The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [3]
The content of this kind of instruction indicates the social priorities of the group concerned, reveals in what terms it regards the world around it, and to a certain extent illustrates the direction in which a community considers that its own development should go. The very existence of formal educational institutions indicates that the community has the means and the desire to perpetuate a particular view, and shows whether that view is progressive and optimistic or, for example, static and theoretical in nature.
In our case, we use instruction to train young members of our society to ask questions. Education in the West consists of providing intellectual tools to be used for discovery. We encourage novelty, and this attitude is reflected in our educational curricula. Apparent anachronisms such as the titles of qualifications and of the teachers, as well as the conferring of formal accoutrements on the graduating student, recall the medieval origins of the organisation and at the same time show the importance our society attaches to standardised education. It is this quality-control approach to the product of the educational system that permits us to set up and encourage groups or organisations peculiar to modern Western culture, whose purpose is to bring change. In the main these lake the form of research and development subdivisions of industrial or university systems. Their members are, in a way, the modern equivalent of the hunters and food-gatherers of early tribes.
In the West the most unusual characteristic of their existence is the extent to which they are autonomous. As a social sub-unit they are, of course, constrained by the same general regulations and limitations placed on all its members by society. However, thanks to the Western view of knowledge and its application, these change-makers usually work in highly specialised areas, isolated from the mainstream of social interaction by the esoteric nature of their activity, and above all by language. Their autonomy depends upon the success of their product in the market-place. Today, the products are technological and scientific in nature, and predominantly oriented towards service and information systems, an indication that our society has moved beyond the stage of concentration on heavy industrial production. We now have the tools with which to reorganise production, and with it life-styles, along more autonomous, less rigid but socially fragmented lines.
The most significant point about these sources of modern technology in the West is that they are entirely directed towards the production of the means of constant change. Whereas other societies in the past adopted the same social structures as we do in order to ensure their stability, and others in the contemporary world still do so, we use those structures to alter our society unceasingly.
This extraordinary, dynamic way of life is the product of a particular, rational way of thought that had its origins in the eastern Mediterranean nearly three thousand years ago.
In about 1000 BC mainland Greeks started to emigrate eastwards, to Ionia, and settled on the islands and the Aegean coastline of Asia Minor. The new arrivals were pioneers, ready to adapt to whatever circumstances they encountered and to make use of anything that might make their existence easier. They were pragmatic people with a hard-headed, practical view of life.
The conditions they found in Ionia were difficult. For the most part they founded their small walled towns on narrow coastal strips of indifferent land, and supported themselves with dry farming capable of producing only some olives and a little wine. Backed by inhospitable mountain ranges that blocked all exits to the hinterland, the Ionians turned to the sea for survival. They began to travel all over the eastern Mediterranean, and discovered almost immediately that they were in close proximity to two great empires, the Babylonian and the Egyptian.
Both these ancient river-valley cultures had been the first, almost