| | | | | | | Man's evolution from nomadic animal to modern-day existentialist thinker started about 15,000 years ago when probably some women figured out how to plant grain and therefore people could stay in one place by growing food and domesticating animals.
This led to the invention of necessary intellectual tools to manage large populations. First we had to learn how to count. We're hardwired, it seems, to count one, two and many. It took thousands of years to develop basic arithmetic.
The next big step was the invention of an alphabet which would allow the human species to record knowledge from one generation to the next going forward, exactly, and with time frames. The Venetian alphabet was refined by the ancient Greeks about 3,000 years ago, which led to many books and an Athenian population where 10% of the people were literate.
Philosophical debate became ingrained in their culture and out of that grew sophisticated concepts like ethics and democracy, logic and science.
| Marshall McLuhan taught us the medium is the message. The written word, became that medium that gave us our modern humanitarian civilization.
The written word allowed people to become literate and keep track of things in a factual manner from one generation to the next. This gave rise to the brilliant ancient Greeks. 10% of Athens was literate. The ancient Greeks were the ones to first discuss ethics and Republics.
It wasn't specific things that were taught, it was just the ability to record information factually from one generation to the next. Which also caused a decline in myths according to Burke and Ornstein. Then when Greece was completely destroyed around the birth of Christ, society started to devolve. You will be hard-pressed to find any thinkers for the next 1300 years after the fall of Greece to compare with any one of probably hundreds of ancient Greeks in the sophistication of their thought. The book the Swerve points out how it was Lucretius's writings on the Nature of things discovered in the 15th century that led to a renaissance in thinking. So here the ancient Greeks are still leading the way.
en.wikipedia.org
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
During the Middle Ages all of Europe practically became illiterate. The monks being the guardians of books and literacy. Then Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1457 and over the next few decades millions of books were printed and people started reading again and became literate and that led to the age of Enlightenment. None of this had to do with the specificity of anything being taught, it was the fact that people simply had the ability to read the ideas of other people.
And as people became generally educated they became more and more humane. Our founding fathers, were the intelligentsia of the day. No one else could have written the constitution. On the one hand they formed the beautiful Constitution relative to everything that went before that, on the other hand they were fine with having slaves.
We've all seen how as a society becomes increasingly educated it gets rid of things like slavery, segregation, racism to the point where today we are the most humane we have ever been according to Steven Pinker.
Most of the education the people get around the world and that is taught in schools and major universities is factual stuff. And along with the facts students are generally taught logic. General facts and logic. This is all stuff that has to be learned. If one just goes back to the mid-1800s and examines how the average person thought and then compares it to todays thinking the difference is night and day. In fact all one has to do is go look at an old movie and compare it to today.
My favorite book the Axe Makers Gift is the one that taught me how fundamental written language, books and education were to the rise of a humanitarian civilization.
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