Millennial Momentum

The Indefinite Article

Millennial Momentum

Welcome to the year 2000 - what a time to be alive! It seems that the world didn't end after all, which must have disappointed some people. They must be having problems adjusting to life going on pretty much as before. I keep feeling somewhat smug about being aware of "Y2K" back in 1989. The team I was working with at the time re-wrote and tested our computer programs to allow for the new century. Sadly, that system was shut down in 1993.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Sydney one evening recently, with two of my colleagues. As the evening wore on, and the wine consumption increased, the conversation waxed philosophical. "This is the best possible time to be alive," it was averred. I do tend to agree with this sentiment - we have unprecedented access to information via the Internet, and availability of wide travel to a mostly peaceful world, to name just some recent developments. Nevertheless, I was the sole dissenter. I am of the opinion that one should not lightly dismiss other critical times in the past as being totally mundane in comparison to our present period of exponential change.

As with other eras, one's point of view on these matters is somewhat dependent on where one was born and the station in life one inherits, or is able to attain. For the majority of the globe's population that as yet survives without Internet access, or struggles to survive at all, today may not be such an exciting time, either. The three of us certainly had little to complain about. We had each flown from a different capital city, and were enjoying a meal at our employer's expense, after a day doing work that we all enjoyed.

Life must have been exciting in Australia and other parts of the Western world in the early years of this century. The Australian colonies had just formed a new Federation, the new country was rising from the depression of the 1890s and the internal combustion engine was making a major impact on personal transportation and society. Air travel was just developing. In the early days of broadcast radio a few years later, almost anyone could construct a crystal set, and become a part of a communications revolution that was as radical in its time as the Internet is today.

We tend now to look back at all past times through Darwin's glasses; we see ourselves as evolving ever upward on a staircase of improvements. I have discussed the impact of this cultural imperialist view of the past in an earlier column. We didn't always have this view, but even the ancient world witnessed changes and upheavals. Darwin's ideas became popular during the period of European colonial expansion, providing a handy justification for some of the excesses of the time. The discoveries of New Worlds and Spice Islands, and the exotic imports they provided created excitement in Europe over a long period.

An even earlier revolution in access to information began in Europe in the 15^th century with the printing press. Prior to this event, most people had access to information only through oral communication. The very concept of a "fact" was not understood as it has been since documentation became widely available.

Ever since I learnt mathematics, names such as Pythagoras have been common knowledge. I took it for granted that ancient Greek thinking had been in the European pantheon for over 2,000 years. This is not the case; with the break-up of the Roman Empire, little of the Greek traditions survived in the Western Empire. The bulk of even the Roman knowledge only survived through the efforts of Augustine and Capella to document what remained in Carthage before it too fell to the Vandals in the 5^th century. This body of scholarship was spread through the monasteries of Northern Europe, and thus preserved during the Dark Ages.

As Europe gradually emerged from the chrysalis of these straitened times, this learning took on a new importance. In the eighth century, Alcuin and others established schools in the monasteries under the sponsorship of Charlemagne. Over the next century, the development of the critical technologies of the mouldboard plough, the harness and the horseshoe allowed the improvements in agriculture and travel that brought about the blossoming of Europe. The culture changed dramatically as trade and education expanded.

But how strange would the predominant philosophy of the early Middle Ages appear to us today! There was no concept of "progress"; only an awareness of the greatness that had been lost. Although education had spread, the overall body of knowledge had not really expanded. A major impasse was the lack of a system of investigation, and all the work of the Greek philosophers and scientists had been lost. "We stand on the shoulders of giants," it was stated. James Burke very aptly describes this situation, in The Day the Universe Changed.

What was not realised at the time in Northern Europe was that this knowledge was still retained in the Arabic world, and had also been further developed. The Crusaders occasionally brought back some inklings of this, including such implements as the abacus and the astrolabe. The full implications were not realised until the fall of Toledo, in Moorish Spain, in 1085. The Arabs had been here since defeating the Vandals in 711 and establishing themselves in Al-Andalus (Andalusia), the land of the Vandals.

The great libraries of Toledo attracted Adelard from Bath in England. He was the first to spread the regained rationalist, investigative approach that would fundamentally transform European thought. Many other monks and scholars also came from all over Northern Europe, bringing back translations of the preserved Greek knowledge of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, music, history and many other fields. Logical forms of argument could now be used to advance this knowledge further. Suddenly, there was no longer a need to rely on the "giants" - Europe now had regained not only the knowledge, but also a way of progressing further by itself. The great European universities began; even the Islamic vaulted arch found its way into the development of the great cathedrals. By the end of the thirteenth Century, Roger Bacon was able to state that "We of later times should supply what the ancients lacked... those works of theirs should arouse us to do better." Progress had begun.

Science Fiction

I find something very appealing in stories of lost knowledge regained, and related social impacts. This has been the theme of a number of excellent Science Fiction/Fantasy stories. Anne McCaffrey uses it well in the Pern stories, particularly in The White Dragon and All the Weyrs of Pern. Jerry Pournelle uses excellent historical scholarship to juxtapose different cultures from different periods of history into an alien environment in the Janissaries series. Lost knowledge is also an element of the universe of The Mote in God's Eye that he developed with Larry Niven and expanded in a number of his own books, such as the evocatively-named King David's Spaceship.

Of course, Science Fiction writers are supposed to foretell the future, not elaborate on the past. Many would deny this; rather than fortune telling, good SF analyses the impact of possible futures. However, there are always amazing examples of prophetic writing. Arthur C. Clarke postulated the usefulness of geo-stationary satellites for communications well before even Sputnik was launched. (Interestingly, he has always denied that the name HAL was derived from its alphabetic precedence to IBM.)

Isaac Asimov's foresight in robots is yet to be realised, but is being given another run in Bicentennial Man. (Asimov's scholarship was sufficiently broad that he is claimed to be the only author with a title in each classification of the Dewey decimal system.) When placing characters in different cultural and developmental environments, Asimov set a fundamental rule: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." When attempting to imagine what the world may look like in another 1,000 years from now, it is worth pondering what Adelard would have thought of Internet chat rooms and mobile phones.

Updated: 27 Feb 2000

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