In Age of Chained Books, when a quote from a book was a precious morsel and a wealthy college at Oxford might have as many as twenty books chained to the wall and a full time Librarian to watch them, a precious quote from a Book was everything.
In the Google Age, we are at the opposite extreme.
But I have never seen anyone mention this, much less analyze it.
And analysis of reality is what Mantra Thinking is all about.
Our whole medical history, for example, has been the story of going from the worship of Chained Books like that of Galen, who said in the second century that the best thing you could do for somebody with pneumonia, as George Washington had done in December, 1799, was to take a couple of quarts of blood our of him.
The combined result of all these bleedings is hard to calculate. Poor people who were starved for vitamins would get sick and the barber would do the bleeding. It was prescribed by physicians who had seen Galen’s Book, but it was such an icky business that, unless the patient was very Uppah Clahss, they turned bleeding and surgery over the barbers.
Doing was for the peasants, Books were for the Doctors of Medicine.
Which, by the way, is why the term “doctor” has changed so. Doceo, docere means “to teach” in Latin, and it was revolutionary when Doctors of Medicine became practitioners.
It required a Doctor of Medicine to cast your horoscope in medical terms. Instead of looking at your body for symptoms, he literally looked to the sky. A medical horoscope was reserved for the Doctors, and they only ordered the bleeding and mixtures of smashed snails and particular types of dung for you to swallow.
The ban on dissecting bodies was not, as they like to say today, just a matter of church doctrine. It was looked on as filthy and beneath the station of Doctors of Medicine.
Medicine in the Chained Book Age had lots of what passed for clean hands and lots of corpses.
The cause of death of the white world is not really new.
#1 by The Seeker of Truth on 07/24/2011 - 7:40 am
When people are uninformed the natural response is to seek out those that are informed. The problem is, those that are informed just said the are. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit! But now we get into credentiality. Just because an individual has a piece of paper that says they are educated does not mean they are intelligent. The practice of bleeding was not stopped by doctors, it was stopped by rural, country, uneducated midwives and barbers. Finally they looked at the doctors and said, “We have watched these people bleed and die for years, this does not work!” The midwife learned that if a mother lost an unusual amount of blood she lost her life. Those that lost the least amount lived. Stupid crap has been spouted and BELIEVED for centuries. That’s why we still have a sweet tooth. Noone ever wonder why when they lost their teeth apples still tasted like apples. We are the midwives today, now we must convince “educated” morons that our blood is better left from whence it came.
#2 by BGLass on 07/24/2011 - 12:37 pm
The Internet Age is a little better.
But face it, the whole point of Michele Foucault was, like in Birth of the Prison, all about the ins-and-outs of creating a self-policing population, a self-censoring population.
As long as you have that, the sky’s the limit when it comes to ‘freedoms.’ If people stop self-policing, in comes an iron hand, and that’s the threat that keeps the self-policing going– the daily fear report.
#3 by Dave on 07/24/2011 - 1:24 pm
What we are experiencing now is a real outlier in history. There is no governmental, military, police, or academic establishment on earth that now has the means to reign in and control communications.
Step back a bit to see a more accurate picture. Mommy Professor has been swept away in a maelstrom.
It isn’t that the Internet has helped a bit. It has destroyed the credibility of the Establishment entirely.
It was only in the Clinton administration that the Feds were talking about keeping a government repository of all encryption keys. Think how utterly laughable that preposterous effort looks today.
The only thing the Establishment ever had going for it was the possibility of the procurement of peace.
Today that is impossible. There will be no peace. And because of it, the Establishment has no means to procure credibility. The Establishment is a done deal. It’s over for them.