"The Zarathustrans study their holy writ but add nothing new." (p. 86)
Religious and ideological groups can try to read only their own authoritative texts but no one lives in a hermetically sealed universe. To study any text thoroughly, it is necessary to write about it. That is already to add something new. Some scholars will write with more imagination and originality than others. There will be disagreements. Some will write about how to apply their received teachings to new situations. Some will try to refute false and heretical beliefs and thus will write about those beliefs. (I once heard Catholic doctrines in a televised Free Presbyterian sermon.) To conserve a tradition is to conserve (an understanding of) that tradition but in change conditions. To reform a tradition is to reject a conservative interpretation. To reject a tradition is to be influenced by what is rejected. Thus, all responses involve both change and continuity.
There are times when children are taught to read only so that they can read the Bible. However, as soon as they can read the Bible, they can also read anything else: Darwin, Marx, Freud etc. Writing both preserves and subverts traditions.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What I thought of, when I read that bit from "The House of Sorrows," was that the apparent inability of the Zoroastrians to create or add anything new included failing to make use of what they knew in ways leading to a true science. That developing of a true science arose, for varied reasons, within Western Christianity. Maybe Anderson had that idea in mind?
Ad astra! Sean
The development of science was one of those very unlikely things that required a whole series of converging accidents, each of which had to happen at precisely the right time relative to the others.
Harry Turtledove does a good treatment of that in his Crosstime series, especially IN HIGH PLACES, where one of his characters points out that Islam and Christianity had an almost identical theological controversy in the Middle Ages... but opposite sides won. In Western Christendom, Thomas Aquinas came out on top; in the Dar-ul-Islam, it was Al-Ghazzali.
They held diametrically opposite views of science and logic; Aquinas thought all knowledge was one, so logic and investigation of the physical world couldn't threaten religious faith.
Note that in terms of developing new technologies, China was the world leader for a long time.
When William the Bastard conquered England in 1066, China already had coal-fired blast furnaces and was using natural gas to evaporate brine from drilled wells thousands of feet deep. Those are just two examples from a very long list.
But the Chinese never developed science.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting comments! And St. Thomas was right, nothing that is true is contradictory to what is known by divine revelation. That, plus a more nuanced view of how Scripture is to be rightly interpreted explains why Catholic Christianity has far fewer difficulties with science (or "science") than Protestantism.
And I have heard of that controversy within Islam between the followers of al-Ghazzali and their opponents (I think they were called the Mutazilites). The triumph of the former was a huge reason why Islam has been so intellectually ossified, even sterile, for nearly a thousand years.
China is puzzling, I agree. Down to as late as 1500, under different dynasties, China was technologically more advanced than most of the rest of the world. What was the intellectual/cultural flaw preventing the Chinese from developing a true science?
ad astra! Sean
Sean: it just wasn't in their mental picture. I suspect that to develop a scientific worldview, a culture first has to embrace a -particular kind- of monotheism.
If you look at the classical Renaissance idea of creation in Latin Europe, it's already "de-superstition-ified."
It has a single all-governing law, which can be discovered and described.
Poul makes a similar point in "Delenda Est". The Celts have gradually developed technology and have steamships and gliders.
But they also think Mars is a planet of witches and that the stars are lights set in a crystal sphere.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Then that makes me wonder what might have happened if, from late Ming times onward, about 1590, enough Chinese had converted to Catholicism that the Central Kingdom would become receptive to new ideas and innovations? China might have been spared the agonies she suffered during the 19th/20th centuries, culminating with the horrid catastrophe of Marxist-Maoism.
Ad astra! Sean
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