An item to be filed under “I’m speechless”

A contestant on the French version of “I Want to Be a Millionaire” (or whatever that quiz show is called) was stumped by the question whether it’s the Sun, or the Moon, or Venus that rotates around the earth. But it wasn’t just this one man who didn’t know the answer. See and be amazed.

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Gintas writes:

Maybe France is undergoing a Ptolemaic revival! If things go well, perhaps they’ll rediscover many of the ways of the Middle Ages.

I’m trying to figure out if this is a big deal (I do in the end). Do you remember Holmes (Conan Doyle) saying in “A Study in Scarlet” of his ignorance of the Copernican Theory?

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

When I first read that it startled me. How could something that is common knowledge—such that not knowing it would be a humiliating embarrassment—be unimportant? After all, Western Civilization grew and flourished and people had it all wrong about the Sun and the Earth.

We could come up with our ideal list of “The Things Everyone Should Know.” Does “The Earth revolves around the Sun” really need to be on that list? Should “The beaks of Galapagos Finches” be on that list?

OK, I’ve been thinking about it. You could say that the Earth revolving around the Sun and the Moon revolving around the Earth aren’t just bare facts about the Solar System but represent the knowledge gained from Copernicus’ Theory and how it all played out, and is something embedded in Western Civilization. People might not know anything about Copernicus, but they at least knew something of it all. So it used to be common knowledge; that it isn’t anymore means something greater than some bare facts has been lost. Copernicus and what resulted are all gone from our civilization and our memory.

And I doubt it shall lead to a Medievalist revival.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2007 01:10 PM | Send