Glenn Reynolds links to Phil Bowermaster, who writes:
One of the tragedies in the history of human learning is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. There are conflicting accounts of the library’s destruction attributed to various perpetrators, beginning with Julius Caesar in 48 BCE and ending with the Muslim invaders in 642 CE.
However it was destroyed, it was a tremendous loss. The Library of Alexandria was the Library of Congress of the ancient world. It is believed that many great works of antiquity – known to us today only by title, or in quoted fragments, or not at all — were lost for all time. Our knowledge would be richer and, potentially, our path from the ancient world to the modern world would have been shorter and easier, had some of these works survived.
AdvertisementThis week we see history repeating itself on a smaller scale as another library in Egypt is burned down:
Volunteers in white lab coats, surgical gloves and masks stood on the back of a pickup truck Monday along the banks of the Nile River in Cairo, rummaging through stacks of rare 200-year-old manuscripts that were little more than charcoal debris.
The volunteers, ranging from academic experts to appalled citizens, have spent the past two days trying to salvage what’s left of some 192,000 books, journals and writings, casualties of Egypt’s latest bout of violence.
Bowermaster’s post is titled “Backing Up Civilization,” which unintentionally cuts both ways in this case. I concur with his sentiments, though it’s a little disconcerting seeing them come from someone who uses the letters CE and BCE. I guess as long as you do your airbrushing slowly, rather than with the wide nozzle of post-Arab Spring Egypt, you’ll both get to Start from Zero eventually — it’s all just a matter of pacing yourself.
Related: The dead tree equivalent of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, or life imitates the ending of Fahrenheit 451.
Just a reminder though — no matter how carefully you back up western civ, the component parts remain infinitely malleable.
Update: Welcome Mark Steyn readers clicking in from the Corner, where Mark writes, “Egypt is now falling into the hands of men who revel in Taliban-scale parochial stupidity and are bent on imposing it. From 1922 to 2011, the country got worse. It’s now getting worser.”
As Wallace Shawn liked to say in The Princess Bride, inconceivable!
The only backup process for civilization is education of the young. And our public schools and universities have stopped doing that, by and large deliberately. The “teachers” think our civilization should be destroyed.
It is a great loss, made worse by being unnecessary. But lest we gloat too much, how much did we lose in the American Civil War? This is not a game taking place in Egypt or an analogue to Bradbury at all. People died that day and if we can cozen the “collateral damage” of thousands of Iraqis and people in Afghanistan in the name of regime change, we can cozen the loss of books. There seems to be a disturbing lack of lament attached to Arab or Muslim life. There are other copies of Napoleon’s “Description de l’Égypte,” there are no copies of the dead. Even worse to blame those dead for fools.
“though it’s a little disconcerting seeing them come from someone who uses the letters CE and BCE.”
Indeed. I thought the imperial decree from the MSM had gone out saying that “Before Obama” (BO) and “After Obama” (AO) were the new standards…I never get the latest news…
When it comes to hostile alternative cultures, liberals presume they’re standing outside of history, and that the anti-modernism/anti-western society espoused by those gaining power as a result of the Arab Spring won’t come back to affect their own lifestyles.
Until it does, of course. Then it will somehow be not their fault for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing at the time of the incident, but the fault of whomever the leading conservative officeholder(s) of the moment are (we may have been fortunate 32 years ago that the Iranians decided to unleash their fanaticism on Jimmy Carter prior to the 1980 elections. The Egyptians, the Libyans and quite possibly the radical Shiites in Iraq may wait until after the 2012 election before they really let their worst of their excesses hang out, which might be good for Obama’s short-term re-election chances, but not-so-hot for the country or the Middle East peace process).
Even worse, over the last couple decades we’ve seen a certain loss of redundant nodes as antiquities have been removed from museums worldwide and repatriated to a centralized location for a bigger bonfire or more convenient looting.
It’s wonderful writing a blog that is read largely by HR professionals but that gets picked up rather frequently by Instapundit. This produces a broad readership, ideologically speaking, and I have the privilege of watching knees jerk in every possible direction. I knew I was likely to get crap whichever way I labeled those dates — either I’m an insensitive “Christianist” or, as here, part of some plot to erase Christian influence from history.
How we notate dates can change over time. As I observed in the blog comments, I don’t write out the year in Roman numerals and yet I still fully affirm Rome’s pivotal role in shaping our culture. I’m not trying “airbrush” Rome out of the record. To quote myself:
‘If I were a non-Christian raised in a non-Christian culture I would find the idea that I’m supposed to refer to each year as the year of “our Lord” bizarre and somewhat off-putting. (Plus there are plenty of non-Christians raised here who feel that way.) For me, changing to a secular designation is a simple matter of applying the golden rule.’
I note that Dennis Prager uses the CE/BCE conventions. It’s hard to believe after all that stuff he’s written about the importance of Judeo-Christian culture that he’s really a deconstructionist who wants to erase Christianity from the record. Maybe he just thinks that if we truly want to preserve western culture there are more important battles to fight?