Sunday, January 18, 2015

Commentary: "Chip off the New Block"

Check it out here. A taste:
Walter Isaacson, most recently the biographer of Steve Jobs, tells the story in The Innovators. Technologies such as moveable type, the steam engine, and the microprocessor remake the world because they radically reduce the cost of a fundamental input to the economy. Transforming the economy, they soon transform society and thus politics as well.
In 1450, there were about 50,000 books in all of Europe, almost all of them held in monasteries and universities under the control of the Church. And then moveable type made books cheap. By 1500, there were 10 million books in Europe, almost none of them under Church control—and the Church soon faced the Protestant Reformation.

7 comments:

Art Deco said...

Would not take those numbers seriously.

Jonathan Rowe said...

The numbers seem realistic based on my understanding re the nature in which information advances.

The quotation in the context presented doesn't show the Roman Catholic Church in the best light.

It fails to account for how forces within the Church played a key role in meticulously preserving the information-knowledge for those years before advances began to liberate such.

Tom Van Dyke said...

"At least a half million books had entered circulation by 1500, it is estimated, ranging from classical Greek texts to Columbus' account of the New World."

http://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html

And I credit the Reformation for a lot, but in fairness, Luther doesn't nail up his Theses until 1517.

Jonathan Rowe said...

I posted this article because one of the things I appreciate most about modernity is the way in which knowledge and IT is so available at so little a cost.

I remember Michael Coren's putting into perspective a reason why the RCC might have so closely guarded access to information before the advances explained in this article: Paper, books, etc., etc. were damned expensive.

If his analysis was right, the cost of a book -- a Bible for instance -- in terms of present dollars was astronomical, almost worth its weight in gold.

Tom Van Dyke said...

The Catholic Church had hoped to limit the proliferation of error, both in Galileo's physics overthrowing Aristotle's metaphysics [it did]

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/10/aristotle-call-your-office


as well as the proliferation [and translation into the vernacular] of the Bible would lead to 100s or 1000s of different understandings of the Bible [which it also did].

http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/a106.htm

I had once believed in a Kojevean "democratization" of philosophy what with the internet making all knowledge known to everyone.

Now I'm not so sure.

https://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper

Jonathan Rowe said...

Desiring to limit proliferation of error is noble in and of itself.

Doing so by limiting access to knowledge? Not so sure if those means are so noble.

Tom Van Dyke said...


Desiring to limit proliferation of error is noble in and of itself.

Doing so by limiting access to knowledge? Not so sure if those means are so noble.


Galileo was simply asked to delay pushing his findings, to give the Church a chance to think through the implications of the demolition of Aristotle's physics, hence his metaphysics.

Aristotle's metaphysics are still tenable, but they have indeed been "shouted down" by modern thought. The Church was quite right to fear what happened.

As for the Bible, the Pope authorized Sir Thomas More to engage in a public colloquy [debate] with early Reformer William Tyndale about the dangers of turning the Bible over indiscriminately to unauthorized translators.

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/moretyndale.pdf

In the end, More has been proven right, that errors and heresies would proliferate, and the "common people," not being fluent in Latin and Greek and knowledgeable in philology, theology and history, would still end up at the mercy of what "authorities" and "experts" tell them.

IOW, the dissemination of information is not synonymous with the dissemination of knowledge.