Ancestor Worship


The glorification of the (ancient) often involves cooking up stories and imagining capabilities that didn’t exist. But if you’re Greek and all of Western civilization is acknowledged as being a descendant of Greek everything (culture, philosophy, scientific mindset), then you can’t criticize modern Greek pride in their history on the grounds of being cooked up stories.

But you can criticize modern Greeks on the grounds Richard Feynman did in a letter to his wife:
“It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously. They study ancient Greek archaeology in their elementary schools for 6 years… It is a kind of ancestor worship.”
Feynman being Feynman pointed out how far the West has come since then:
“Experimental science, the development of mathematics, the art of the Renaissance, the great depth and understanding of the shallowness of Greek philosophy”
And was irritated by the response he got:
“They continually put their age down and the old age up.”
Feynman goes on to add:
“The development of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia…”
Tartaglia who?
“…that you can solve a cubic equation.”
Huh? Why is that so important?
“Although it is of very little use in itself, the discovery must have been psychologically wonderful because it showed that a modern man could do something that no ancient Greek could do… It therefore helped in the Renaissance, which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients.”

And when Feynman asked about an ancient machine in a Greek museum, he had to explain why he found it interesting:
“Didn’t Erastothenes measure the distance to the sun, and didn’t that require elaborate scientific instruments?”
He got a blank look, leading him to lament:
“Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don’t appreciate their own time.”
But he acknowledges how he must come across to them:
“I guess the Greeks think all Americans must be dull, being only interested in machinery when there are all those beautiful statues and portrayals of lovely myths and stories of gods and goddesses to look at.”

You can say a lot of things about America, but living in the past isn’t one of them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more