As I
mentioned in the previous article, in my unpublished work Quantification
of history and the future of the West I applied an objective quantitative
method (not dependent on my preferences) to give points to the main creators in
various fields of human activity in the Greco-Roman and Western civilizations:
science, philosophy, literature, plastic arts and music. The next figure
represents the global cultural evolution of our civilization over the
centuries. It can be seen that:
Global cultural evolution of Western civilization |
- The horizontal axis represents time. In
the ninth to fourteenth centuries, a single point represents a whole century.
In the other centuries, the figure shows the data every half century. The
point of the curve located above the year 1700 corresponds to the first
half of the eighteenth century.
- It is clear that the 12 centuries of
evolution of Western civilization are divided naturally into three very distinct phases: the first,
until 1400, corresponds to the Middle Ages; the second, from 1400 to 1700,
to the Renaissance and the Baroque; the third, from 1700 to the present.
The Middle Ages are undervalued in this study, since the method used does
not apply to anonymous works, which played a very important role for the technology,
art and music of the time.
- Between the second and the third phase, a
marked decrease is observed, in which the sum of all the cultural
activities in the West seems to have decreased. This is not surprising,
since the seventeenth century was exceptional in the culturally most
active countries in Europe, especially Spain, France and England. It is their
golden age. This not only applies to the
arts, also to science, some of whose practitioners were among the most
important in history: Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal,
Harvey, Boyle, Fermat, Huygens, Hooke Halley...
- In contrast, the first half of the
eighteenth century shows a general decline in all the arts and sciences,
in all the major European countries. The most important scientific figures
are the Bernoulli brothers, Euler, Linnaeus and Franklin, who were born in
new countries for science: Switzerland, Sweden and the United States. Only
Euler can be compared with the giants of the previous century.
Voltaire |
It is
curious that the myth of the Enlightenment, asserting that we were just entering
the era of science and reason, was cooked precisely by people who were not
scientists and lived in a time of scientific stagnation. I will cite three of the
most important, two French and one English:
- Voltaire, a second-rate novelist. I’ve read three
of his novels and liked none.
- Diderot, whose greatest contribution to the
history of thought is having convinced other writers to participate in his
Encyclopédie.
- David Hume, the philosopher who introduced in the West skepticism, which has led to the decline of philosophy.
Manuel Alfonseca
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