CURSED WATER.....

WE know Nostradamus from his predictions, which are still hot tickets all over the world.
WE may not know that Nostradamus was also a physician, an extraordinary one who did not believe in leeches. For the plague he prescribed air and water; ventilating air,cleansing water.
Though filth incubated disease, water had a bad reputation in Christian Europe. Except in baptism, bathing was avoided because it felt good and invited sin. In the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition, frequent bathing was proof of Mohammedan heresy. When Christianity was imposed on Spain as the only truth, the crown ordered the many public baths left by the Muslims razed, because they were sources of perdition.
Not a single saint, male or female, ever set foot in a bath, and kings rarely bathed since that's what perfume was for. Queen Isabella of Castile, maybe, had a soul that was sparkling clean, but historians debate whether she bathed two or three times in her entire life. The elegant Sun King of France, the first man to wear high heels, bathed only once between 1647 and 1711 and that time it was only on doctor's orders.
Europe in general and Spain particularly did not like water, the devil's toy, a Muslim heresy.


Compiled through Galeano's mirrors. salamat.

ACCORDING TO EDUARDO !!

" What did the Chinese not invent ?

When I was a child, I knew China as a country on the other side of the world from where I was. You thought you could get there if you had the patience to dig a hole deep enough.
Later on, I learned something about world history, but world history was the history of Europe and it remains so today. The rest of the world lay, and still lies, in darkness. China too, we know little or nothing of the past of the country that invented practically everything.
Silk began there, five thousand years ago.
Before anyone else the Chinese discovered, named, and cultivated tea.
They were the first to mine salt from below ground and the first to use gas and oil in their stoves and lamps.
They made lightweight iron plows and machines for planting, threshing, and harvesting two thousand years before the English mechanized their agriculture.
They invented the compass eleven hundred years before Europe's ships began to use them.
A thousand years before the Germans, they discovered that water driven mills could power their iron and steel foundries.
Nineteen hundred years ago, they invented paper.
They printed books six centuries before Gutenberg, and two centuries before him they used mobile type in their printing presses.
Twelve hundred years ago, they invented gunpowder, and a century later the cannon.
Nine hundred years ago, they made silk- weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay.
They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fire works, the pinwheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing real, the suspension bridge, the wheel barrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.

EPILOGUE !! (6)

Essentially there are two fundamental and pivotal events in human history, the agricultural revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization, and the industrial revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan and the ex soviet union now in China, India and Brazil,out of their homes and their farms into cities and factories. It transformed society and government by empowering the owners of machinery and the controllers of commerce beyond the owners of titles and land.

It transformed religion by generating science and its persuasive miracles and including many men to think in terms of cause and effect and machine. It transformed the mind by substituting novel and varied stimuli. It transformed woman by taking her work from the home and forcing her into the factories and the work force. It transformed morals by complicating economic life, postponing marriage, multiplying contacts and opportunities, liberating woman, reducing the family, and weakening religious and parental control and authority. And it transformed art by subordinating beauty to use, and subjecting the artist, not to a favored few with inherited standards of judgement and trained tastes,but to a multitude who judged all things in terms of power and cost and size.

ALL this and more,incredible as it may seem, Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when industrialised nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars.

I know how partial and provincial all these lists must be. We are all born within frontiers of space and time,and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our boxes. To us, civilisation means Europe and America, and the orient, which considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.

I will let the reader, then, make his own lists, helping himself to what he likes in mine. Let him try to build for himself another perspective that shall clarify human development and progress for him.



Thanks again to MR. Durant, Little, et al.
thanks to all my readers for their patience in following my line of thoughts.
And finally salamat to all.

AND MORE !!!! (5)

SCIENCE AND EDUCATION :

We progress only in knowledge.
More and more completely we pass on to the next generation the gathered experience of the past.It is almost a contemporary innovation, this tremendous expenditure of wealth and labor in the equipment of schools and the provision of instruction for all, perhaps it is the most significant feature of our time. Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure class, today universities are so numerous that he/she who runs may very well become a PhD. We have raised the level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human, we are born ridiculous and maladjusted animals, we become human through the mental and cultural inheritance, through humanity whose preservation,accumulation,and transmission place mankind today. In the perspective of history the great experiment of education is just began.


WRITING AND PRINT :

Again our imagination is too weak, we cannot vision or recall the long ages of ignorance, impotence, and fear that preceded the coming of the letters. Through those unrecorded centuries men could transmit their hard-won lore only by word of mouth from parent to child, if one generation forgot or misunderstood, the slow and weary ladder of knowledge had to be climbed anew. Writing gave a new permanence to the achievements of the mind, it preserved for thousands of years, and through a millennium of poverty and superstition, the wisdom found by philosophy and the beauty carved out in drama and poetry. it bound the generations together with a common heritage, it created that country of the mind in which, because of writing, genius need not die.


See you all tomorrow with the finale.

More on the same theme.... (4)

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION :

Here are two men disputing; one knocks the other down, kills him, and then concludes that he who is alive must have been right, and that he who is dead must have been wrong, a mode of demonstration still accepted in international disputes. Here are two other men disputing; one says to the other,"Let us not fight, we may both be killed,let us take our differences to some elder of the tribe,and submit to his decision." It was a crucial moment in human history! For if the answer was, "NO" barbarism continued, if it was "YES" civilization planted another root in the memory of man,the replacement of chaos with order,of brutality with judgment, of violence with law. Here, too, is a gift unfelt, because we are born within the charmed circle of it's protection,and never know its value till we wander into the disordered or solitary regions of the earth.


TOOLS :

We need not be ashamed of our prosperity, opportunities once confined only to barons and kings have been made by enterprise the prerogatives of all. We grow gigantic arms that build in a month the pyramids that once consumed a million men,we make for ourselves great eyes that search out the stars of the sky,and little eyes that peer into the invisible cells of life, we speak, if we wish, with quiet voices that reach across continents and seas, we move over the land and the air with the freedom of timeless gods. in flying we have freed ourselves, and now we may look the eagle in the face.
No these tools will not conquer or defeat us. These great inventions and future ones are clear and visible steps in our progress to a slaveless world. The menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders and harnessed to the tireless muscles of iron and steel and fibers, soon every wind and every sun ray will pour it's beneficent energy into factories and homes, and man will be freed for the tasks of the mind. It is not revolution but invention that will liberate the slave.


to be continued, salamat for now.

More progress..... (3)

THE CONQUEST OF THE ANIMALS :

Our memories are too forgetful, and our imagination too unimaginative, to let us realise the gift we have in our security from the larger and sub human beasts of prey. Animals are now our playthings and our helpless food, but there was a time when man was hunted as well as hunter, when every step from cave or hut was an adventure, and the possession of the earth was still at stake. This war to make the planet human was surely the most vital in human history; by it's side all other wars were but family quarrels. That struggle between strength of body and power of mind was waged through long and unrecorded years, and when at last it was won, man's safety on earth was transmitted across a thousand generations, to be part of our heritage at birth.


AGRICULTURE :

Civilization was impossible in the hunting stage; it called for a permanent habitat, a settled way of life. it came with the home and the school, and these could not be till the products of the field replaced the animals of the forest or the herd as the food of man. No doubt it took centuries to make this greatest of all transitions in human history, but when at last it was made, progress began.

Civilization came through two things chiefly, the home, which developed those social dispositions that form the psychological cement of society, and agriculture, which took man from his wandering life as hunter, herder and killer, and settled him long enough in one place to let him build homes, schools, churches, colleges, universities, civilization.


More thanks to W.Durant.

Further progress ... ( 2 )

FIRE :
Fire made man independent of climate, gave him a greater compass on the earth, tempered his tools to hardness and durability, and offered him as food a thousand things inedible before. Not least of all it made him master of the night, and shed animating brilliance over the hours of evening and dawn. Picture the dark before man conquered it; even now the terrors of that primitive abyss survive in our traditions and in our blood, once every twilight was a tragedy, and man crept into his cave at sunset trembling with fear. how good it is to be liberated from our ancient fears!! We shall never be grateful enough for light.



More precious words by W.Durant

Compiled by me.

Ideas to better understand progress. ( 1 )

Let us first define progress as "increasing control of the environment by life," and let us mean by environment "all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire." progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose,of matter by form and will.

Certain great moments stand out as the peaks and essence of human history,certain advances which, once made, were never lost. Step by step man has climbed from the savage to the thinker and scientist, I will in the coming few days briefly outline these stages of man's growth, we start today with:

SPEECH ; think of it not as a sudden achievement, nor as a gift from the gods, but as the slow development of articulate expression, through centuries of effort, from the mating calls of animals to the lyric flights of poetry. Without words, or common nouns, that might give to particular images the ability to represent a class, generalisation would have stopped in its beginnings, and reason would have stayed where we find it in the brute. Without words, philosophy and poetry, history and prose, would have been impossible, and thought could never have reached the subtlety of Einstein or Anatole France. Without words man could not have become man--nor woman woman.

Words by W.Durant.
Compiled by me.