[OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you "new"

[Max Samukha]

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:27:56 -0400, Jarrett Billingsley
<jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Joel C. Salomon <joelcsalomon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
>>> Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
>>> beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they
>>> had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans
>>> and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go
>>> decrepit. Very scary.
>>
>> Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
>> knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
>> possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
>> pyramids, the walls of Crete, &c.) to magic or the gods or some such.
>
>Indeed.  The European Dark Ages were dominated by views that humans
>were inherently flawed; that everyone was born a sinner; that you were
>predestined to go to either heaven or hell and there was nothing you
>could do to change that.  There was pretty much a complete loss of
>faith in the capabilities of humanity itself.  


The problem with capabilities of humanity is that humans are mortal.
At least their bodies are. This is the evidence of a fatal flaw in
humanity that is hard for me to deny. You may do your worst at
convincing yourself that it's other people who will die, not you,
because you don't believe in your death, or don't want to die, or
drink little beer and jog regularly, or are hoping that they will find
the gene of aging and remove it from you, whatever. But the scientific
evidence (your dying relatives, the current looks of Arnold
Schwarzenegger, your aging reflection in the mirror in the bathroom,
etc) suggests that the odds of your death are very high. When you are
no longer young and cool, you are starting to loose your faith in
technology, progress, renaissances in this world, because it's
becoming more and more clear that you are going to leave this world
some day (no matter how hard Dayle Carnegie's writings try to persuade
you not to worry and get busy - Dayle Carnegie's dead). What will be
next? I dunno. It seems like science, technology and rationalism can't
give me an answer to this fundumental question. Science even can't
give a proof of God's non-existance. How can I trust it when it comes
to more important things? :)

>It wasn't until the
>renaissance that humanistic thought made a return and caused politics,
>science, and technology to simply explode in development.  Heck, even
>most of the work of the ancient Greeks and Romans was lost, either
>unavailable to the public at large due to a lack of printing
>technology and literacy, or simply disregarded as heresy.  Some
>incredible writings had the ink stripped off the pages and were reused
>in copying the Bible or other liturgical works.  Incredible.