I Am Ignorant, Therefore I Am

I have nothing new to report. I was hoping to squeeze another post or two out of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, but not that much of it is Coonworthy. It's a moderately interesting book, but here at One Cosmos we like to keep things highly interesting. 

A few random points. As we've been saying, man is an open system. This being the case, then the culture that is equally open will best conform to man's nature, and therefore be more successful. 

As such I was struck by a letter written by the Chinese emperor to King George III, that helps to explain why the Chinaman fell so far behind while Christendom zoomed ahead:

Strange and costly objects do not interest me.... we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.... Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There is no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.  

Okay, if you say so. This difference in outlook -- a closed vs. open economy -- "would shape the next two centuries in profound ways," and you know the rest. 

Yesterday we touched on our WEIRDERness, i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. Regarding that last category, Wilson cites eight alliterative elements that shaped our culture, calling them Inwardness, Infinity, Imagination, Individuality, Inspiration, Intensity, Innocence, and Ineffability.

For example, inwardness is the idea that the most important things come "from inside a person rather than outside," while individuality focuses on the "specific rather than the universal." These two in particular

are so central to our understanding of identity and the self that we cannot fathom how people in previous centuries could possibly have thought about personhood differently.  

Seems to me that the 1960s were nothing if not a resurgence of unalloyed romanticism, and I have only to think of my own father to highlight the difference in sensibility. I doubt if he spent a moment wondering "who he is." If asked, he would have said "a salesman." Or an American, or husband, or father. No need to complicate matters.

But in the span of a couple of generations we've reached the point that various obscure identities are everything, so much so that "disagreeing with them is viewed as hate speech or even violence in some quarters, since it strikes at the heart of who they are." Thus, identity has gone from an objective banality to the sacred category around which progressive politics revolves.

There's also a chapter on how the West became so wealthy and affluent, which economic historians call "the great escape," "the great divergence," or the "European miracle." 

That is to say, prior to the industrial revolution "the living standards of the average human had hardly changed" in a thousand years. No wonder the mass of people had no time to indulge in neurotic questions about identity.

gross domestic product per person when Shakespeare wrote his plays, estimated at about $550 per year, was barely higher than it was in the time of King David.

Problem was, we were trapped in the "Malthusian trap," whereby increased productivity resulted in a higher population which consumed any increase in productivity.

But quite suddenly the flat line becomes a true hockey stick, and "productivity outstripped population growth by an order of magnitude":

Today, human beings consume around seventy times more goods and services than we did two centuries ago -- an increase not of 70 percent but of 7,000 percent. 

I'm with Thomas Sowell: the question isn't why people are poor, since this is the norm. Rather, the question is how we escaped this universal condition. Wilson trots out the usual suspects, which include good institutions (e.g., rule of law and secure property rights), but 

Institutions do not spring up out of nowhere; they are products of long-term social, cultural, theological, legal, and economic developments. 

So we need a deeper Why. A progressive might say greed, but that's just a universal feature of the human nature they deny. I'm as greedy as the next guy, but so far it hasn't resulted in being a billionaire.

Part of the answer comes down to the closed systems alluded to above, for 

Historically speaking, virtually all cultures put a higher value on tried and tested ancestral wisdom than on newfangled, unproven contemporary innovation.... What needs explaining is why early modern Westerners started doing the opposite.

"Three factors were particularly significant," beginning with -- surprise surprise -- Christianity, "whose influence on the psychology, sociology, eschatology, and theology of Western Europeans over the course of a millennium can scarcely be exaggerated."

We have devoted many posts to this subject. Is there anything new to add? Whitehead spoke of this radical change in the European mind, which must ultimately "come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God."

We have also in the past spoken of the incredible importance of ignorance, i.e., of starting with what we don't know, which can, of course be traced all the way back to Socrates. This is nothing less than "the discovery of ignorance" whereby

we encounter entirely new things that we know nothing about and that appear to be surprising and/or important [and] are driven to investigate.

But here again, I would say that this comes back the the question of man as open system, whereby

The more people knew, the more they realized they didn't know, and the more motivated they became to find out. 

We are only properly human when we are open systems, both horizontally and vertically. So again, nothing new to report.