A few years ago, I wrote an article asking Is Uncertainty a Blessing or a Curse, or Both? It was based on a book by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. As a result of the article, Dr. Rovelli’s publisher sent me a copy of his new book, Anaximander and the Birth of Science. This new book is as well written and intriguing as the first one I read years ago. It’s also as relevant as the older book was to this frightening moment in history that we are facing.
And one aspect of the threat we face today is the emphasis on certainty. To emphasize certainty in the face of a universe that’s continually changing and evolving is to deny and even hide reality. It’s to cling to the ideas, images, illusions we held of the past in order to pretend we can manufacture a future that fits those created illusions. It means to undermine learning itself in favor of indoctrination. It’s to fight for dominance for one person or group over the many; to fight for total centralized control of information, resources, and power instead of a de-centralized, interdependent, democratic sharing of perspectives, information, resources, and power. In other words, science and democracy are linked together.
Anaximander lived in a place and time where both political and mental realms were opening up, where gaps were emerging in the sources and institutions of both political power and intellectual ideas and belief. He was born in Miletus, a Greek city-state on the Ionian or Turkish coast, in 610 BCE. Athens was just beginning to grow in power. The Odyssey and Iliad had been composed two centuries earlier. Solon, the creator of the first constitution to incorporate democratic ideas, had just been born. And about 200 years later, we have Sophocles, Sappho, and Plato and the Golden Age of Greece.
Miletus was close to Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Black Sea, and traded with a good portion of the rest of the world. The city thrived from the introduction of ideas and products from all these different areas. Rovelli discusses how civilizations flourish when they mingle; they decline in isolation. So called cultural “purity’ closes off new ideas and understandings.
His was a time of secularization, where the religious or spiritual realms were not controlled by a church or religious institution. Where the ideas of the ancients, of the past, were not given divine and unquestioned status. The Homeric gods were neither fully credible nor majestic, but full of faults as well as powers. Miletus itself was an independent city-state in a league of cities where no one entity dominated the others. It was called the Ionian League, and it met in a Parliament, maybe the first in history.
Writing was no longer the exclusive domain of the religious elite and rulers, or to scribes, priests, and aristocrats. It was possibly the first time in history written accumulated knowledge and study were accessible to many, both to learn⎼ and to question, criticize, and debate. A large class of citizens could discuss not only intellectual issues but how to apportion power and make decisions critical to the lives of the community. And it was assumed that knowledge and truth best emerge from allowing criticism⎼ of established ideas as well as new understandings. And where open discussion replaced absolute belief. The same held true in social and political matters. Democracy in intellect and belief mirrored democracy in politics.
Of course, this didn’t last. Even before the birth of Christ, the Roman Empire re-established absolute political power. And the Christian Church put knowledge once again (mostly) in the hands of a divinity. Why “mostly”?
Because the Catholic Church was both the persecutor of Galileo in 1600 and the preserver of much early Greek and Roman knowledge. And Medieval Muslim scholars also played a large role in preserving, translating, and expanding the knowledge of the Ancient world that Christian scribes later translated. In fact, it was the meeting of Christian Europe with the Muslim preserved and expanded knowledge that sparked the Italian Renaissance.
And what do we see with DT and his MAGA movement, with his war against sharing information and his policy of undermining medical and other research? With the imposition of fraudulent certainties over the truthful and open space of living with unknowns? And what are the costs we’re now paying for his call for cultural “purity” and political and religious domination? What are the costs for his attemped imposition of oligarchy and theocracy on our rights, our safety from crime, violence, terrorism, disease, our healthcare, economy, education systems, and our physical environment?
Instead of trying to restrict life to a myth of what was, we could expand our understanding and way of living into realities of what could be.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia
