In the article “Why was Florence so important during the Renaissance” I wrote about the Renaissance, and how, after almost a thousand years of stagnation, ancient knowledge could be recovered after the fall of Constantinople. The question in this post is if this is the only existing example of lost knowledge.
Every culture has some knowledge that is precious and that other cultures can learn from. It happened during the story of humankind that this knowledge got lost for different reasons. And this is a shame because it will take time until this knowledge is re-discovered. In other words, the progress of humankind could be much faster when there is a continuity of knowledge. It is impossible to say how far would be the world culture today if there would have not existed any Middle Ages and Renaissance, but instead a continuity of cultures. Thousands of years more of progress would have been added to humankind.
Mistakes are parts of a process, but how many are normal?
It is possible to argue that everything is a process, and in this process, we need to learn. And as humans, we learn from our history and make it each time better and better. At the same time, we can say that if a child doesn’t pass a math exam for the 3rd time, then either the child is not learning at all, or does not have the capacity to learn. Taking out the worst-case scenario (the child has no capacity to learn), then we must deduce that the child is not learning at all for an unknown reason.
The loss of knowledge is not only a problem in history or from a specific culture. It is a universal problem. It happens at any organizational level, it may be on the human level, as a civilization, as a company, family, research group, etc. And before making the topic complex, there is only one easy way to avoid this loss of knowledge: the genuine desire to preserve the knowledge and learn from it, and in the best case, to refine it further.
Are we at the pinnacle of human civilization?
To end this short post, the question I want to answer in the next one is: are we today at the pinnacle of humankind in every aspect? In other words, that no civilization had acquired higher development in some area of humankind (health, technology, philosophy, spirituality, etc.) than today? Or are there still examples of lost (ancient) knowledge, that we cannot explain today, but would add greater advance to our knowledge if we could figure it out? Similar to the example of the Renaissance, when the artists of this time re-discovered the knowledge of Rome and Greek culture ending with it almost a thousand years of stagnation.
Juan Carlos
Sources
- Picture from Pixabay
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[…] In the last post, I talked about the significance of knowledge, and how, at times, it can be lost only to be re-discovered many years later. When examining various types of organizations, such as businesses, living forms, or cultural institutions, we consistently find roles associated with knowledge. As a result, I classify them into the following categories: […]