The Arrogance of Modern Civilization

As I’ve watched several programs on TV, and read articles about archeological finds, I find myself shaking my head at the conclusions some of these so-called researchers come to. They seem to be incapable of giving credit where credit is due. There is an assumption that if someone lived before our great age of enlightenment, then they were incapable advanced thought or engineering.

Let’s look at one example of great knowledge and engineering being lost. The Hellenization of the Mediterranean led to a great accumulation of knowledge from the surrounding areas. With Greek being the lingua franca of the region, the writings of Euclid, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and others were widely available, so knowledge of medicine, geometry, and astronomy were easily accessed by anyone looking for knowledge. Great cities were built, with running water (hot and cold in some houses) and sanitary sewers, multistory apartment buildings, and the use of concrete for construction. The Roman Empire thrived because of this knowledge.

Carrying water over water. The Pont du Gard was built by the Romans, and many of the aqueducts are still in use today.

This knowledge remained in the Eastern Empire, called the Byzantine by the West, but was lost completely by Western Europe. A once educated people became illiterate peasants. Even the nobility had little knowledge of anything beyond what they could see. But that was not true of the whole world. The Greek texts still existed and were used in the Eastern Mediterranean to create great buildings, practice medicine, and keep the water running. The spread of Islam brought this same knowledge back to the West, and the city of Granada became the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean, with running water, sewers, and gas lighting in the city streets.

As Wester Europeans took to the seas in the 15^th centuries, they “discovered” new lands, and in those lands they found buildings beyond their imagination. Pyramids built on the same scale as the ones in Egypt, roadways and buildings using concrete and mortar, and stones cut to such precision that even experts today can’t explain how the locals made them. This leads many to use the old copout that “…aliens must have done it.” After all, humans before us must have been stupid, so there’s no way they could have done something we can’t explain.

“It must have been aliens.” The Maya were mathematically gifted, so engineering of this kind was not out of their realm of expertise.

It seems that we get caught up in the now and think that the past was all in black and white, and our predecessors knew nothing. This is an extremely adolescent attitude. Mark Twain is credited with saying: 

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Collectively we act like the fourteen-year-old when it comes to the people of the past, rather than acting more maturely by giving our ancestors some credit. They were humans of intelligence just like us; there is abundant evidence of that, but we are shocked when we see something that we can’t explain. Human ingenuity is not a new trait, and I’m sure this will be borne out as we make new discoveries of old things that were lost.