Our Defective History

Our Defective History

            There are a couple of things I’d like to point out regarding our own perfect little world here on Earth, namely the image of humanity, historically speaking.

            In recorded history, we have a staggeringly low amount of real documents which we partially base human history on (other parts are the micro/macro physical from DNA fragments to the pyramids themselves).

            For example, take the Roman Empire, one of the greatest, most powerfully influential civilizations in history, and ask yourself: What percentage of their document survived time? How many, total, of their documents survived? Historians claim about 5% of all Roman documents created have survived and are with us. Ok, I’ve heard as high as 8% as well, so let’s say 7%. So, 7% survived. Really? How do we even know how many were created total? We actually know how many documents the Romans wrote in their entire existence? How was this quantified?

            At best, I think this could be estimated, but I think predicted might be impossible. Even if we began an estimation, that would be flawed. What constants shall we use for this estimation?

            The Romans did have something going for them. The desire to preserve events as they happened through documentation.

            It is interesting that, in the western world, Greece was the first (or so we think) to record things and events rather accurately and with useful, practical detail. For example, Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Tory and so forth, history before ancient Greece, wrote things a poetic fashion. What is a good example of this? Ok, everyone is familiar with the Bible. Ever try to read it? Very dreamy, or nebulous, and poetic text. Not much of a history text book, is it? Iliad, the tale of Troy and Achilles is written similarly. It’s a great story, but little facts are there and to make the challenge, err, more challenging, there are many critical chronological errors within it which greatly undermine its credibility.

            Take ancient Egypt. The same things happened in ancient Egypt as ancient Rome. Wars, political change, mass starvation, triumph, expansion and decline.

But the real differences are in how and why certain documents survivied their civilizations.

            Before the written word sagas were used. A natural, yet erroneous fashion of relating Stories, ideas and information from generation to generation in verbal teachings or narratives.

            Writing hasn't been "invented" yet? Hell, how did they store information? Can you imagine? Sure the ancients told stories with paintings on cave walls and some carved statues telling tall tales and legends, but where is the practical information? How do I  continue farming? When will the rain come? How will I know when to plant? What to plant? What about engineering concepts? Such as how to construct a bridge or what an arch was and how to use it effectively without killing everyone. Information on how your pervious generation did this or that? How did they survive generation to generation? Something had to be handed down. There are your sagas, which unfortunately limit the existence of a civilizations knowledge, where any civilization who documents things accurately gain the benefits of that civilizations full experience, not just the last generation’s bibble-babble.

            Seriously, we really take what we have and know for granted. Modern man has seen so much. Almost everything, with the help of TV and the net, plus photographs, and even art work, such as really good quality maps.

Back far in the past, there was no way to experience anything or see anything if it wasn't smack in front of you. And how are you going to get in front of it? Will it come to you? You have threes ways: Ship, walk or horses.  Get moving pilgrim.

            Back in ancient, ancient times, say the Assyrian Empire in the East who built the largest army the world had ever seen and used it too! They crushed everyone like they were frozen in the Stone Age. Catapults, castles, fire artillery, even armored battering rams and tanks. They used all capabilities, essentially, that the Roman's used a thousand years later. If fact, the Roman's appreciated them, as they did the Egyptians (the Romans called them ancients) and ate up all the heroic tall tales of Achilles, the Pharaohs of Egypt, and such). The Assyrians and the Ancient Greeks were the model for the Romans. They did what worked and really respected anything that was old and lasting, since it was proven through time or familiar to them.

            So what is my point?

            Think of all the lost documentation and verbal information in all of recorded history. We have very, very little that survives, even up to as late as the 1800s. Face it; things get lost, burned, hidden, rewritten, or simply just dissolve into nothing over the centuries or millennia. Are we to assume that the documents we have today that we base all of history on, are the best? They survived because they were the best? Think. What if our human civilization just goes poof! Gone. Two thousand years pass. No humans around to explain anything. Explorers from another world descend from the stars, step out of they’re tired spacecrafts, and begins to discover they were not the first ones to set foot on this rotating mud ball named Earth. After few seconds preparing the galacta translator the Aliens begin to assimilate all the strange things the humans left behind. Of all the crap that is printed in our world, what do you think would survive long enough to allow this alien explorer to read it? We don’t even know if the stuff we read or write is true. Sure it’s “believable”. But true? We don’t even know that ourselves right now, let alone what someone might find in 2,000 years. The alien would read a small fraction of what survived to form an image in his mind (if that is how they thought, anyways).

            Or did the documentation and evidence of our civilization simply survive because it was helped or was allowed to survive? Say, Monks frantically grabbing all text on engineering and shoving into a cavern below a church that later stands for a 1,000 years. I would call that help, yes.

            Who benefits from storing information and history? Who benefits from destroying it? Think of all things that have happened, that will happen, that we will never know about, or could never know about. Are there limits to human knowledge? Are there things that humans simply cannot know? Sure, at best we can know about such things. We read about them. And then we know what someone wrote, hoping they were truthful, thoughtful, and accurate when they wrote it. Why do we assume that if someone wrote it down it must have happened? We read they’re text, and experience the imaging, the emotions that the writer intended us to feel, moving pictures and intricate sounds, and we close the book and think we know them. But we will never experience them as they lived without some sort of universally correct time-machine.

            Wouldn't it be strange if we saw an alien historian picking up one surviving book from human civilization, and then standing before a crowd of aliens (in their underpants) and claiming, "We've studied these people and we have come to know them from what they have left behind!"

Just how much of the stuff we left behind is just utter crap and does little to explain the human condition. How much of the stuff we left behind is just the result of commercialism?
            There are, unfortunately, many civilizations, not towns, or ships or something, but full fledged civilizations, having multiple cities and ports that, today, are simply not there anymore. Nothing is left. All that is left is perhaps ruins or, more interestingly, comments from other civilizations, say neighboring city states, that scribbled something down one morning before crushing grapes.

“Our neighbors to the northeast, wild and barbaric, have two ports we frequent and they smell very bad.”

For instance, take Troy. We all have a fascination with it, I do as well, but the fact is, looking at the time Troy was supposed to have existed, 1100-1200 BC or something, all the neighboring cities and states, which were large, rich and well represented in the documents of history, and older than Troy herself never mention the crazily, insanely, rich and power city to the west? No, the name doesn't have to be perfect. I sure 3,000 years ago no one called "Troy" T-R-O-Y. But you'd think for all its awesome "history" something from within the walls would have survived, let alone someone else’s comments or artifacts.  

Is Troy just an image? A fantasy? A saga or a tale that the Greeks invented for their own purposes? How do we know that the Iliad isn’t the equivalent of a Michael Crichton  novel? Just read the Iliad and you'll see how many issues there are for anyone possessing a critical mind. Another huge, huge problem adding to this is the forgotten issue of translation. We all seem to assume that translation is just math. This English word equals this Babylonian word. This is a huge problem that even today is quite bothersome.

            When we pick up an ancient book, how do we know we aren’t just buying into that particular civilizations’ propaganda? Who makes all the documents anyways? The rich, powerful, the influential? Right. All those honest people who always tell us the way it really is. Why don’t we have some great narrative or memoir of some poor slave who help build the pyramids? What was a Roman slave’s life like? We will never know. We only know things that their “masters” told us. Oh, he loved his work. I could tell because a smiling slave is generally a happy slave, right? Yes sir, he was a pleasure to slap around here and there. Such a great lad.

Information handed down from the ages is filtered through thousands of doorways which create, modify, destroy, move forward, place in limbo, rewrite, and translate that information. The paper might be authentic, the ink might be authentic, but the words must surely be a fabrication because history seems to be not what actually happened but what someone wanted us to think that happened.  Wrapped up, calculated, edited, and presented as if it were just the normal natural events of the world. Packaged and handed to us like some strange colorful cake that just tastes too good to be true. The calculated taste of a fabricated reality.

I have spoken to many, many historical professors, students and simply, well, old people, who I must say are a joy and are impressive, but they do not seem to ever cover the problems with their own discipline. Everyone talks about the subject, but no one ever disputes the discipline itself. Einstein. He was great, perhaps the greatest. But what does it mean when other scientists say: “Einstein is right.” What does that mean to us? Comes down to trust, doesn’t it? You believe Einstein because another person has stated he believes Einstein. Are you willing to devote your entire life into learning the disapline as Einstein knows it to confirm he wasn’t wrong? The mathematical theories I mean. I can have long, long conversations regarding the history of space, time and the multi-verse for exceedingly long periods of time, but I will never really know what the math is all about.

            Perhaps the theory would make sense, in a practical sense, or not at all. For instance, a theory which appears to apply and work until a flaw is discovered. You might think that this is rare. But actually it is quite common in science. People love to quote, apply, and brag about science and what it does, and perhaps, what it has become. Few if any, question or study the history of science. Why certain things are believed and others are not. Did you ever stop to think how many fundamental assumptions are at the core of scientific theory?

Then all you have to do is invent another theory, this other phenomenon for instance, that explains that problem away. Get over it. Many theories are based on other theories, some of which have unproven elements. Now interject the notion that experience is unique to the individual. Everyone likes to say: “We see what we want to see.” Or even think. But we all experience everything differently. And I am not talking about Bob experienced the A's game yesterday oppositely from Frankie-Pie, who thought this or that. No. The danger here is people experience fundamental things very differently.

            I believe that the critical study of human nature can provide as much, if not more, than that of the modern historical science.

            Let’s be clear. Science works. We have evidence of that. Science is not a fantasy or magical. Look at any city, structure, or device and you will see that there are sciences heavily based in complex mathematics that simply work, and can and do predict reality. That is what we are talking about, right? Predicting or symbolizing what we see in nature? The Saturn 5 rocket? A computer? A Roman aqueduct? Some sciences, which are based in human experience, simply work. Civil Engineering is perhaps the best example of this point as is Electrical Engineering. There are many that describe devices or creations made by man and made by nature.

            What about the sciences that cannot be proven or supported with experiments or, to be more exact, sciences that describe non-experienced things. Take gold. It is heavy isn’t it? Pick it up. Here this is a gold bar. I’ve just set it in you hand. Kinda dense, right? Kinda heavy, right? Good, you’ve just experienced the weight of gold. Now let’s take a small part of that gold I gave you and try something you might find interesting. Shave off a small part. No, really. Small. No, no, no. Smaller than that. I want one atom. Got it? Thank you. Okay, here we have it. A gold atom here. Can you see it? How about those electrons flying around this nucleus? Can you see those?

Sciences that describe nature at a depth which we cannot experience without the need of another science based device are what I am talking about.  These are the sciences that have evolved recently and some, particularly modern “popular” cosmology, almost appears a religion from a distance.

Remember facts lie. Since they must be interpreted by a person who, as we have said earlier, can have varying degrees of experience to temper that interpretation.

            Is a perfect circle found in nature? The wiser of you have said no. I’m not talking about circular, but a real geometric circle. Is that found in nature? Name one. I’ll wait. Go ahead. Nothing real in nature is a geometric. Sure there are some sea shells around, or cut an orange in two. Wee! You have a circle, right? Wrong. You have something that is close to a circle, not exact. What about something in nature that is close to a perfect circular perimeter such as the orbit of a small body around that of a large body? Say, the earth revolving around the sun. As good as that could be, we would still say it’s elliptical, not a circle. Interesting. So, therefore, picking one of the most common things found in humanity, the circle, we have realized that it simply doesn’t exist in reality. Only in the human mind.

JS 11.7.2011