Most of you have heard of Aristotle. A great guy, by most accounts. Greek, born around 384 BCE. He was a philosopher, literary critic, scientist, doctor, and a host of other things. Even today his theories continue to inform and challenge scholars. I'm not going to talk about how great he was, instead I'm going to discuss what his most dubious and unacknowledged achievement: the European dark ages. Now, it's hard to pin nearly a thousand years of thought on a single person, and he obviously isn't solely responsible, but he had more to do with it than any other person.
Let me begin by pointing out that, while he was right about a lot of things, he was wrong just as often. Take, for example, his insistence that the heart was the centre of thought and that the brain was simply used to cool the blood. Before you get up all in arms about how everyone was wildly guessing about science back then, I'd like to point out that by this time both atoms and evolution had been proposed and largely accepted in that very same society, among others. He had seen the insides of corpses and how the nerves functioned, but went with his heart theory anyway. There are many other instances of things like this.
The Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, an event hard to imagine nowadays. Picture the Federal Government just stopping over the period of a few years, leaving the provinces to fend for themselves. It is more extensive than that, as the Roman Empire at that point was all there was to the West. Around five or six major civilizations were flourishing at this point, but contact was limited, so the Empire was it. It didn't happen overnight, of course. The decline began to snowball around a hundred years earlier. At that point there was a massive social upheaval with the transition to Christianity (made official by Constantine in 300 CE). As with any movement on such a large scale, there is the need to reject the old. The French Republic guillotined Louis XVI, and a large Christian mob burned the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge was seen as blasphemous, and much of it was pagan, but the fact of the matter is that by 476, a vast majority of Classical knowledge had been lost. If it were not for the Arabic empire in North Africa we wouldn't have any of it today. I'm not blaming Christianty, or Romans, or whomever. This is just what happened.
Individual states sprung up in the power vacuum, but a significant portion of it was filled by the Vatican. It held significant political sway and culturally speaking, it was the absolute word. However, the Church was, obviously, more concerned with spiritual matters and not fit to govern many aspects of day to day life. The fall of Rome, along with the general rejection of Classical knowledge, meant that the Vatican needed a new approach to day to day life, a new philosophy of earth, so to speak. Instead, they just went with an old one. Scholasticism is the term for this: Aristotelian philosophy and science mixed in with Christian metaphysics.
So yes, Aristotle was brilliant, but both he and those around him made the mistake of assuming he had all the answers. What followed was a millennia of "keep your head down, go about your work, don't worry about anything because we know everything". The investigative force, the will to question, all but disappeared. There was certainly a lot going on, but in terms of scholarship, it all but dried up in Europe. It took until the 16th and 17th century for things to pick up again. Galileo (the telescope guy), in a letter to a friend, recounted a public autopsy (performing any action on a corpse besides burial, especially cutting into it, was illegal during the middle ages). The man performing the demonstration discussed how the nervous system worked and drew attention to the large bundle of nerves going from the brain, and the one nerve thread going from the heart. Another man, quite learned, stood up during the demonstration and said something to the effect of: "What a fine demonstration, and if I weren't an Aristotelian, I would wholeheartedly agree with you".
So, when you have all the answers, what happens? Everyone goes to sleep, lulled by the false sense of security. So don't listen to Aristotle, don't listen to the guy who claims to know everything. Listen to Socrates instead. He lived a century before Aristotle, and was an extremely rude man who went around annoying people. He did it by asking questions, and always claiming ignorance. He knew nothing, he would constantly point out, but asked questions to those who said they did. He usually demonstrated they didn't know what they were talking about it.
So let's not have another dark ages, which is what I fear we are in right now. We're fed bright, shiny, entertaining answers from 24 hours a day news networks. We're saturated with information that has no use, bombarded with hidden agendas and opinions that are handed to us. We've forgotten what it's like to look someone in the eye and tell them they're wrong. So let's do that, let's listen to Socrates and have the questions instead.
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