The Lying Stones of Marrakech (36 page)

Yes, but almost all our agonized questions about the future focus upon the wriggles, not the broader patterns of much longer scales. We want to know if our children will be able to live in peace and prosperity, or if the Statue of Liberty will still exist to intrigue (or bore) our grandchildren on their school trips, or to greet yet another wave of immigrants. At most, we ask vague and general questions about futures not really very distant, and not truly very different, from what we already know or suspect.

Just consider the most widely discussed pattern of human history since the invention of writing: the rise, spread, and domination of the European world, thanks largely to the auxiliary technologies of gunpowder and navigation. Traditions of Western explanation, largely self-serving of course, have focused upon two successive causes—strikingly different claims to be sure, but strangely united in viewing European domination as predictable, if not foreordained.

The first, as old as our lamentable self-aggrandizement, simply trumpets the inherent superiority of European people, a claim made even uglier in the last
few centuries by grafting the phony doctrine of scientific racism upon old-fashioned xenophobia. The second—arising largely from a desire to reject the falsity and moral evil of racism, while still viewing history as predictably sensible—holds that people are much of a muchness throughout the world, but that certain climates, soils, and environments must inspire technological advance, and European people just happened to live in the right place.

This second argument holds much merit, and almost has to be valid at a scale of explanation that steps way back and looks at broadest patterns. Indeed, no other explanation in the determinist mode makes any sense, once we recognize the multitude of recent genetic studies that reveal only trivial differences among human groups, based on an enormous weight of shared attributes and the great variability existing
within
each of our groups.

But again, I ask most readers of this essay (originally published in a Western land and language, and initially read mostly by people of European descent) to look into their guts and examine the basis of their question: are you really asking about an admittedly broad inevitability based on soils and latitudes, or are you wondering about a wriggle lying within the realm of unpredictability? I suspect that most of us are really asking about wriggles, but looking at the wrong scale and thinking about predictability.

Yes, complex technology probably had to emerge from mid-latitude people living in lands that could support agriculture—not from Eskimos or Laplanders in frozen terrains with limited resources, and not from the hottest tropics, with vegetation too dense to clear, and a burden of disease too great to
bear. But which mid-latitude people? Or to be more honest (and for the majority of Anglophones who read this essay in its original form), why among people of my group and not of yours?

In honest and private moments, I suspect that most readers of European descent regard the spread of European domination as a sensible and predictable event, destined to happen again if we could rewind time's tape, say to the birth of Jesus, and let human history unroll on a second and independent run. But I wouldn't bet a hoplite's shield or a Frenchman's musket on a rerun with European domination. The little wriggles of a million “might have beens” make history, not the predictabilities of a few abstract themes lying far from our concerns in a broad and nebulous background.

Can we really argue that Columbus's caravels began an inevitable expansion of one kind of people? Surely not when the great Chinese admiral Zheng He (rendered as Cheng Ho in a previously favored system of transliteration), using a mariner's compass invented by his people, led seven naval expeditions as far as the shores of eastern Africa between 1405 and 1433. Some of Zheng He's ships were five times as long as a European caravel, and one expedition may have included as many as sixty-two ships carrying nearly 28,000 men.

To be sure, Zheng He sailed for the Yung-lo emperor, the only ruler who ever favored such expansionist activities during the Ming dynasty. His successors suppressed oceanic navigation and instituted a rigidly isolationist policy. (I also understand, though I can claim no expertise in Chinese history, that Zheng He's voyages must be viewed more as tributary expeditions for glorifying the
emperor, than as harbingers of imperialistic expansion on Western models. Incidentally, as further evidence for our fascination with differences, I have never read a document about Zheng He that proceeds past the first paragraph before identifying the great admiral as both a Muslim and a eunuch. I could never quite fathom the relevance, for captains don't navigate with their balls, while we know that court eunuchs played a major role throughout Chinese imperial history.)

In any case, suppose that Chinese history had unfolded a bit differently? Suppose that the successors of the Yung-lo emperor had furthered, rather than suppressed, his expansionist policies? Suppose that subsequent admirals had joined another great Chinese invention—gunpowder as weaponry—with their unmatched naval and navigational skills to subdue and occupy foreign lands? May we not suppose that Caucasian Europe would then have become a conquered backwater?

We must also consider dramatic (and entirely believable) alternatives within Caucasian history. Has any force in human affairs ever matched the spreading power of Islam after a local origin in the sixth century A.D.? The preeminent traveler Ibn Battuta surveyed the entire Muslim world during three decades of voyaging in the mid-fourteenth century. Would any companion have bet on Christianity over Islam at that moment in history? (And how would one vote today, despite the intervening success of European doctrines?) The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
comments: “Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) might have been read from Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway; but Ibn al-'Arabi (1165–1240) was read from Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga River.”

Islam came close to subduing Europe on several occasions that might easily have experienced an opposite outcome. Perhaps that Moors of Iberia never did have designs on all Europe, despite the cardboard tale we once learned in conventional Western history classes—that Islam peaked and began an inevitable decline when Charles Martel defeated the Moors at Poitiers in 732.
Britannica
remarks that “the Andalusian Muslims never had serious goals across the Pyrenees. In 732, Charles Martel encountered not a Muslim army, but a summer raiding party.”

But genuine threats persisted for nearly a thousand years. If the great Timur (also known as Tamerlane), the Turkic conqueror of Samarkand, had not turned his sights toward China, and died in 1405 before his eastern move, Europe might also have fallen to his form of Islam. And the Ottoman sultans, with their trained and efficient armies, took Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, and
laid powerful siege to the walls of Vienna as late as 1683–a final failure that gave .us the croissant as a living legacy, the breakfast roll based on the Turkish symbol of a crescent moon, and first made by Viennese bakers to celebrate their victory. (As a little footnote, remember that I have not even mentioned Attila, Genghis Khan, and several other serious threats to European domination.)

Our history could have been fashioned in a million different credible ways, and we have no adequate sense of where we are heading. But a good moral compass, combined with an intelligent use of scientific achievements, might keep us going—even prospering—for a long time by our standards (however paltry in geological perspective). We do have the resources, but can we muster both the will and judgment to hold first place in a game that can offer only possibilities, never guarantees—a game that spells oblivion for those who win the opportunity but fail to seize the moment, plunging instead into the great asymmetry of history's usual outcome?

9
I wrote and first published this essay in 1998.

M
OST FAMOUS QUOTATIONS ARE FABRICATED; AFTER
all, who can concoct a high witticism at a moment of maximal stress in battle or just before death? A military commander will surely mutter a mundane “Oh shit, here they come” rather than the inspirational “Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Similarly, we know many great literary lines by a standard misquotation rather than an accurate citation. Bogart never said “Play it again, Sam,” and Jesus did not proclaim that “he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” Ironically, the most famous of all quotations about the cardinal subject of our mental lives—learning—bungles the line and substitutes “knowledge” for the original. So let us restore the proper word to Alexander Pope's “Essay on Criticism”:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again
.

I have a theory about the persistence of the standard misquotation, “a litde knowledge is a dangerous thing,” a conjecture that I can support through the embarrassment of personal testimony. I think that writers resist a full and accurate citation because they do not know the meaning of the crucial second line. What the dickens is a “Pierian Spring,” and how can you explain the quotation if you don't know? So you extract the first line alone from false memory, and “learning” disappears.

To begin this short essay about learning in science, I vowed to explicate the Pierian spring so I could dare to quote this couplet that I have never cited for fear that someone would ask. And the answer turned out to be joyfully accessible—a two-minute exercise involving one false lead in an encyclopedia (reading two irrelevant articles about artists named Piero), followed by a good turn to
The Oxford English Dictionary
. Pieria, this venerable source tells us, is “a district in northern Thessaly, the reputed home of the muses.” Pierian therefore becomes “an epithet of the muses; hence allusively in reference to poetry and learning.”

So I started musing about learning. Doesn't my litde story illustrate a general case? We fear that something we want to learn will be difficult and that we will never even figure out how to find out. And then, when we actually try, the answer comes easily—with joy in discovery, for no delight can exceed the definitive solution to a litde puzzle. Easy, that is, so long as we can master the tools (not everyone enjoys immediate access to
The Oxford English Dictionary;
more sadly, most people never learned how to use this great compendium or even know that it exists). Learning can be easy because the human mind works as an intellectual sponge of astonishing porosity and voracious appetite, that is, if proper education and encouragement keep the spaces open.

A commonplace of our culture, and the complaint of teachers, holds that, of all subjects, science ranks as the most difficult to learn and therefore the scariest and least accessible of all disciplines. Science may occupy the center of our practical lives, but its content remains mysterious to nearly all Americans, who must therefore take its benefits on faith (turn on your car or computer and pray that the damned thing will work) or fear its alien powers and intrusions (will my clone steal my individuality?). We suspect that public knowledge of science may be extraordinarily shallow, both because few people show any interest or
familiarity for the subject (largely through fear or from assumptions of utter incompetence) and because those who profess concern have too superficial an understanding. Therefore, to invoke Pope's topsy-turvy metaphor again, Americans shun the deep drink that sobriety requires and maintain dangerously little learning about science.

But I strongly suspect that this common, almost mantralike belief among educators represents a deep and (one might almost say, given the vital importance and fragility of education) dangerous fallacy, arising as the product of a common error in the sciences of natural history, including human sociology in this case—a false taxonomy. I believe that science is wonderfully accessible, that most people show a strong interest, and that levels of general learning stand quite high (within an admittedly anti-intellectual culture overall), but that we have mistakenly failed to include the domains of maximal public learning within the scope of science. (And like Pope, I do distinguish learning, or visceral understanding by long effort and experience, from mere knowledge, which can be mechanically copied from a book.)