ConNiPtioNs

"We do not even know the extent of our ignorance..."

Here is an excerpt from Professor Robert Darnton's op-ed piece in last Sunday's Washington Post

Few people appreciate the fragility of civilizations and the fragmentary character of our knowledge about them. Most students believe that what they read in history books corresponds to what humanity lived through in the past, as if we have recovered all the facts and assembled them in the correct order, as if we have it under control, got it down in black on white, and packaged it securely between a textbook's covers. That illusion quickly dissipates for anyone who has worked in libraries and archives. You pick up a scent in a published source, find a reference in a catalogue, follow a paper trail through boxes of manuscripts -- but what do you discover in the end? Only a few fragments that somehow survived as evidence of what other human beings experienced in other times and places. How much has disappeared under char and rubble? We do not even know the extent of our ignorance.

Imperfect as they are, therefore, libraries and archives, museums and excavations, scraps of paper and shards of pottery provide all we can consult in order to reconstruct the worlds we have lost. The loss of a library or a museum can mean the loss of contact with a vital strain of humanity. That is what has happened in Baghdad. But when confronted with the loss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to be unperturbed: "We've seen looting in this country," he explained at a Pentagon briefing. "We've seen riots at soccer games in various countries around the world."

Next question.

(read the whole piece)