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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (240316)	12/22/2013 10:55:33 AM
From: koan	Respond to of 541777

I was using caves as a metaphor. My only point was that the accumulation of knowledge is what allowed civilization to hit critical mass to explode and the more knowledge the faster it evolves. The entire world lived off the knowledge of the ancient Greeks for a couple of thousand years; and had they been able to preserve all the knowledge they had we learned we would be a thousand years ahead of where we are now. IMO. But most of Greek knowledge was destroyed and the rest just couldn't be preserved as books had to be copied one at a time and they were destroyed by fungus and other things. And during the Dark ages most people were illiterate. Poetically it was a 2,000 year old book by Lucretius "one the nature of things" that had a hand in restarting civilization: "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a non-fiction book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction. [1] [2] Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age. [3] [4] [5] Greenblatt noted how unpopular the irreligious nature of the poem was even before Christianity spread: Once… you start thinking what the implications of a world made of atoms and emptiness and nothing else, lots of things, potentially at least, follow. And the things that follow can be extremely dangerous -- [dangerous to pagan, Jewish] or Christian orthodoxy… [3]Reception[ edit] en.wikipedia.org