Did you believe everything your teachers told you?

Good Read

I REMEMBER WELL the first time I got into trouble for disrupting a class. It began with a simple question to the teacher. I raised my hand and asked, “Do you seriously believe that?” The teacher was conducting a class in history and had described early sailors as “ignorant and superstitious.” I was a sailor and took offense.  

For one thing, she claimed that sailors didn't want to voyage out of sight of land for fear of monsters or sailing off the edge of the world. As evidence, she produced copies of their charts, decorated with sea serpents. She was not happy when I pointed out that sailors didn't draw the charts. They were drawn by men who had never been to sea. “Well,” she demanded, “where did they get the idea from? Didn't sailors tell stories of the monsters they had seen and battled?”

I had to laugh. Of course, sailors told fantastical tales when they came ashore. How else were they going to persuade an inn keeper to provide them with free drink, or wheedle their way into young ladies' beds? And, as for sailing off the edge of the world? No one believed in a flat earth since Hellenic times. Although, we have  recently  seen an example of a Harvard graduate, our President, who still believes that myth. 

The truth is that the Spain's court scholars didn't argue that the earth was flat when Columbus applied for a grant to go exploring. They disagreed with Columbus's estimates of the size of the world. Indeed, their estimates were less than one percent short of the actual size. Columbus had mistakenly estimated the earth to be far smaller than it actually is. Had he not run into another continent between Spain and China, he would never have survived. In fact, the “New World” was already known before Columbus's voyage, but that's another story.

Columbus debates with the king's Jewish and Arab scholars

Also, if the teacher had bothered to listen to my explanation, she would have learned that the thing sailors fear most is being anywhere in sight of land. The vast majority of shipwrecks occur when a vessel runs out of sea room and is pushed aground or onto a reef on a lee shore. Just pick up a newspaper when a hurricane approaches a port and you'll learn that all ships, including warships, are racing to get as far to sea as possible where they will be safe.

The truth is that history has been the purview of academics too long. Flesh and blood personalities from history have been turned into mythological characters in schools and universities for political purposes and anyone seeking a passing grade dares not question the stories they are told.

Indeed, academicians have become the new priests, punishing anyone who seeks to confirm or disprove the facts as they are presented in the cathedrals of learning, much as the prelates of the church abused the early scientists,  such as Galileo and Copernicus, who proposed outlandish theories.

So, my grades suffered and I resented the scholars who tried to blow smoke up my posterior orifice. 

Just about fifteen years ago, I found an academician who was challenging the establishment. He wrote of history with an open mind. Using common sense and scientific methods of inquiry, he wrote a new guide to history. He wrote about The Discovers, The Seekers, The Americans, and The Creators among others. His name was Daniel Boorstin (1914 - 2004). An attorney, a professor, a historian, and a writer, he was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress (1975 to 1987). 

Daniel Boorstin

I discovered Boorstin's books at a critical point in my life. I was thoroughly convinced that all that I had been taught was generally rubbish, but didn't have any clue as to where to look for the truth. Boorstin didn't provide the answers, but he helped me frame the questions and set me off in the direction I needed to answer them.

For example, one of the more fascinating stories he set me in search of was the voyages of the Chinese Treasure Fleets. Imagine Asian explorers circling the globe and charting the world so accurately that some have hypothesized that they were drawn by aliens hovering in spacecraft over the earth. Even more incredible is the fact that the Chinese didn't make contact with other peoples to take treasure from them, but rather to give it to them as a demonstration of the superiority of the Chinese culture. I had to laugh as I read stories of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gama, trying to impress natives on Madagascar with tin mirrors and beads after the Chinese had already arrived and given them gold, silk, and porcelain.

Be forewarned: Boorstin's books will disillusion you. He possibly will offend your Western sensibilities. He doesn't pull punches as he exposes the intellectual crimes of Europeans, especially Christians, as they substituted superstition and pseudoscience for real knowledge. Indeed, Boorstin opened the case that the European Renaissance was inspired by visits from the Chinese Treasure Fleets, and that what the little intellectual progress occurred in Medieval Europe was handed to them by Jewish and Persian scholars who were free to inquire into the true nature of reality without fear of offending religious leaders. Of course, these scholars were persecuted whenever they accumulated enough wealth and the avarice of European princes overcame their need for medicine that actually healed and maps that actually led their merchants to profitable markets.

Read Boorstin only if you dare.