Google: A Sign of the Times
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
An interesting pair of news stories concerning Google Maps reminds me of something Leonard Peikoff recently said of his preference for the civilization of ancient Greece to that of modern-day America.
I'm not putting down technology. But I'm saying that if I had a choice of living in a culture that is utterly barren and void but technologically still the way it is today, or [having it reversed, as in a] non-technological culture such as Ancient Greece -- I would, without hesitation, go back to Ancient Greece. Now I'm sure I would miss the plumbing there, ... but that still does not mean that my choice of life would be made on that grounds.
I would much rather the intellectual life of that kind of society and the potentialities of the future, rather than live in a society which... Remember, you're free to take a different opinion; this is, in my opinion, an optional issue. I'm not here trying to prove that anybody who is happy in the world today has something wrong with them. [laughter from the audience] It's an optional issue.
Look, I've been fighting the trend in the world for 45 years, and it's gotten worse for 45 years. I've become very bitter in my old age, and I've found a lot of solace in the fact that people used to be a lot better than they were, in reading literature from the past and considering past civilizations. That's one of the things that keeps me... sane." [quoted by Jason Roberts]
Google, the computer company I'd love to love, demonstrates our age eloquently and on a near-daily basis. Their internet search engine is the best, bar none. Unless you live in China. I keep hearing them being called "the new Microsoft", as they roll out new products on a continual basis. Matt Drudge reports today, for example, that Google and Sun plan to offer a web application to compete with Microsoft Office. (See more on web apps here. I use Linux and hate vendor lock-in anyway, so I say, "It's about time!")
This company bedazzles the world with new technology daily -- while helping the autocrats of China keep her people in medieval serfdom. And so we have Exhibit A: this story about how a layman was able to use Google Maps to locate Roman ruins.
Italian computer programmer Luca Mori made a surprising discovery recently when he used the Google Earth geographic imaging program to examine satellite photos of his home town of Sorbolo: signs of an ancient Roman villa beneath a nearby river bed.
"At first I thought it was a stain on the photograph, but when I zoomed in, I saw that there was something buried under the earth," he told the Daily Telegraph in London.
...
When he examined the Google Earth image closely, Mr. Mori noticed an oval-shaded form more than 457 meters long (or about 1,500 feet), along with some strange-looking rectangular shadows.
He contacted some archeologists via the Internet who theorized that the shape might correspond to an ancient river and the rectangular shape could be a buried manmade structure.
Mr. Mori next tried the National Archeological Museum of Parma. They dispatched archeologists to the area, which was occupied by a corn farm, and they checked out the discovery.
"At first they thought the site might be Bronze Age, but a closer inspection turned up ceramic and stone pieces that showed it was a Roman villa built some time just before the birth of Christ," he said, as quoted on the web site China View [link added].
It is supremely ironic that a Chinese web site reports this. For while Google demonstrates the miracles of capitalism in one instance, it aids its destroyers in another. To wit, Exhibit B:
The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislative caucus yesterday called on the public to write to Google to protest its listing of Taiwan as a "province of China" on its Google Maps service.
In addition to sending its own letter of protest to the US search-engine giant, the caucus asked the government to lodge a formal protest and request Google to clearly define Taiwan as "an independent state."
In the spirit of our age, it might be more accurate to note that Google's actions are somewhat sensible on a brutish, short-range level, but foolish in the long-term. Perhaps because Google has been so pliant, it is receiving good publicity on the above Chinese web site. That may be a big "perhaps", but a smaller one is that its submissiveness lets it in the Chinese market (though not all the way) to begin with.
Note that this infusion into China of technology -- and therefore of efficiency -- is aiding a nation that is building up its military and is poised to threaten its neighbors in Asia, not to mention the United States, where Google is headquartered. Even if we ignore this, though, the above example shows us that, far from simply "doing in Rome what the Romans are doing", Google is making concessions to China on a worldwide basis. On even this level, at what point will Google's compliance end? And on the more fundamental level, does Google even realize it's hacking at the roots of the tree that bears its golden fruit? Or: Does Google want to run Google or even be able to exist freely as Google?
As I ponder these questions, I am composing this post in Gmail, which is owned by Google, to be posted on my blog, which is hosted by Google -- but blocked in China!
What a convoluted world we live in today! How will it all turn out?
I often side with Dr. Peikoff on which "world" I'd prefer, but when I'm in the mood for suspense, I pick this one hands down.
-- CAV
8 comments:
Adam,
Off the cuff, I'd say that's a safe assumption, but I will confess ignorance of how well the Athenians treated their slaves.
Gus
Adam,
"Also, they killed Socrates." Ouch!
That's a better comeback.
On slavery, though I thought of something worth considering. If money represents stored effort, is not taxation a kind of slavery? It would be interesting in that light to note that in our society nearly everyone is in at least partial serfdom. While the abolition of complete servitude is a distinct improvement, we're not out of the woods yet.
I'm not Peikoff, but I think the point he was trying to make lies on a couple of levels: the intellectual and the "spiritual" for lack of a better term.
First, the Athenians may have killed Socrates, but their culture also produced many great thinkers, including Aristotle. While Aristotle made many errors, his systematic study of logic gave later generations the means to correct these errors and make advances of their own. The culture had its flaws, but it was also populated by intellectual giants the likes of which we don't see in such great proportions today.
Spiritually, the culture, judged by its art versus ours was superior as well. If one function of art is to refuel the soul, what would be better: the heroic statuary of the ancient Greeks or such things as the piles of trash (Oops! "found objects") or crucifixes immersed in urine? (I'm not even Christian and I find the latter appalling.)
You can sit down and find faults with these two cultures (or any other) all day any day, but Peikoff was speaking, I think, of the fundamental direction each culture was taking.
The Greeks were advancing (and fueled the advance of the West centuries later), we are stagnant or declining, at least at the present.
Gus
Adam,
I noticed that I should have added something to the last.
You say, "Athenians didn't know the first thing about natural world or even how to investigate it."
This is a very common charge against Aristotle. As a biologist he made many errors. But his fundamentals, his understanding of logic for example, were sound.
Contrast this to today's situation, where scientific progress continues on the fumes of the Enlightnment, but the very idea of what constitutes science is being wiped out by poor philosophical fundamentals. This link on the ID/evolution debate is a good example.
Gus
I may be showing some ignorance here, but I thought Google was technically correct in it's labeling Taiwan as a province of China. I know they govern themselfes and have seperate treaties with many countries...including a mutual defense treaty with the U.S. However, my understanding is that they have not declared independance and that the U.S. is leary of them doing so at the present time. It's an odd situation, though hopefully they will be an independant country soon. Not to defend Google or to comment on their other idiotic policies, but just an observation.
Yo, Gus, you write: "First, the Athenians may have killed Socrates, but their culture also produced many great thinkers, including Aristotle." Reminds me of the famous story that when Aristotle left Athens to go into exile in 323 BC after the death of Alexander (Demosthenes and other anti-Macedonians were calling for the death sentence for him as a Macedonian sympathizer on grounds of impiety), he bid adieu with, "I do not wish that Athens should sin twice against philosophy." Heh.
More generally, while Athens allowed philosophy to flourish, don't forget that the main body of the population viewed philosophy with suspicion at least as early as the Sophists. It challenged the traditional religious verities, encouraged disbelief, and inculcated the habit of looking critically at the democratic tenets of the society. And because it was pursued especially by aristocratic men of leisure, philosophy was dragged into the class conflicts of the society--that's not a Marxist statement since the democrats and aristocrats formed two distinct, antagonistic, and self-conscious parties who struggled vigorously for control of the state. That's one reason Socrates was so hated by the democrats; that's why the capital charge of impiety was often lobbed at philosophers; that's why Plato hated democracy so much; and so on.
Just read Thucydides on such things as the mania that seized Athenian society after the mutilation of the hermai. Basically, someone lobbed off all the phalli from the bases of the ceremonial statues of Hermes on roadsides and outside houses, which was horribly impious. It wasn't just mutilation of time-honored statues, it was a direct attack on religious beliefs still deeply held by many Athenians. In short, Athenian culture was still imbued with the old religious beliefs, including recognition of fertility spirits and other natural forces, and reacted strongly against anything that traduced them. Rather reminiscent of some parts of modern America, no? But the glory of Athens is that only in times of great social stress did that extend to judicial murder.
Brainy,
To use a point that may resonate with you....
Back in college, when I rejected Christianity once and for all, my roommate insisted that, until I informed my church of my decision, I was, in fact, still a Christian!
If you agree with him, that someone else's perception somehow trumps (or alters) reality, then I'm not going to be able to convince you. If not, my point should be fairly straightforward.
Taiwan, technicalities intended to save face for China notwithstanding, is an independent country regardless of what China and its appeasers (e.g., Bush and the U.N.) have to say on the matter. Taiwan has been functioning as such for decades and will cease to do so only if it chooses to or mainland China makes good on its recent military buildup-cum-thinly-veiled-threats and conquers it.
Gus
Adrian,
Thanks for lending your superior historical knowledge to the conversation.
On further examination, America and Ancient Greece keep looking more and more alike, though our society still loses in the comparison because one would think we would have benefitted more from the millennia of hindsight (data and thinking) that we, but not they, have at our disposal.
Gus
Adam wrote, "Ancient slaves (either Roman or Athenian) could have a fair amount of comfort and even status. Still, I doubt that they had very much time for the liberal arts."
Some did, but it's worth remembering that school comes from Greek skholé 'leisure.'
Now that I've gotten to thinking about all this, I'll comment a bit more before lunch ends. There's not too much concrete in the way of population figures for ancient Athens, but the fine historian A.H.M. Jones was able to tease out four or five figures for population and income to come up with a very crude income distribution for the Athenian democracy. (It was the title essay published in 1957 in his Athenian Democracy. --Gus, he's the author of that massive two-volume The Later Roman Empire, 284-602 my copy of which you read a bit in years ago.) I asked a historian of the ancient world how well the argument stood up, and he said it still hadn't been superceded; but that was a decade ago and it might have been since then.
But anyway, I remember him finding the income distribution to be comparable to that in the West. Slaves were important, but probably rather more important were the metics, resident foreigners who carried out lots of trade and crafts. The extensive public works of the Periclean Age were made possible partly by Athenian imperialism, but that it wasn't the source of most of Athenian prosperity can be seen in the fact that even after the destruction of the informal empire at the end of the Peloponnesian War, the state was still able to pay all citizens the same rates for jury service and such as before; this only ended with the triumph of aristocracy throughout the Greek world under Alexander the Great's successors (and then the Romans).
Under the Athenian democracy, then, the middling and poor had the opportunity to advance and above all to make money without any form of government discrimination. Of course, this resulted in something like the mass culture of modern America that accepts the dignity of labor and probably had a great deal of crassness to it. This was especially made clear to me when I was reading Plato's Apology of Socrates in Greek class. Socrates's first rhetorical blunder was at one point where he discusses in detail the joys of a propserous life and asks something like, "But is this really the good life?" As the prof pointed out, you should only ask a rhetorical question when you are certain that the answer can be nothing but no. However, a reasonable person (like most of the Athenians in his jury) can quite reasonably answer, "Well, that sounds pretty good to me!" It might not be enlightened, but it allows enlightenment to grow and it answers many human needs. One can even imagine, given the grasping character of the aristocrats and Socrates' simple lifestyle, that under those circumstances that question could be taken as a veiled threat against the general prosperity. So, the more you look at it, the more it sounds like modern-day American society...
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