They will be celebrating Nikola Tesla’s 150th birthday in Croatia next year. I recently heard Tesla referred to as a Shaman of the modern era.
So what this brings me to is a tendency of a certain type to scoff at the advancements people have made in the past. I find it ironic that this certain type will scoff at the idea of magic, but seem to think that “science” magically appeared suddenly out of the ether sometime around the Enlightenment.
This attitude makes fun of alchemists and mystics, and you hear smug remarks like “A stopped clock is right twice a day.”, and other equally arrogant remarks. Why is it that people do this? What need do people have to dismiss the advancements people made in the past? Does it fill them with some sense of pride in how smart and advanced they are? Are they completely clueless as to who built the foundations of their modern day science? Do they honestly believe that Science as it is today would exist without alchemists, Magi, Mystics, Shamans, Astrologers, etc…? Do they not realize that Isaac Newton was an alchemist? That his pursuit came out of a theological study of Alchemy and Astrology?
From where does this arrogant stance derive? What possible personal gain does one get from not acknowledging the advancements that were brought about prior to modern science, that led to the development of modern science? Are they blissfully unaware of Pythagoras’ mystical cult the Mathematikoi ? Do they not know that Gemmatria developed what we know of as Geometry today? Are they unaware that the trigrams of the I Ching helped develop the mathematical understanding that lead to advances in genomics in the modern era?
This is a common form of ignorance I see espoused on this board, and it’s one of the worst kinds of ignorance IMO.
It’s fucking bizarre. And just to get my jingoistic jollies, I’m going to call every single person who engages in this behavior, a “Fucking idiot.”
Do you have a link? Which thread, exactly? Considering Tesla’s contributions, I can’t believe anyone would seriously look on him as a “modern day shaman”.
Perhaps you agree that I can speak fairly knowledgeably about the achievements of the past. I believe it is possible to take a position that appreciates these achievements without believing that there is anything scientifically useful about them.
Alchemy was not an advancement so much as a distraction. An inquiry that headed off in the wrong direction and proceeded from an unsound and frequently unquestioned foundation. In other words, a colossal waste of time.
Alchemy plays a fascinating role in the history of ideas, but it makes fun of scientists to unquestioningly consider these things achievements. They are detours and accidental fragmentations. It is very interesting to look at alchemy’s role in the establishment of modern science, but it would be a mistake to take its findings too seriously unless they somehow unmistakably forshadow the findings of chemistry.
Of course science could exist without astrology and alchemy. The fact that they coexisted together and the fact that the latter still exists today at all are interesting subjects for inquiry. Again, it does not mean that the findings of these disciplines are anything other than worthless.
I don’t think it is arrogance so much as disinterest in the history of ideas. I think this is laziness and lack of curiosity, but probably not arrogance.
This is about the least useful thing that Pythagoras ever contributed to the modern world. I am interested in this sort of thing because I am an antiquarian. But it is irrelevant to modern science and is not really an achievement as such.
I think this claim is extremely dubious. Gemmatria is biblical numerology based on intrinsic properties of the Hebrew language. Geometry began with the postulates of Euclid. The intersection of these two sets is null.
Which would make the I Ching a fascinating cultural artifact. This says nothing about its divinatory power, in which I am not inclined to believe.
Not to my knowledge. Tesla did do some design work for Edison at one point, and Edison stiffed him out of his payment. Also, when it became clear that Tesla’s AC was vastly superior to Edison’s DC, Edison unsuccessfully tried to convince the populace that AC had certain mysterioso dangers. But I don’t think Edison took any credit for Tesla’s work, except perhaps for the aforementioned shafting.
It’s odd that Tesla is comparatively unknown, not only because he was a genius, but because he had a really, um, interesting personality.
Obviously, it’s unfair to call someone living in the 15th century an idiot for believing in alchemy or astrology. It made sense, with the knowledge available at the time. However, in the intervening centuries, we’ve learned a lot more, and have pretty much conclusively shown these areas of knowledge to have no actual value. Someone who persists in believing in them today… well, I don’t know that I’d call them stupid, exactly, but they are certainly lacking in a certain amount of intellectual rigor.
They’re ill-informed if they think that; the hypothesis of a luminiferous ether was effectively disproven by Michelson and Morley in 1887.
Seriously, I think that at least part of what the OP may be regarding as “arrogance” is simply an acknowledgement that science demonstrably improves itself over time. As such, its attitude toward the pursuit of knowledge is open to the idea of constant revision and expansion, unlike the other fields of inquiry cited above such as alchemy and astrology. Science doesn’t worship its ancestors, it seeks to improve upon them. The greatest accomplishment a scientist can achieve is to take all of yesterday’s accepted knowledge, tear it down, and replace it with something that works better, just as Einstein did to Newton. This is not to say that scientists don’t honor their past, just that they are not afraid to move beyond it. Merely being wrong isn’t a crime in science, but if you are unwilling to reconsider your ideas then you take the chance of being left behind. It’s not too surprising, then, that people who value science would take a somewhat dim view of contrasting enterprises such as magic or astrology, which cling to ideas long after their merit has been proven baseless.
Bottom line: magic doesn’t work. Astrology doesn’t work. Yes, Newton was interested in astrology, and he also contributed a great deal to science. But his contributions were ultimately separate and distinct from his astrological pursuits. His laws of thermodynamics and gravitation were demonstrably sound, whereas astrology is not. Tesla made a number of groundbreaking innovations, and he was also queer for pigeons. That doesn’t mean we need to give the pigeons any credit for his scientific work.
Our OP, not knowing diddly about how science works, does not appreciate that it is possible for someone to be brilliant but wrong. Newton’s comment about standing on the shoulders of giants is a great example of this. We can also examine their chain of reasoning. Being wrong by reasoning from incorrect data (it not being discovered yet) is far better than being wrong because of unjustified jumping to conclusions.
BTW, if you want to tie math to mysticism, Pythagoras is a wonderful example. Very mystical, very good math, and the mysticism was based on the math. It is a great example because though the mysticism is almost forgotten (and certainly not followed today) the math still stands.
The prescientific cultures learned a fair amount by empirical experiments, but science has let us learn far more. Mysticism is sterile, and empiricism tends to dead end quickly by itself - without the underlying theory, there’s no way to know which experiments to try.
For example, an ancient tribal shaman might know a few cures, but it’s very difficult and dangerous for him to discover more, since he doesn’t understand how they work. He knows that if he mixes certain herbs, chants, and performs a ritual people get better; he doesn’t know that it’s the herbs and not the ritual. He doesn’t know what in the herb helps, how to find similar substances or test it properly if he did. He doesn’t know how to proper expand his knowledge, in other words. Give him knowledge of the scientific method, double blind tests and so on, and in a few generations his successors would no doubt have far more medical knowledge than everyone around them ( assuming they followed those principles, of course ).
We know far more than our ancestors not because we are smarter but because we have invented science; the most effective method of discovering knowledge ever to exist. Newton was brilliant, and he learned much when he used science - and learned little or nothing when he used mysticism. Without the dead hand of mysticism holding him back, I’m sure he would have achieved far more than he did.
Static mindset, in my opinion. Most people would grant the ancients some limited prescience and insight, but at the same time will insist that the whole body of what we call modern scientific knowledge will be preserved forever.
In reality, there is a lot of pseudo-science going on: naked charlatanism, obscurantism and profiteering comprise about 70 to 80% of all modern scientific “activity”. If history is any guide, most of modern “science” will be washed away by time and only few kernels of newly discovered truths will be preserved by posterity. So it always was.
I don’t see any general belittlement of the achievements of the past. There may be some belittlement of certain types of thinking, but it is quite justified.
Personally I think primates have been doing science since sometime around the era they stopped walking on their knuckles. Way back when, someone figured out which stones can be knapped into blades, where to find fire and how to feed it and keep it going, which kinds of muds can be turned to stone by baking, all that good stuff. And those guys and girls were doing science, even if they thought of themselves as hunters, gatherers, fishers or whatever. They were scientists. We’ve always had them, we’ve still got them, and I’m proud to be mostly one of them.
We’ve probably also always had the guys and girls who declare themselves the high priests of the Fire God. Or the types who use the sacred flame to predict the future, or pray to the Fire God to alter reality. We’ve always had them, we’ve still got them, and I’m proud to be mostly not one of them.
Note that I use the word “mostly”. There can be a degree of overlap involved. The person who discovers that you can burn animal fat with a rush wick and make a lamp deserves proper credit for it, even if he’s a Shaman who kids himself he can see the future in the Sacred Flame. But credit shouldn’t be given to his irrational belief structure because of his discovery.
Trouble I have with the second lot, the mystic types, is that they’re inflexible. Their beliefs become codified as dogma. A scientist-gatherer who discovers coal will eventually decide the belief stone can’t burn isn’t always correct. A flame priestess on the other hand must declare the burnable stone heretical, because the Fire God has communicated to the priestesses directly that stone does not burn.