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I can't tell if your comment is in good faith, but reading it charitably, it seems to me that you have gotten your information from a highly biased source. If w

I can't tell if your comment is in good faith, but reading it charitably, it seems to me that you have gotten your information from a highly biased source. If we blame the Mayans for Cortez or the Persians for Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, then we might as well blame the librarians at Alexandria for not preserving their texts off-site, no? At any rate, on the Christian monastic tradition and its roots in scribal cultures that were rooted in the eastern Mediterranean, you might want to check out the works of Peter Brown - The World of Late Antiquity is from 1971 but is still an interesting read. And on the deep history of knowledge exchange between the two sides of the Mediterranean, this Wikipedia page is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world_contributions_to_Medieval_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world_contributions_to... The Crusades is the famous binary, but when you dig down into actual sources, you end up in unexpected places, like one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages (Maimonides) living happily as a Jew in Cairo, or the hugely inventive and experimental medical school in Norman Salerno which drew on Christian, Jewish and Muslim works, or Cordoba under the Ummayads, or the fact that Grosseteste, Bacon and other founders of medieval empiricism were directly engaging with writings on optics and chemistry from the Islamic Golden Age (which, incidentally, were better preserved in the eastern Mediterranean than in the Christian west)... the list goes on.

candiodari 9y ago
Nope. I do not blame the Mayans for Cortez. But I do blame them for losing the knowledge that Cortez destroyed. If it wasn't Cortez (or as some see it: a civil war caused by the local population being confronted with Cortez showing them an alternative) For that same reason that I'd blame the person who lost their bitcoins by a phone falling in the water: If it wasn't that event, something else would have happened and destroyed that knowledge. It's not the fault of the disaster, rather of the inadequacy of the measures taken to prevent disasters, whatever they are, from taking it out. You cannot prevent disasters from happening at all, so you must simply be ready for them, and there's no excuse for not being ready. The difference between civilizations with lasting scientific progress and those without is not Cortez, or flooding, or ... it's whether they had backups of their knowledge and whether they spread it. Most didn't, and knew perfectly well that they didn't. They simply preferred having a small group that had power solidified into that power forever, and locked up everything including their scientific progress, to that end. That's what happened to Mayan scientific progress. That's what happened to Islamic scientific progress, that's what happened in a LOT of places. this is the big missing link in most stories. Why is western civilization destroying indigenous tribes, e.g. in Africa ? Mostly (I'm not claiming there were no atrocities, there were. And they're no OK, they are not the major cause of the destruction though) because their members would much rather be westerners than tribe members ... That's the local perspective and this does not seem to be well understood in the West. Life in indigenous cultures is mostly boring, short, and painful. It has a few positives that we in the west may or may not have lost, but in general individuals in the west live a lot better than members of indigenous cultures. That, of course, causes a systematic "leak" of individuals choosing to "join the West", rather than maintain their indigenous customs. Often just partially.
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candiodari 9y ago

Nope. I do not blame the Mayans for Cortez. But I do blame them for losing the knowledge that Cortez destroyed. If it wasn't Cortez (or as some see it: a civil war caused by the local population being confronted with Cortez showing them an alternative) For that same reason that I'd blame the person who lost their bitcoins by a phone falling in the water: If it wasn't that event, something else would have happened and destroyed that knowledge. It's not the fault of the disaster, rather of the inadequacy of the measures taken to prevent disasters, whatever they are, from taking it out. You cannot prevent disasters from happening at all, so you must simply be ready for them, and there's no excuse for not being ready. The difference between civilizations with lasting scientific progress and those without is not Cortez, or flooding, or ... it's whether they had backups of their knowledge and whether they spread it. Most didn't, and knew perfectly well that they didn't. They simply preferred having a small group that had power solidified into that power forever, and locked up everything including their scientific progress, to that end. That's what happened to Mayan scientific progress. That's what happened to Islamic scientific progress, that's what happened in a LOT of places. this is the big missing link in most stories. Why is western civilization destroying indigenous tribes, e.g. in Africa ? Mostly (I'm not claiming there were no atrocities, there were. And they're no OK, they are not the major cause of the destruction though) because their members would much rather be westerners than tribe members ... That's the local perspective and this does not seem to be well understood in the West. Life in indigenous cultures is mostly boring, short, and painful. It has a few positives that we in the west may or may not have lost, but in general individuals in the west live a lot better than members of indigenous cultures. That, of course, causes a systematic "leak" of individuals choosing to "join the West", rather than maintain their indigenous customs. Often just partially.

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