November 20, 2009
 
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| Piety? Who Needs Piety? |
| 2/25/08 |
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"What do you think you're doing!" cried the great scientist to the soldier, as he leaned over his tracings in the sand. The soldier -- who had no idea who the man was, and how much his commander wanted him alive -- slew him on the spot. Had his world needed the works of his restless mind, the great Archimedes might now be hailed as the inventor of modern science, and the industrial revolution might have taken place 2,000 years ago. He came within an eyelash, in The Sand Reckoner, of inventing the calculus. He needed only the intellectual fiction of Newton's infinitesimal, and the convenient bookkeeping of Arabic numerals.
The Greek states succeeding Alexander the Great were constantly embroiled in wars with one another, so the rulers of Syracuse sought assistance from technology, and Archimedes was available to invent machines for ballistics -- literally, for hurling things around, like rocks from cranked-up catapults. The Mediterranean peoples always needed ways to get at scarce supplies of fresh water, so Archimedes perfected an idea of the Egyptians: a drill or screw whose inclined planes "pull" the water up as the levers of the screw are turned roundabout.
It is to Archimedes, too, that we owe our exclamation, "Eureka!" Plutarch tells the story of how the law of displacement of fluids came to Archimedes in his bath, whereupon he ran out into the streets naked and shouting in triumph. The law explains why a maple log might sink, but a ship made out of the same logs can float. Though Mediterranean man had long been sailing the sea, even unto farthest Britain, Archimedes must have suspected that his discovery could yet be put to practical use.
But he didn't invent the calculus, and there was no technological revolution. Indeed, during the Hellenistic period and then during the age of the Roman Empire, technological development was slow. A few bright spots there were, unquestionably. Since the Romans had large and thirsty cities, they built aqueducts, perfecting the arch as a weight-distributing device both practical and handsome. They built roads across which their armies, their merchants, and their well-to-do citizens could ride with ease. They invented various recipes for concrete, depending on what you needed to do with it -- including one most useful form that would set up under water, for the piers of bridges. Then, for those same piers, you would need equipment to move earth that no number of men together could budge. Hence that still-necessary monster, the pile driver.
Still, there was no revolution -- because there was no need for it. Slavery retarded it. That's not because ancient slavery was unjust. It was unjust -- even though some slaves were old and beloved family retainers, and others, particularly learned Greeks, rose to positions of great influence in imperial affairs. It was simply because slavery removed the immediate necessity for invention. Why ply your wits to discover how to shuck corn with a rotary blade and a crank -- tools that the Romans certainly had the wherewithal to fashion -- when a cheap slave can do it right away, without the start-up cost of intellectual labor? Only much later, after the Christian monks had removed the stigma against manual work and had established self-sufficient outposts of culture -- intellectual culture, and the older kind that requires digging -- in heavy-soiled Germany and rainy Ireland, did technological development return, slowly and steadily.
Meanwhile, in areas ravaged by Viking raiders and pagan inroads from the north and east, the old culture was so disrupted that some areas lost the know-how they had preserved for many generations. I am told that in at least one European backwater, the people literally had to reinvent the wheel.
One thing that slavery did, at least in Greece, was to give the male citizen a great deal of free time. I don't mean idle time; the Greek youth was expected to spend his days at the gymnasium, in training for strength of body and mind. He was to be prepared to take his place in the army and the assembly, and given Greek quarrelsomeness, there was always going to be something to fight or argue about. Unless he wanted to be rejected as worthless and effeminate, he had to enter fully into the Greek civic life, and that meant, in Athens and in many other cities, the vigorous investigation of what a truly just city looks like, and how the laws can be devised in harmony with the nature of man. In other words, with the cities of the Peloponnese and Thessaly and Ionia all vying for preeminence and all aware of and communicating with one another, philosophical investigation and artistic creation became felt necessities. Pericles wasn't simply being a booster for Athens when he boasted that only there could a man fully appreciate the glory of being a man, and free.
It is one of the silliest errors of modernity to suppose that technological, intellectual, and moral progress all move forward as inevitably as the hands of a clock. Call it Darwin's Revenge. A glance at history shows it isn't so. Even technological advances can be and have been lost, nor do we need to return to the rough centuries of early serfdom to see it. Why do pieces of antique furniture demand so high a premium? Think of the intricate dovetailing of a Mennonite chair. What unnamed artisans everywhere in the Western world made for their neighbors, now only a few craftsmen who specialize in old tools and old techniques can replicate.
One small town in Italy was responsible for fashioning the finest violins in the history of the world. The techniques for their manufacture -- and I mean that literally; they were made by hand and hand-held tool -- were passed from one generation to the next. To this day, if you are a virtuoso violinist, you need a Stradivarius. The best we can do now is to analyze and replicate, but not really duplicate, the old violins.
Old tools are often replaced by better tools, but not always. If, then, the history of tools, of those good earthy things you can see and grasp and swing and hammer, is not one of uninterrupted progress, then certainly the history of the intellect and of culture, of ideas you can barely glimpse and fumble for and struggle to apply and keep nailed in place, or of habits that require the uninterrupted handing-on through the generations, admits of some breathtaking collapses. The necessity or capacity to preserve them, and the genuinely free time to consider them and deepen them, may be lacking. |
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