I figure that's a decent title for a book about the world today. There haven't been enough books written lately about the world today. Oh, I've read a few of the ones that have come out but they all focus on one or two subjects and leave a surprising amount of unsummarized material.
Sure, the world is bigger than it's ever been. Most people have a social group extending halfway around the planet and there's more to read than can be read in an entire lifetime and those lifetimes are getting progressively longer each decade.
We're half mad from media over-exposure and yet we can put together the absolutely crazy systems of open conspiracies being perpetrated all around us day in and day out. We might as well, at one time, have been peons and now we are given to understand the machinations of kings. It makes most of us feel helpless since all of this information is monstrously scattered and the influences of each system, (of biology on politics, of history on psychology, of sexuality on economics,) are terribly opaque.
In the 15th century, a man named Hermann The Recluse set out to record as much of human knowledge as he could. His work became known as the Codex Gigas. At that time it was possible to actually summarize a vast proportion of our available knowledge about how the world operates.
In the 19th and 20th centuries we used large sets of books called 'encyclopedia' to keep huge sums of knowledge.
Now the knowledge is too great and it's more important than ever to have some index of the important events of the day but the fluidity of history in the minds of individuals has never been more obvious.
The Bible began as a personal care manual and an entertaining set of stories mixed in with a little half decent pornography and a disaster movie for flavor to make sure people paid attention. It was comprised of what people knew. It, along with it's attendant fan-fictions (the Torah, Qu'Ran, the Apocrypha) comprised a huge chunk of survival information along with a bunch of history.
Here's what I want to know.
How would you go about writing a new index of human knowledge?
This is more or less my bias but I believe it must be something a single person can absorb. It should be something that gives them a sense of the shape of the world along with a good chunk of things they'll need to know about society as it exists right now. One could potentially add a section about the future which will help them live, survive, and prosper within this civilization.
How would you write something like this and make it interesting enough for people to listen?
Sure, the world is bigger than it's ever been. Most people have a social group extending halfway around the planet and there's more to read than can be read in an entire lifetime and those lifetimes are getting progressively longer each decade.
We're half mad from media over-exposure and yet we can put together the absolutely crazy systems of open conspiracies being perpetrated all around us day in and day out. We might as well, at one time, have been peons and now we are given to understand the machinations of kings. It makes most of us feel helpless since all of this information is monstrously scattered and the influences of each system, (of biology on politics, of history on psychology, of sexuality on economics,) are terribly opaque.
In the 15th century, a man named Hermann The Recluse set out to record as much of human knowledge as he could. His work became known as the Codex Gigas. At that time it was possible to actually summarize a vast proportion of our available knowledge about how the world operates.
In the 19th and 20th centuries we used large sets of books called 'encyclopedia' to keep huge sums of knowledge.
Now the knowledge is too great and it's more important than ever to have some index of the important events of the day but the fluidity of history in the minds of individuals has never been more obvious.
The Bible began as a personal care manual and an entertaining set of stories mixed in with a little half decent pornography and a disaster movie for flavor to make sure people paid attention. It was comprised of what people knew. It, along with it's attendant fan-fictions (the Torah, Qu'Ran, the Apocrypha) comprised a huge chunk of survival information along with a bunch of history.
Here's what I want to know.
How would you go about writing a new index of human knowledge?
This is more or less my bias but I believe it must be something a single person can absorb. It should be something that gives them a sense of the shape of the world along with a good chunk of things they'll need to know about society as it exists right now. One could potentially add a section about the future which will help them live, survive, and prosper within this civilization.
How would you write something like this and make it interesting enough for people to listen?
