Outlooks
Is this Euro-centrism a problem? On the one hand, we - in this chapter and in the academy more broadly - have spent so much time looking at it that other issues get short shrift.
Many of these may be more interesting than the West- versus-rest problem, which after all is fundamentally a question of organizing knowledge. Other issues are related to the Euro-centrism: For example, Edward Said's much criticized Orientalism is surely not completely wrong in linking Western scholarship on the Wider World to Western imperial dominance over the Wider World. It is, moreover, not easy to avoid carrying one's cultural presuppositions into studies of other cultures: so, because writings of the third-century Buddhist philosophy Nagarjuna became accessible to the West during or after the ascendancy of Wittgenstein, there was a tendency to see Nagarjuna as Wittgensteinian, seventeen centuries in advance.[222] Cultural incommensurability is one of the more fashionable of a long list of reasons why comparative study is impossible, though much of the list had been anticipated by the ancient wise. If you had told Zhuangzi that he could not know what a Hindu thought, he would have asked how you could then know what he could or could not know - intercultural incommensurability reduces to interpersonal incommensurability, which then ends all our scholarly conversations. Foregrounding these geographical divisions in our knowledge may also reinforce an unwanted gap between West and rest that is at least partly historiographical.The greatest obstacle is Western scholars' relative disinterest in the histories of belief and knowledge in the Wider World. From that disinterest follows not only a relative ignorance, but also some sense that Wider World peoples, their beliefs, and their knowledges are less deserving of our notice. The geographical interests of historians in the top history departments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States are proportionate not to population numbers, but to gross domestic product per capita; our collective professional specialization is the history of the very wealthy.
History departments in the West are dominated by historians of Western history, and those in Britain seem to be shifting even more towards Western history, after a brief, slight, but evidently unsatisfying flirtation with the Wider World. Some historians of the Wider World are somewhat hidden from view in the various area-studies academic units, but this does nothing to ameliorate the reality that half of history departments skip Africa.[223]We are furthermore relatively uninterested in the Wider World's languages. In the United States' universities, only some one-seventh of foreign-language enrolments are in non-Western languages, a proportion steadily growing over the last five decades, a growth fuelled before the 1990s slowdown by enthusiasm for Japanese, and now mostly by jumps in Chinese and Arabic enrolments. This should not make us optimistic, as the total number of students studying language has largely remained steady in the last half-century, despite the undergraduate population in the United States more than doubling.[224] In the United Kingdom, only some tenth of undergraduate students whose subjects of study are language work in non-European languages. (Typically in the United Kingdom language students are twice as likely to be female, but this gender imbalance disappears when only students of non-Western languages are con- sidered.[225]) Note that three-quarters of the earth's population are native speakers of a non-Western language. Even looking at the rates of change based on the less discouraging American data, we do not expect enrolments to reach this level until, perhaps, the twenty-third century.[226]
Problems with language compound and are compounded by problems with accessibility of sources. Key treatises from Muslim scientists working before the European Scientific Revolution have not yet been translated into a Western language.[227] Sometimes even whole collections of the originals of non-Western sources are endangered.
Soon some 30,000 of the historical manuscripts in Timbuktu will have been evacuated into the Ahmed Baba Institute's new building (where, ironically, the first document-refugees became easy targets for Islamist rebels). The fate of the hundreds of thousands re-evacuated or remaining precarious in private institutions is an open question. If we ignore these sources, their histories will go away.Of course we cannot discount the possibility that there will be a future historiography of language, belief, and knowledge that introduces wholly new issues and changes the variables that seem most meaningful. In this digital age we record per person each year some 800 megabytes of information, which may prove intellectually overwhelming even if it is not in media solid enough to suffocate us physically.[228] Perhaps a Silencepeace movement will arise to save us from information pollution, or monasteries of apophatic monks will prune bonsai libraries. David Macaulay's masterful Motel of the Mysteries (1979) - perhaps the greatest meditation on historians' ability to know past knowledge and understand past belief - deals with the apocryphal apocalyptic junk-mail tsunami of 1985. Perhaps future attention will swivel from language, belief, and knowledge to silence, doubt, and ignorance.
It may be helpful to consider, through the magic of imagination and extrapolation, the next century's Beijing History of the World (Beijing UP: forthcoming, 2174). Historians of the future will have remembered the early- twenty-second-century shift of the core of the academy from West to East, following not long after the Asian dominance of the world economy.[229] Chinese and Indian scientists accumulated Nobel prizes for finding the Higgs particle (had it been hiding in Urumchi all along?), resolving the proton-spin crisis, equating P and NP, and much else. If you turn to the History's chapters on the history of science, you will see a great many Chinese names, even from much earlier centuries.
The section on physics, for example, traces modern (that is, twenty-second-century) physics back to its roots in the atomism of the ancient school of Mozi ⅜A. A special boxed text section on ethno-science, inserted at the eleventh hour by an editor keen on multiculturalism, mentions the probable additional influence of and ⅛A⅛ Their names are helpfully romanized in the index (volume 14) as Descartes and Boyle, although Chinese has become the academy's default language, and even scholars primarily anglophone might drop in a classical allusion with no translation and with minimal pretension; after all, AA⅞∏M A® ' WAW W I).Although the Beijing History helps us see our own blind spots, it does little more than replace one centrism with another. Perhaps our imagination has not drifted quite far enough into the future. Looking down the bookshelf, we can just make out the cover of the twenty-fifth-century Lunar History of the Earth. This may promise the objectivity born of great distance, but we notice the publisher is Copernicus Crater University Press, the name reminding us of the iconic yet ironic place of Copernicus in all of these discussions. Who knows what perspectives the lunar inhabitants will have? A great deal depends on what beliefs and knowledges the CCU history department's colonist ancestors will have brought with them - and whether they are packed in boxes labelled “religion” or “science" - and a great deal depends on whether they will have been lifted to the moon by nuclear thermal rockets, or by devas and angels.