A sea of errors

 

"Rome versus China: What made the difference?" (link below) is an article by Richard Carrier in which he tackles (but never really solves) the question of why Western civilization had a Scientific Revolution, while other high cultures (he concentrates on China) didn´t. 

The article is interesting, but I suspect it made me think in ways very opposite of those intended by the author. If "formal" science, logic and mathematics only arose once in all of human history (ancient Greece) and (after a very long time period) led to a Scientific Revolution only in the modern West, doesn´t this disprove the Western Idea of Progress? It certainly disproves a "hard" teleological view of human history. It also means that if modern Western civilization is destroyed (which seems very likely at this point), "formal" science might disappear completely. 

But there are also good news: craft knowledge (of course) existed in all high cultures, including those that never even came close to a Scientific Revolution. Carrier points out that China had very advanced technology, engineering, philosophy and mathematics. But if so, humans don´t *really* need science to create high cultures or even a kind of industrial revolutions (that is, "formal" science). 

Carrier writes: "Understood as such, it is not surprising that China didn’t develop it. Because “it” here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight. That only happens when you have no conception of how to tell the difference between those two things. And so really, the “secret sauce” is simply the remarkable, indeed clearly extraordinarily rare, discovery of how to tell the difference." The most important sentence: "Because “it” here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight." 

Carrier clearly believes that modern science isn´t mired in a sea of errors, fantasies and bad ideas. During my materialist-skeptical period, I would have agreed. Today, I´m not so sure. I´m not even sure whether "formal" science is the tool to take us out of this sea of confusion. Perhaps nothing can. So when the chips are down, our "Faustian" civilization might not be so different from the other high cultures, after all. We are just more conceited, since we think our progress in "craft knowledge" somehow gives us the key to how the universe "really" works...

Rome versus China: What Made the Difference?