The publication of this Cambridge World History signals that the new world history has reached a certain maturity, and this chapter takes advantage of the moment to take stock of the vast scholarship on the history of ideas and the meagre scholarship on the global history of ideas by responding to a single question: what role has the entire world played in how we write and understand the history of belief, knowledge, and language?
Historians have approached language, belief, and knowledge in many ways, and these differences are reflected in large measure by the confidence we have in various aspects of language, belief, and knowledge, and by the extent we consider language, belief, and knowledge to be universal.
Generally speaking, a pound of doubt added to knowledge creates belief; add a pound of confidence to belief and you have knowledge. We are still knee-deep in a sociological and cultural morass that sees a clean break between a traditional and irrational religion and a modern and rational science. Picturing the likely author and likely audience of an academic essay written today, we might associate science with confidence and religion with doubt; “scientific knowledge” and “religious belief” roll off the tongue, while “scientific belief’ hesitates, and “religious knowledge” feels qualified, or patronizing. In the plural, “beliefs” sounds natural, but “knowledges” annoys the word processor's spellcheck, which seems to doubt there can be multiples of a universal.Because this chapter describes historiography rather than history, we will decline to define terms that historians themselves rarely and inconsistently define. As with “belief” and “knowledge” above, we mainly describe how these terms are used, their behaviours in the historiographical wild. “Europe” refers to the continent, itself with fuzzy boundaries, but when appearing in the world history of knowledge “European” usually refers also to the places most colonized by Europeans in the last two centuries, and to those places' peoples and their ideas. For practical purposes, we will refer to the “West”; for its complement, we'll use the name “Wider World”, hopefully without reification. Each term has its silliness: a round rotating world can have an absolute north and south, but not an absolute “West”, and referring to the larger part of the planet in terms of its not being the smaller part is certainly backwards.
Travelling peoples and travelling ideas burst through such divisions in both directions, and historians are increasingly aware of and interested in these trespassers, even as the fundamental geographical division endures in most minds.With both “West” and “science” amorphous, we have exactly twice as much wiggle room as we need to define each in terms of the other, and historians implicitly do this. Science is the knowledge developed in the West, which consists of those places with science, which is the knowledge developed in the West... Even those who deny the monopoly of the West on science usually admit that Western science is unique for its raw kind of power to save lives and blow things up. This sense of science being an objective thing that we have achieved may, of course, be illusory. The medicine of comedian Steve Martin's medieval Theodoric of York is perfectly modern in its confidence if not in its explanations: “Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.”[174]
Religion is no less problematic. It emerges as a category largely as an involuntary and unintentional collaboration between Christian missionaries and their targets, shaping local beliefs and practices into a mould resembling something like Christianity. The first British missionaries to Sri Lanka, for example, reported that the local Buddhist monks did not seem to be very religious - with some accuracy, as Buddhist practices had not yet become a Western-style “Buddhist religion”.[175]
In the eyes of the academy, religion may do things, too, but if it once resurrected the dead its focus has shifted to moral subtleties, psychological reassurance, societal duct tape, and dubious miracles sometimes involving images on tortillas.
Frustrated in his prayers for a bicycle, Emo Philips finally stole one and prayed for forgiveness, one of the few things modern religion can still dispense.[176]This idea that European science “won”, in some crude sense, exists perhaps because it is objectively true and capitalizes on an empiricism that the Wider World found less compelling, perhaps because we (and anyone who touches a Cambridge History may join this “we” to some degree) are ourselves in a European tradition and must stretch to value what is outside it, and perhaps because European empires once claimed dominance over much of the world. Most of our books about knowledge are in fact about Euroknowledge, rather than about the Wider World's ethno-knowledges. We so implicitly understand knowledge to be the stuff of Kant and Newton that we forget to qualify it explicitly with a “Euro-” prefix, and often we forget that it needs to be qualified at all.
The division between Euro-knowledge and ethno-knowledges works differently in various cases, depending on the kind of knowledge under discussion, its perceived universality, and the confidence with which we know it. At one end of the continuum is mathematics. Most of us know that 2 + 2 = 4, in Cambridge as well as in Timbuktu, and we have deductions (surprisingly complex) from axioms (surprisingly arbitrary) to give us tremendous confidence in this our universal knowledge. Outside of this Euro-mathematics we have several traditions of ethno-mathematics, most of which care little for deductions and axioms; their knowledges typically consist of different methods, and different objectives, but the results are compatible with Euro-mathematics and indeed can be legitimized by Euro-mathematicians using their own methods. Consider the process of the Tamil mathematician Ramanujan (1887-1920): after the goddess Lakshmi had put the seeds of ideas in his head, Ramanujan grew them out on his writing slate, and recorded his results on paper for posterity, but the path he took to them (along with any hint of proofs) vanished as he wiped clean his slate.[177] In Asian mathematics, the articulation of convincing explanations was traditionally, on pedagogical grounds, the responsibility of the mathematician's students; in Ramanujan's case distinguished Euro-mathematicians have since his death played this role, with these efforts teaching them as much as Ramanujan's results themselves.
The distinction between Euro- and ethno- works much the same ways in many of the natural sciences. We think universal laws of physics are no less universal in Timbuktu, and the odd term “ethno-physics” exists mostly as a heuristic foil, as it does here. The case of philosophy is still in flux, with the mainstream academy perhaps seeing in Europe a logical, systematic philosophy made by individuals, while Africa has an ethno-philosophy or folk philosophy, more intuitive than logical, more communal than built by individual genius.[178]Extending the Euro /ethno-distinction into religion requires great care. It may be tempting to equate ethno-religions with the primitive or primal religions, or with religions that are not Christian. For our purposes, however, we can continue the thrust of the previous paragraphs by describing all religions as ethno-religions, and leaving the category of Euro-religion as empty, though we might perhaps mention the temptation to include there Euro-science itself. Such is the secularism of the contemporary academy that no religion enjoys the same confidence we have in chemistry, and religion only survives under the protection of the same wilful suspension of disbelief we might apply to ethno-knowledges - although in this case without a real Euro-religion there are no reliable Euro-religionists to check Muhammad's maths, so to speak, after the fact, as Euro-mathematicians have done for Ramanujan.
The upshot is that the ethno-prefix allows non-European knowledges to be included and excluded simultaneously, to be included but only conditionally, as at the children's table of a wedding dinner. This “xkcd” cartoon[179] (Figure 6.1) points at the key issues: whether science works, and the effects of cultural circumstances (“you're so cute when you get into something”) on that science. If the second figure's hat were a Buddhist monk's robes (some Buddhist siddha adepts have been known to levitate and to zap things), we would have an image that works out the tension between scientific knowledge and religious belief, in favour of the latter - yet this cartoon is humorous only because science does seem to “work”. I will stipulate that I am not advocating for this division between science/knowledge/West and religion/belief/Wider World, but merely am attempting to distill the consensus sense of the intellectual West. The extent to which this preliminary discussion holds for the academy will become clear below.