For centuries before the Greeks the entire weight of intellectual history was about preserving and defending established ideas: religious, practical and tribal. This defensive tendency, seemingly so universal in human history, has been a subject of speculation for anthropologists over many years. But the answer, surely, is that ancient tribes were trapped in a Fixed Mindset. They thought that the truth had been revealed by a god or god-like ancestor and did not feel any need to build new knowledge. New evidence was regarded not as an opportunity to learn fresh truths, but as a threat to the
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