The mathematical civilisation

Richard Spencer's Twitter reminds us of the Bryan Caplan / Scott Alexander title-fight. You might want to download the latter one; Alexander has taken down his content before.

Caplan argued for the Western civilisation and for its superiority. Alexander argued that the "Western civilisation" consisted of Latin manuscripts, maypoles, and Thor - all romantic silliness and dead now. What we live in, isn't "Western"; it's just Science. It's all so much neoliberal Epicurean cortex-hacking. It'll work just as well on Congolese as on Bostonians. Better, perhaps.

I'm not getting into all that. I'm not even getting into, "how come this happened in the West", first; as Alexander points out, it happened in Macao before it happened in Connacht. I'm interested in the intermediaries. I'm interested in Late Antiquity. I'm interested in Islam.

I suggest here that Islam reacted against the Late Antique natural-history. Up to about AD 600, there wasn't a scientody in the West as such. The study of the observable world was natural history, a process of classification and common-sense. Much was fit into models: the four humours for medicine, epicycles for planetology. This worked okay if you just needed to set bones, drain internal haemorrhages, or to set a short-term calendar. It was stagnant beyond that, and failed utterly at explaining how it all got here - it could not compete against the first chapters of Genesis. Everybody knew the haruspices and astrologers were quacks, but nobody could do better.

The Qurân proposed a model whereby the stuff the Syrians couldn't explain, like birdflight, happened by Allâh's Will. When the qurrâ took over the Islamic culture, which was a long process complete by the 'Abbâsî régime, natural history became something that good Muslims simply didn't do anymore. You'll notice that the main [al]chemical discovery at the time was the Greek Fire discovered and transplanted by Christians. You'll note that the best doctors were Jews.

But Islam persisted. And it attracted converts. Upwardly mobile converts - the smart set of people. What were they doing if they weren't fighting jihad or playing politics? Well: many of them got into the Hadith science and the law. That wasn't a total waste of their time - this (with Syrian Christian help) got us our modern tools of text-criticism, which in turn furnished much help to the infidels' medical texts. We also got the political-science of Averroes and more so Ibn Khaldun.

I'll further suggest that Islamic scientists, barred from alchemy and astrology, concentrated on astronomy and mathematics. There was cartographical use in measuring the positions of planets against the vault of stars. Not least - this corrected the qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca. And mathematics hold true whatever language one uses to invoke Allâh, and whatever "incoherences" a Ghazâlî might publish UPDATE 3/30/23 but not Ghazali himself! He's on my side, on this one.

Perhaps the world civilisation needed a break from classical philosophy. Perhaps we needed some space in our times and space, free from the quacks, for Choresmian mathematicians to improve our Language Of Sanity. Islam seems to have focused its dhimmis on rationalism, as well.

But in the end, the Muslims needed to allow the Natural History back. With some exceptions like al-Jahiz they didn't. If an individual bright spark like Ibn al-Shatir proposed, say, heliocentrism the Muslims wouldn't do anything with it. The Muslims couldn't. Only dyotheletes bound only to mathematics (again, whoever did the sums) and unbound from an immutable human capital-S "Scripture" could do that. Only Italians, Frenchmen, Portuguese, and Spaniards could do that. Caplan, like Napier and Newton and Einstein, is on their fringe; but Caplan knows what Alexander doesn't know, that it takes the Western balance to apply mathematics to natural-history, which Islam could never allow.