or national superiority or inferiority, weakened the first condition for innovation in China.

Wealth is unevenly distributed over individuals. This distribution needs to be assessed before any interesting conclusion can be drawn about the prospect of innovations in one nation. Often the most productive niches have been decadent courts, already alienated from centralist power and ideologies, but nonetheless gathering luxury, dancers, musicians, prostitutes, poets and philosophers. Plato’s most impressive attacks on materialism are uttered around affluent tables in wealthy houses. When a famine stroke Milan, Augustine was appalled to see that scholars like himself were banished from the court, while the dancing girls were allowed to stay. Avicenna made music and conversed with his pupils throughout the night at the court of Hamadan.

Ideas

Another condition for innovation is ideas. Much of what is said about the propagation of materials, applies to ideas as well. The mere fact that Alexandria was built on the crossroad of three continents, was as important as the mere fact that is was built amidst papyrus marches.

Whenever scholars were enslaved and deported after a military victory, or fled famine or repression, ideas migrated, integrated and impregnated. Ideas were also locked up in materials: goods betray the methods of their maker. Each time our physical or social reality changes, some thoughts disappear and others become thinkable.

Abstract thoughts are thoughts about a group of similars. Such thoughts are indispensable in everyday thinking: when an Eskimo recognizes a polar bear, he uses the abstract thought ‘polar bear’ that covers all individual polar bears, including small ones and dirty ones. Abstract thoughts become non-sense very fast if not constantly checked with reality. Spiritual thoughts for example can not be checked with reality. Mathematics do not belong to an eternal reality, but grew among living people through history, from stacking pebbles to launching rockets. Mathematics originate in real world calendar design, construction works, armament and so on. As all thinking, mathematical procedures are more or less abstract, but are never spiritual.

A man stuck in a maze will not manage to escape by strict formal logic. He has better chances using the rat’s strategy, and rage through the corridors until a solution crops up in the turmoil of trials and errors. Once escaped, chances are that he does not recall exactly how the solution came about, and if he recalls, his audience would not be enthralled by his account. One possible way to win applause then is to imagine a story about how he shrewdly sorted out a solution. Great inventors are haunted by mind-storms raging to the limits of insanity, and when finally they grab hold of a fresh idea, they tend to write books presenting it as the outcome of a series of logical steps.137

As Locke already concluded, the variety of ideas we have is caused by varying cultural circumstances. A researcher will only ‘find’ his thought if the evolution of our species and the experience of our culture has made it conceivable. Einstein was a brilliant thinker, but he might not have found the principle of relativity if his family had been more concerned with ornithology than with mathematics, and those mathematics in their turn date back to the dawns of many histories. We often forget that, like materials, ideas come to us rampantly. Ask a sailing champion what it took to win a race, and chances are that he will not mention the ocean.

During the first half of the twentieth century, many scholars tried to decipher the earliest Greek script, until Michael Ventris eventually succeeded. Andrew Robinson described his approach as ‘hypothesis and experiment which jump back and forth’, and follows:

There is no thread like Ariadne’s running through the linear B decipherment labyrinth. Even Ventris himself was unable to produce a coherent narrative of his method.138

The French scientist Sadi Carnot fashioned the theory of thermodynamics in 1824 CE. This superb intellectual exploit, in spite of the conventional perception, did not lead to the steam engine. Already half a century before, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot had designed such an engine to be mounted on a vehicle, without waiting for a theory. The device inspired the inventor of the theory it applied.139 The electric light bulb, maybe the most important invention ever, has only been discovered after almost a century of random trials and errors. Thomas Edison, the man who finally succeeded, admitted voluntarily that he could never explain how his best ideas came about. And the most impressive scientific development of the twentieth century, the discovery of the DNA structure - the formula on which every living being is built - was equally made by trial and error, involving scissors, paper snippets and lots of despair, as is described with humour by one of the involved Noble Prize winners, James Watson.140

Doubt - the essence of unbound thinking - is only possible if we know of different world-images, and realize that still others are possible we don't know yet. Only then we realize that thoughts are made and can be made, changed or rejected. This is the modern concept of ‘thinking’.

In an isolated culture, gods and rites are as solid as mountains and seasons. But when we hear of another population with a different world-image, we react either with aggressive dispute, demonization, recuperation etc.…. But as more borders are crossed and we hear of three, ten or more supreme truths, universal temples or chosen peoples, the insight grows that thoughts are just constructed by humans, and can be changed or disposed at will. This stretching of our mind is one of the biggest steps forward in thinking, and will eventually become the deathblow for Truth. It is the gift to create wild ideas, evolving towards reality by means of trial and error.

Inventors often fall victim to myth building. Ideas are never in the hands or head of one person only. The actual state of the art is learned from masters and fellows; skills are embedded in social settings and exchanged over borders of time, social groups and distance. In contrast with the commonly held notion that the only limit to ideas is the ‘brightness’ of someone’s ‘grey matter’, thoughts only become conceivable in a society through a long-winded evolution. Andrew Robinson wrote that deciphers of lost languages, besides their intellectual power, all were so lucky, to some extend, to be present at the right moment and

did not always admit their debts. Rivalry, sometimes with a touch of skulduggery, is endemic in archaeological decipherment141

This remark must be applicable for much of scientific thinking.

The most innovative societies always had the most outward interactions. This is because knowledge can only be maintained and developed over a long time within a network of different cultures, serving in turn as mutual shelters for periods of decay and disaster, but also because the opening of borders, and the resulting doubt towards official cosmologies, provokes skepticism by itself.

Archaeological finds in remote Tasmania contained fish-hooks, while the Aboriginals did not know fishing when Europeans first visited their island. The Greeks of the second millennium BCE knew writing – the Linear B alphabet - but lost it in the succeeding dark ages. Contrary to the isolated Tasmanians, the Greeks got a second chance, because they lived in the shadow of African and Asian temples and, while the Tasmanians never learned to fish again, because the art had had no opportunity to take shelter in adjacent cultures, in due course all classical Greek texts were written in, as they coined the new script themselves, Phoenician letters. If the Tasmanian Aboriginals had lived in Greece, they would have produced Aristotle.

The age that followed the wars of Alexander the Great was marked by the exchange of ideas over two vast continents and many destabilized civilizations. When Hero of Alexandria wrote his Pneumatics in the first century CE, the work summarized Asian and African mechanical inventions known and exchanged in his time. As in every society, some of those inventions were useful, other fanciful. He described, among other things, a steam engine to pump up water and a vessel to change water into wine - a device John the Evangelist might have noticed before composing his gospel.

Benefit

The third condition for innovation is cost-benefit. Perceived benefits allow innovations, while ineffective innovations will disappear after time. Those benefits are not just financial, but money should not be discarded as a reliable indicator. Benefits created by innovations will contribute to wealth in their turn, leading to a reinforcing feedback of innovations. In this regard cost-benefit reacts different from materials or ideas. The latter might become exhausted which might break the reinforcing feedback of wealth. This is even bound to happen in a wealthy but isolated society.

An innovation must be beneficial to sovereign decision makers in a society. As a consequence, more decision makers lead to more innovations, and authoritarian societies are the least receptive for innovations, because there is only one decision point available. This is one other reason (besides growing exchange of ideas) that most innovations happen when civilizations fall apart.

Leonardo Da Vinci designed a calculator more than a century before Blaise Pascal. He never actually made one because nobody needed it: the cost-benefit condition failed and the idea was forgotten. A few years later, Schickard built a calculator to help Kepler with his astronomical enquiries, but it was never distributed because nobody else was interested. Pascal convinced the Catholic authorities to forbid the development of more calculators, after which his model flourished and made him famous.

Printing was known in the Old Stone Age to decorate cave walls with hands and animal corpses; it was used since the third millennium BCE in seals to stamp clay documents, in India and Mesopotamia; it was also used for a thousand years in the East and elsewhere to embellish fabrics and walls; in ancient Alexandria it was used by prostitutes to print obscene drawings in the sand with the engraved soles of their shoes, and at about the same time, the second century CE, paper sheets were printed in China. Also from China stems the first known printed book, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 CE. In Europe, books were printed only when the benefits were raised by the exchange with distant continents, in its turn causing the weakening of central ideology and growth of decentralized wealth, while the cost diminished by the introduction of Chinese paper recipes. Today almost every European nation claims to have invented printing.

Triggers of scientific revolutions and progress

In an established civilization the task of a scientist is to study the massive body of knowledge, find a missing brick in the solid building of answers and write a new book to fill the gap. In the twentieth century CE Thomas S. Kuhn contested that such ‘normal science’ was the whole story. In his view scientific progress does not merely consist of extending the scientific collection by means of logical operations.142

To Thomas Kuhn, great scientific progress stems from the conflict between accepted convictions and apparent anomalies. Generally accepted convictions are consistent and persistent paradigms, while occasionally anomalies challenge scientists to search for alternative concepts, leading to the replacement of those paradigms. Science is no longer just adding bricks to the tower of knowledge, but demolition and renovation. Scholars had been ‘unconscious’ of the nature of their own acts for centuries.

Kuhn refrains from considering the relation between society and scientific paradigms. He insists that paradigm shifts do not influence the way a society looks at reality. Yet ideologies are based on carefully selected paradigms: without the paradigm that the earth was in the centre of the universe, the Catholic Church could hardly claim to be the custodian of creation, and without the paradigm of Germanic supremacy, Hitler could hardly have invented Nazism.

Paradigms in general bear social relevance: society provided the scientists’ environment, and science provides ideas to shape society. Many seemingly neutral scientific theories are conditioned by ideology. If this had not been the case, Galileo and Darwin would have been treated differently.

It is important to know why some paradigms are discarded and others are accepted in the first place, despite the anomalies they bear, and how it is possible that anomalies can survive for centuries without causing unrest. The answer is that we are neither hurt nor disturbed in any way by inconsistencies in our thoughts. Socially relevant paradigms are accepted if they are beneficial to the ideology in place, and if this benefit outweighs the discomforts created by inherent anomalies. Those discomforts are the price of censorship and repression and the cost of checking dissidents. To official ideology, the cost-benefit equation of innovations appears as a dissent-ideology argument.

Anomalies are no sufficient triggers of progress. Old paradigms must either become inappropriate to the power in place, or wither with them. New ideas become conceivable and acceptable under pressure of altering borders and environments.

That our brains cannot stand inconsistencies is a grave underrating. The most naïve mind is never aware of inconsistencies, while the most educated mind manages inconsistencies as a herdsman manages his flock: although the sheep never come to rest, it is a satisfying business to keep them together and account for them.

Without radically changing circumstances, a world-image can easily bear anomalies when it is supported by official institutions: just see how often academics make use of the phrase ‘it is generally accepted’ where some kind of scientific line of reasoning would be more appropriate.143 Accidental fissures can be ignored or, if threatening, solved by means of ritual cleansing, and ideologies can be saved by moral display or by casting out dissidents and other demons.

One example is the Big Bang theory about the origin of the universe. Despite its anomalies, among which creation out of nothing, it is well accepted among academics.144 Sir Fred Hoyle, as a new Thomas Aquinas, managed to resolve this anomaly by reconciling Einstein’s theory of relativity with the Aristotelian uncreated universe. This interesting alternative became known as the Steady State theory. But the concept of a universe without a beginning or an ending was incompatible with traditional European ideology, still influenced by the Christian creation myth, and Fred Hoyle paid for this discord with his dismissal as a Cambridge professor.145 Each paradigm has its flaws to bear, but it is sufficient to burn the heretics in order to live with those minor defects.

Progress is no necessity; it is not even what civilizations deliberately look for. Academies constantly search for the ultimate, final theory that will explain the universe for all times to come, just like ideologists claim to establish a definitive, unchanging world-image. The only real danger to both is the dreadful instability of the universe.