Author Topic: Redux: So now as it was then, this is the world in 854 words  (Read 3304 times)

Joe Carillo

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The World in 854 Words

To put in context the current hostilities between ISIS-linked Muslim terrorists and Philippine government forces in Marawi City, I am once again reposting the essay below that I wrote way back in the early 2000s for my weekly column in The Manila Times. I am doing so to help make sense of the appalling religious, political, and ideological antagonisms in many parts of the world that have now also erupted in fierce, deadly warfare in southern Philippines. It is painfully clear that along with the rest of the world's peoples, we in the Philippines still need to answer this big question that has remained unanswered over the centuries: “When will humanity learn to be peaceably rational and rationally peaceable?” (June 21, 2017)


Left photo: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte salutes the coffin of a soldier killed in Marawi City during fighting with Maute group militants: May 26, 2017. (Malacanang Presidential Palace/Handout via Reuters)

Right photo: Fleeing Marawi City residents walk past a mosque towards an evacuation center after government troops continued an assault on Maute group fighters who have taken over large parts of the city in southern Philippines: May 26, 2017. (Reuters/Romeo Ranoco)


IF I were asked to describe the world as I see it today, I would readily give this answer: it has hardly changed since 2,200 years ago when Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and physicist, was said to have bragged that he could move the world if only he had the lever to lift it. For all his ingenuity and imagination, however, Archimedes was dead wrong on this count. He knew the power of the lever like the back of his hand, assiduously applying this knowledge to design military catapults and grappling irons; he figured out with stunning accuracy the mathematical properties of circles and spheres, including the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or what we now know as pi (3.14159265...); he began the science of hydrostatics, or the forces that govern stationary fluids, after discovering the now familiar Archimedes Principle; and he even invented the Archimedes screw, an ingenious water-raising machine still used today to irrigate fields in Egypt.


The world has now become a huge boat of refugees fleeing religious, ideological, or political persecution

But on hindsight, we know now that Archimedes obviously exceeded his mind’s grasp when he thought of lifting the world with a plank. It wouldn’t have been possible to do so even if a suitable fulcrum could be found. The world was actually (and still is) an ovaloid sphere 12,760 km in diameter, one that rotates on its axis in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds and that revolves around a much bigger sphere—the sun—in 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.6 seconds. The object Archimedes had bragged of lifting actually has a mass in tons of about 5.98 x 10 raised to the 21st power, and a volume in cubic meters of about 1.08 x 10 raised to the 21st power—figures too mind-boggling to even think about, much less to trifle with.

These elemental things obviously went beyond the ken of Archimedes’ overarching genius. It was only 1,750 years later, in fact, that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was to make the startling, heretical thesis that Earth was not the center of the universe but simply one of the planets that orbited the bigger, stationary sun. But on this even Copernicus, who began the scientific reawakening that came to be known as the Copernican Revolution, was only partly right. The sun, it turned out centuries later, was not stationary in the heavens at all. It was rotating on its own axis in a perpetually moving spiral arm of the galaxy that we now call the Milky Way.

All of these facts about our world are now well-established certainties. Despite this accumulated knowledge, however, mankind still acts more primitively and more irrationally than its ancestors before the time of Archimedes. Humanity is still as mired as ever in superstition and religious fundamentalism. Organized religion, superstition, and nationhood have no doubt been great civilizing forces, instilling fear, awe, faith, and patriotism in man, and marshaling both the motive and creative energies for such architectural marvels as the Stonehenge in England, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the stately cathedrals in Europe, the great mosques in the Middle East and in Asia, the Borobodur temples in Cambodia, and the huge statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Yet these very same forces— organized religion, superstition, and nationhood—are now methodically destroying not only human lives by the thousands but even the physical, social, and cultural legacies humanity had accumulated in the interim.

Intolerance on the religious, political, or ideological plane has always plagued mankind through the centuries, of course, both long before and long after the time of Archimedes. It brought about so many of the horrible depredations on either side of the major religious or geopolitical divides, from the time of the Crusades—those armed Christian expeditions to the Holy Lands and Constantinople in the 11th century—to the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. But more deeply disturbing is the fact that this intolerance and bloodshed have persisted even with the civilizing influence of the Age of Reason and Scientific Enlightenment. Today, people in many parts of the world are still murderously lunging at each other’s throats, intolerant of one another’s religious beliefs, disdainful of one another’s politics and ideology, and covetous of one another’s personal or national possessions. Humanity obviously has not learned its lessons well.

Thus, the great flowering of scientific knowledge and rational thinking that began with Archimedes and pursued with vigor by such great scientific minds as Copernicus, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein—not to mention Charles Darwin—seems not to have really amounted to much. Our mindsets and dispositions as a species have remained largely primitive—there are disturbing signs, in fact, that we have deteriorated as social and reasoning animals, perhaps irreversibly. It is therefore not at all surprising that today, on a shocking improvement on Archimedes’ claim that he could lift the world with a lever, people by the thousands could think and claim that they could move the world simply on pure belief—no lever, no fulcrum, no hands or physical effort even—just belief and absolutely nothing else.

This essay first appeared in the weekly “English Plain and Simple” column of Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times in the early 2000s and later formed part of his book Give Your English the Winning Edge © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

BREAKING DEVELOPMENTS:
Read “Terrorism in the age of polarization” by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, June 19, 2017
Read “The brothers who brought death and ruin to Marawi” by Cecil Morella, Agence France-Presse, June 18, 2017 feature story
“Was Orlando shooting terror or homophobia? Yes," June 13, 2016 feature story in CNN.com

RELATED MEDIA READINGS:
“The Starry Messenger,” January 19, 2013 editorial of The New York Times
“Pakistan horror: When the war comes to schools,” December 16, 2014 news dispatch in CNN.com

RECENT RELATED DEVELOPMENTS:
US drops ‘Mother Of All Bombs’ in Afghanistan (April 14, 2017)
43 Philippine police killed by Muslim rebels while hunting bomb makers (January 27, 2015)
Bomb explodes during pro-Ukrainian rally (February 22, 2015)
2 New York women accused of ISIS-inspired bomb plot (April 3, 2015)
147 dead, Islamist gunmen killed after attack at Kenya college (April 3, 2015)
Pope Francis laments killing of Christians (Associated Press, April 4, 2015)

RELATED BOOK READINGS:
Read a review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (April 1, 2015)
Read Bangsamoro History: A Nation Under Endless Tyranny by Salah Jubair (pseudonym of Mohagher Iqbal)
« Last Edit: June 21, 2017, 03:52:19 PM by Joe Carillo »