Reminds me of this delightful passage from the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi (tr. Brook Ziporyn):
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”
Huizi said, “It would be useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.”
Searching for a short elaboration regarding "Yellow Springs" (地獄 - dìyù) [0] I ended up digging way too deep:
>In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth – eight dark hells, eight cold hells and 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. All will go to Diyu after death but the period of time one spends in Diyu is not forever – it depends on the severity of the sins one committed. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. Diyu is divided into ten courts, each overseen by a Yanwang. Souls pass from stage to stage at the decision of a different judge
As Flexner was recounting to Eastman the many contributors to Marconi's unification of threads that led to radio, I was reminded of the recurring theme of James Burke's great TV series 'Connections' in recognizing the multitude of contributors who are so often overlooked as we grandly laud a masterwork as a solitary act of 'genius'.
Burke would also agree that useless knowledge might be very useful in the future, because we simply cannot predict what might be useful in 2, 20, or 200 years.
> [...] most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
> "Curiosity?" asked Mr. Eastman.
"Yes," I replied, "curiosity, which mayor may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered.
"Curiosity" goes back to a few centuries ago, and in Europe? Short-sighted and eurocentric.
It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air.
My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.
No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking.
Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.
You are reading too much into my comment, as others have done. "Curiosity" (note "curiosity", not science) does not go back to Newton, Bacon, Galileo. It's a stupid and shortsighted statement by the author. No need to read scientific counter-historiographies, be a post-modern "social constructivist" about reason and science, or a "progressive" cultural relativist to see that this statement is just stupid.
I added that it's eurocentric because that's what it felt when I read it (and it probably is, since even non-human animals are probably curious, too).
We seem to be quite advanced wrt edge cases that the wealthy and influential are concerned with. In the interests of a good humbling, however, a short list of issues that we haven't eradicated:
>Homelessness
>Hunger
>Slavery
>Genocide
As to our level of sophistication, also, a short list of scams that we've fallen for in living memory that have lead to civilization-level crisis:
>A bunch of guys learn how to fly planes so that they can crash them into buildings in order to draw us into a war.
>The aforementioned war.
>Banks sell people loans designed to default, sell insurance on those loans, get bailed out when the loans default and insurance is due on the failing loans.
>Governments promise that sort of shutting down in-person economic activity for 2 weeks will stop a disease with an infectiousness period of ~3 weeks that relies on person-to-person contact, while helping businesses that will benefit from an extended pandemic set up related operations
>Something something Eurozone austerity
And not in living memory, but rhyming nicely:
>A bunch of guys shoot a small-time royal in order to draw us into a war.
All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science.
The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed.
Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.
>potentially exacerbated homelessness, as the income/wealth floor for maintaining a household is now higher, globally
Additionally:
>there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history
>some of the worst genocides in history are within living memory
All of the above is the result of Western cultural and logistical immaturity in the face of its industrial over-development. E.g., notice how a major global shipping lane is currently inaccessible due to war (a war ultimately cause by Western meddling in the region). It should also be noted that we're in the middle of a mass extinction driven by this same dynamic.
Any positive assessment of the West's sophistication and development has to be tempered or even nullified by the reality that its efforts have served to worsen, let alone ameliorate, basic measures of civilizational quality. An extreme analogy, using fiction: I refuse to call the civs in universes like WH40K, Dune, etc. "sophisticated and developed", because they've simply transposed and magnified age-old failings and atrocities onto a cosmic scale. True sophistication and development may eschew technological complexity, if complexity is instead in the systems and processes that support self-actualization in the population.
To go back to the original point: if the introduction of indoor plumbing and the extension of civil rights in America had been switched chronologically, we'd be much better off as a society. If landing on the moon and the acceptance and election of a female president had been switched, ditto. So, yes, it's shameful.
We basically licked the problem for food production but the issue is distribution.
We now have specific terms for genocide, and varying amount of labor rights, such as non-free versus free labor, characterizing levels of deception, coercion, and force.
Homelessness is a political problem that has no business of existing, because affordable housing will have huge benefit for everyone.
We have made targeted and limited progress, dragged kicking and screaming by the people for whom that progress was a matter of life/death and dignity/destitution.
There is another source of really great discoveries: goal-driven research which fails to achieve its predefined goals, but discovers something completely unrelated which turns out to be useful.
Anyone who worked in research knows that this is the usual way of discovery. Few people complete a PhD on the topic they originally aimed for.
"Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which
threaten civilization itself, men and women-old and young-detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?"
How would you rewrite it so that it was better? It seems perfectly fine to me. It's a single thought, why would it need to be broken up into separate sentences?
“In a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, is it not curious that men and women-old and young-detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering?”
I actually think this helps me understand the sentence better. The use of “fact” is not necessary, and an example of a filler word. When I look at the sentence, it isn’t the length of the sentence, but the amount I had to parse. Taking out that word and reworking the sentence slightly made things clear to me.
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”
Huizi said, “It would be useless.”
Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.”