The Cultural Appropriation of Knowledge
Our modern world – when you listen to those shouting loudest who claim to be in the know – and especially the latest generations in the advanced West have discovered and created all that we know today. There is no history before 1776, there are no countries outside of the United States of America; the only language used throughout the world should be American [sic], and anywhere that has a city with the same name as one in the United States, is guilty of cultural appropriation. All worldly knowledge and wisdom originates from within the borders, the institutions, of the United States of America. Jesus Christ, we are told through faked attributions to various names of note, was a white American who wrote the Bible in English.
The latest offering long these lines has been presented by none other than the master of conspiracy theories Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose basic primary school knowledge seems to extend to matters far beyond his possible understanding, and is that there have been no scientific discoveries, literary works of merit, or other achievements which may be attributed to anyone in the Arab world – however one may wish to describe it politically, geographically or culturally.
There has, of course, been immediate backlash from those who do have a less than rudimentary education, and considerably more world experience than someone who claims, with pride, that worms have been eating his brain. Part of the basic structure of the so-called western civilisation comes from the Arabic world, from their learning and knowledge, not least the system we use to count: basic numbers and arithmetic. It can be irrefutably argued that the basics of the written word came from Arabic sources, and that several different forms of committing ideas and information to a written form were developed and refined by peoples in what we now call the Middle East.
This is not to denigrate the work of later generations, as knowledge and the art of learning moved further west, bringing a new form of civilisation to other countries as conquest and migration brought new impressions and experiences, but much of what we know was formed in people’s minds thousands of years ago, and has merely been rediscovered over the last few centuries, despite strong and sometimes overwhelming efforts to suppress and destroy. One merely needs to glance toward Nicholaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei for prime modern examples. But even before them, before the beginning of our current era, there were those who turned their minds to matters beyond the pale of our earthly existence, with ideas which, even today, cannot seem to be accepted by some:
In the first place, all around us in every direction and on both sides and above and below through the universe there is no limit: as I have shown, and truth itself cries aloud, and the nature of the unfathomable deep gives forth light. Now since there is illimitable space empty in every direction, and since seeds innumerable in number in the unfathomable universe are flying about in many ways driven in everlasting movement, it cannot by any means thought likely that this is the only round earth and sky that has been made, that all those bodies of matter without do nothing: especially since the world was made by nature´, and the seeds of things themselves of their own accord, knocking together by chance, clashed in all sorts of ways, heedless, without aim, without intention, until at length those combined which, suddenly thrown together, could become in each case the beginnings of mighty things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.
Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 – ca. 55 BCE): On the Nature of Things.
There is, according to an old saying which can also be found in the Christian Bible (Ecclesiasties 1:9), nothing new under the sun. We are taught the basics as they have been taught for generations, based on theories and facts dating back well beyond human memory, and are challenged to work with these basic structures or foundations to achieve our own level of knowledge and wisdom. The claim that a certain land or people does not produce any knowledge of worth – perhaps simply because their scientists, writers, and other creators of knowledge and art do not win prizes predominantly based on mainland American works – is short-sighted as much as ignorant. We can, and many do, learn much from the so-called primitive ways of former civilisations, and our lives could be enriched beyond measure by attaining this mass of available knowledge to influence and guide our own lives, through the insights and experiences of those who have lived and learned before us.
