Part of my (quite popular!) recent essay “Why no Industrial Revolution in ancient Rome, Greece, or China?” deserves more explanation. I note in passing that economic historians offer several answers to the aforementioned question, including this one: “pre-industrial society having too much respect for the wisdom of their ancestors.”
I have zero problem with learning from the past and conserving/promoting the best of its legacy. That’s the “conservative” bit of my Conservative Futurism. It means guarding the classical liberal tradition of political and economic freedom (the freedom to choose one’s pursuit of happiness) as part of a duty to the past, present, and future — what Edmund Burke called “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
The Faster, Please!thesis looks forward without ignoring or automatically devaluing what’s come before. The importance of the latter was again brought home to me as I re-read A History of Christianity by Paul Johson. The author highlights how the monks of the Dark Ages played a crucial role as “cultural carriers,” preserving and transmitting knowledge from the ancient world that might otherwise have been lost.
These monks, driven by a deep reverence for the past and a sense of urgency, dedicated themselves to copying and preserving ancient texts. While most of their focus was on religious works, they also preserved many classical texts, copying writings by authors such as Tacitus, Suetonius, and Virgil. These efforts ensured the continuity of knowledge through the Dark Ages, bridging the gap between the ancient world and the Renaissance.
And yet this valuable preservation, ironically, was intertwined with and ultimately driven by a Down Wing impulse. The monks believed things would continue to worsen in the outside world, which motivated them to create multiple copies of texts, increasing the chances of survival. Johnson:
There was a sense of gloomy urgency about the task, for men believed that, however horrible the period since Rome’s decline had been, things would get worse, not better; and there was much evidence to support their belief. One chief reason why King Alfred, at the end of the ninth century, wanted all the essential Latin texts translated into English was that he believed the coming hard times would wipe out Latin scholarship and that, even if the originals were not destroyed, no one would be able to read them. Hence, in the eighth and ninth centuries virtually all the ancient texts were re-copied, often many times, and so saved.
These intellectual pursuits were also limited by the monk’s sense of inferiority to the classical world. Again, Johnson:
Eighth- and ninth-century monks believed that under the Romans mankind had possessed virtually the sum of ascertainable human knowledge, nearly all of which had since been lost; the most that they could do was to transmit faithfully what had been preserved. Augustine, writing on the brink of catastrophe, had allotted an essentially humble and unenquiring role for the human mind in the total Christian society. … “‘Rome has spoken; the debate is over” – those were his very words. The impact of his teaching was to apply the phrase in a much wider context than he had, perhaps, intended. His message to the Dark Ages was seen as: ‘The ancient world and the Fathers have spoken: the debate is over’; and by debate was understood the whole process of acquiring knowledge by thought and experiment. It was not for monks, however able, to challenge the conclusions of the past: merely to transmit and where necessary translate them.
The intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages paradoxically, then, preserved ancient knowledge by prioritizing the safeguarding of classical texts over their own creative work. But such reverence for past wisdom eventually proved limiting. American historian Carl Becker wrote in the 1930s that “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress … until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.”
