How Europe made the Knowledge Machine

Steve Sailer links to NYT on The Knowledge Machine. Publishers Weekly is on it too.

This traces modern scientody to the Western need for a common language, after Christianity broke in such a way that no side could marginalise the other. Schism had been a reality of the Christendom since, oh, Islam but up to the Middle Ages, either the schismatic state was left to itself or else some Crusade snuffed it.

From what I've been reading, the schism between the Avignon Pope and the Germans - especially AD 1328-30 when the Germans presided over the episcopacy of the (then) fifth Nicholas - was the first which foreshadowed the scientific world. For the first time a dissident philosopher like Marsilius could migrate to a friendly region. That meant he didn't fear excommunication - being #canceled, we would say. He didn't have to write in code as did Dante. William of Ockham was, exactly, the philosopher who mooted that a common understanding, even unto Scripture, could be had by disinterested inquiry.

Before all that, there was already a feeling among the nations' elites (i.e. knights and clergy) that all Christians were in it together. Mediaeval Europeans went ignorant of IndoEuropean linguistics and of modern genetics; but they did share a Bible. From that, Europeans intuited they were similar to each other, against Shem and Ham; which they could interpret as Sons Of Japhet. (The Basques might have been an exception - except that Euskara was a hinterland language whose nobles spoke Gascon and Navarrese Romance, like the lords over England speaking Norman.) The rediscovery of Tacitus in Germany lay still in the future.

From this mutual asabiya arose first the Crusade; then, in the late twelfth century, the tournament (see also Philip Hoffman). Knights from widely dispersed baronies, even rival baronies, could meet in one place for a mock battle. The same tradition was extant among the Nahua / Otomi peoples, also sharing a mythology.

Here were the two ingredients: first, that diverse peoples felt that they were kinsfolk; second, that these supposed brothers could not agree upon basics. We awaited the technological moment when neither pope nor king could ban Cambridge Analytica.