The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

Nearly as many manuscript books survive from the second half of the fifteenth century, after the invention of printing, as from the first half.

The meager success of artificial international languages simply attests to the mystery and vagrancy of language.

President Andrew Jackson was reputed to have said that he had no respect for a man who knew only one way to spell a word.

in Muslim institutions there could be no novelty, but only the fulfillment of the Koran, Muslim biographies could not have the dignity of new knowledge. History, in the Muslim phrase, became merely a “conversational science” helpful for political wisdom and social skill, a source for illustrations but not for demonstrations. The historian appropriately called himself a compiler of the stories of Muslim crusades and successes.

The emphasis on biography increased the temptations of official chroniclers to sycophancy. Their records of events became as suspect as they were fulsome. The biographical dictionary, a characteristic and original creation of the Islamic community, focused on the individual yet did not produce individualism. The historical literature of Islam became an instrument of the faith, not an opener of vistas.

The earth was not a scene of man’s journey toward the City of God, but an arena for conquest by the Prophet’s faith. He asked how the varied surface of the planet explained the uneven opportunities for Islam. “The past resembles the future,” he concluded, “more than one drop of water another.”

The writing of Standard Histories continued to be governed by contradictory ideals: “truthful record” versus “appropriate concealment,” “objectivity” versus “ethical instruction.” The whole Chinese past, incorporated into the Confucian tradition, became part of the apparatus of government.

One of the greatest Greek inventions was the idea of history. The word “history,” along with its cognates in European languages, derives through the Latin historia from the word historiê, which the Greeks used to mean “inquiry,” or “knowing by inquiry.” Its original meaning survives in the expression “natural history” for inquiry into nature.

The great religions of the West, also seeking to escape from the animal world of Again-and-Again, found an opposite path. While Hindus and Buddhists sought ways out of history, Christianity and Islam sought ways into history. Instead of promising escape from experience, these sought meaning in experience. Christianity and Islam were both rooted in Judaism, and all three revealed a dramatic shift from a world of cycles to a world of history.

The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

for a thousand years the spirit of historical inquiry foreshadowed in Herodotus and Thucydides would lie dormant. Christian scholars would share Eusebius’ faith in “the incontrovertible words of the Master to his disciples: ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.’ ”

History became a footnote to orthodoxy.

European sovereigns were willing, or even eager, to finance Columbus, Gama, Magellan, or Cabot, to stake out claims on land and sea. But by recharting the past they could only lose. There they preferred to leave well enough alone. Why substitute uncertain facts for authorized legend?

The printing press increased the perils. It is not surprising that Cosimo de’ Medici exercised a special censorship (1537–74) over historical writing, or that Queen Elizabeth made trouble (1599) for the author who too freely described the dethroning of her predecessor Richard II. A kaleidoscopic past might conjure up visions of a changeful future.

Before falsifying historical documents could have the opprobrium of forgery, it was necessary to believe that the historical past was not a flimsy fabric of myth and legend but had a solid definable reality. The courage to discredit the fictitious past would be a symptom of rising historical consciousness.

Despite Marx’s hyperphilosophic hyperpolemical style, there is a grandeur, a wit, and a poignancy to his view of history. “Christian Socialism,” he says, “is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart burnings of the aristocrat.” By his ways of asking he awakens us to ignorance that we had never recognized. He thought he was definitively mapping the whole human past. He was really a discoverer of terra incognita, only a Columbus, whose followers liked to think of him as a Vespucci.

Just as the convert to Jesus was freed from pagan gods, so the convert to Marx would be freed from enslavement to idols fabricated by those who controlled the machinery of production.

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Marxists would not dissent from the axiom of Saint John, for Marx, like Saint Augustine and Vico, believed that the cure for man’s feeling of powerlessness was knowledge of the true course of history. Again, history had become therapy.

Muslim theology and the hazards of history luckily inoculated Islam against the virus of racism. The solid dogma of the equality of all believers, the spread of Islam across black Africa, the frequent intermarriage with slaves and concubines—all these discouraged any Muslim belief in racial levels of humanity. For Muslims, who would not separate secular from religious life, the all-important distinction was between Believers and non-Believers. Mere variety of social custom, where it did not violate the Koran, seemed insignificant.

Adam Smith is commonly awarded his place in the pantheon of economic thinkers as the champion of what he called “perfect liberty,” a free competitive economy. But from our perspective he did more than espouse an economic doctrine. He lifted the vision of European man to a new scene. He saw economic well-being not as the possession of treasure but as a process. Just as Copernicus and Galileo helped raise men above the commonsense fact that the sun circulated the earth, so Adam Smith helped his generation rise above the specious proposition that a nation’s wealth consisted of its gold and silver.

The colleges showed how “teachers … are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbor may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own. In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.”

A natural law similar to that governing the physical world governed the growth and flow of wealth. The wealth of a society consisted not in its store of gold and silver but in its total stock of commodities, and the best way to increase that stock was to allow the free flow of products in the market without monopolies or tax restrictions.

As economic adviser to Lloyd George at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, he had an insider’s view of the bickering “Big Three.” Keynes saw that the narrow nationalism of Lloyd George, the vindictiveness of Georges Clemenceau, and the moralism of Woodrow Wilson were all equally menacing to the prosperity of Europe.

The legacy of a vindictive Versailles would be a contagion of riots and revolutions and dictatorships. “Never in the lifetime of men now living,” he concluded, “has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”