Rebuilding Civilization with Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie

I'm reading The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, which is an interesting how to guide and speculation about how a manual of knowledge good be used to help reboot civilization after a post-apocalyptic scenario. And he quotes from Diderot as having the original inspiration for a similar project during the Enlightenment:

To whatever level of perfection an encyclopedia may be brought, it is evident from the nature of the work that is will necessarily be in the latter category. There are objects which are in the hands of the people, from which they draw their subsistence, the practical knowledge of which is their constant concern. Whatever treatise one may write about it, there will always come a moment when they know more about it than the book does. There are other objects about which they will remain almost entirely ignorant, because their gains in knowledge are too small and too slow, even if we assumed it is continuous, ever to amount to much enlightenment. Thus both the man of the people and the scientist will always have equally as much to desire and instruction to find in an encyclopedia . The most glorious moment for an opus of this nature would be that which immediately follows some great revolution which has suspended the progress of the sciences, interrupted the labors of the arts, and plunged a portion of our hemisphere back into darkness. What gratitude the next generation following such troubled times would feel for the men who had feared them from afar, and taken measures against their ravages by protecting the knowledge of centuries past! Then you would see (I say this without vainglory, because our Encyclopedia will perhaps never attain the perfection that would earn it such honors) that that great opus would be named along with the monarch under whom it was undertaken, the minister to whom it was dedicated, the powerful who favored its execution, the authors who devoted themselves to it, all the men of letters who took part in it. The same voice that recalled these supporters would not forget to evoke as well the burdens the authors had to bear and the affronts to which they were subjected; and the monument that would be elevated to them would have several sides, which would represent by turns the honors accorded their memory, and the marks of indignation attached to the memory of their enemies.

After the next barbarian invasion, civilization would not have to slumber through a long Dark Age, as it did after the fall of Rome. It got me speculating about the possibility of Diderot's Encyclopedia actually being used for the purpose it was intended. If you ever read a copy, its not just Enlightenment philosophy, there are pages of elaborate plates giving detailed instructions in agriculture and mechanics.

Edward Gibbon writing during the same time period, also speculated about the possibility of Early Modern Europe falling the way of Rome, and he discounted it as highly unlikely given the technological advances.

Europe is now divided into twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and a variety of smaller, though independent states: the chances of royal and ministerial talent are multiplied, at least, with the number of its rulers; and a Julian, or Semiramis, may reign in the North, while Arcadius and Honorius again slumber on the thrones of the South. The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manner of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and indecisive contests. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.

Probably Gibbon is right and 18th Century Europe can't be seen as analogous to the Roman Empire, but its an intriguing question whether a new civilization would have had a head-start relative to the long Dark Ages following the fall of Rome. If the works of Greek Science and Atomism had been preserved and made readily accessible earlier in the Middle Ages, it quite possibly could have jump-started the Renaissance and the rise of Modern Science. That in itself is an interesting scenario, suppose some wise Roman Emperor had ordered a compendium of the highest works of Greek science and civilization to be preserved in a compact form, widely distributed throughout the Empire, would that have shortened the length of the Dark Ages?

It probably isn't one of the most realistic timelines, but for me its an interesting speculation. An Alternative History version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series.

Perhaps a World Nazi Empire could serve as the New Barbarians who stamp out all remnants of Enlightenment civilization, and after a 'new dark ages, made all the more sinister and longlasting by the lights of a perverted science' perhaps the Encyclopedia aids in the reconstruction of a Neo-Enlightenment after the fall of Hitler's New Order.
 
Rather Future history than before 1900, but if you are dystopic about it, we could very well have a destruction of the current world order in the next century or so, given how nature is maltreated at the moment all over the planet.
 
TBH I've always considered the role of "Greek Science and Atomism" to be rather over-exaggerated. For one thing, the Greeks didn't actually have science in the usual modern sense of the term; they tried to come up with explanations of phenomena they observed in the world around them, but there was no push to come up with empirically-testable theories, which was what really set the science of the seventeenth century on from the studies of the earlier period. For another thing, there's no reason to suppose that atomism was or is necessary in the development of the scientific method: the ancient Greek atomists hadn't developed (what we would recognise as) the scientific method, after all, and there's nothing to stop a Platonist or Aristotelian from making predictions and testing them.

(In fact, modern philosophy of science is arguably closer to the views of Aristotle than to those of Francis Bacon, Newton, et al. The seventeenth-century scientists tended to see the "laws of nature" as external commands which God imposed on the physical universe, a view which kind of went out of fashion with the rise of atheism. Modern philosophers of science are more likely to view talk of "natural laws" as short-hand for the sort of behaviour physical things tend to exhibit in virtue of their inherent properties, which is a much more Aristotelian way of looking at things.)

(It's also perhaps worth noting that "the Renaissance" wasn't quite the unambiguous advance over the Middle Ages that people tend to assume. Among other things, the period saw a much more widespread belief in magic and the occult than the Mediaeval period, whose intellectual luminaries tended to regard such things as backward country superstitions not worth taking seriously.)

Basically, I don't think that "jump-start[ing] the Renaissance" would necessarily lead to an earlier Scientific Revolution, or vice versa, or for that matter that the Greek atomists would be the people to do it. That said, preserving the works of Greek philosophers like Aristotle -- people whose works, when re-discovered and translated, helped to bring about the twelfth-century renaissance -- might have helped to lighten the Dark Ages somewhat. On the other hand, though, it's not like these authors -- as well as various epitomes, summaries, and encyclopaedias -- were absent from the Western Empire before the Fall; in fact, the main reason for their loss was that, when barbarians are over-running your country and you're trying to defend your farms against garlic-smelling Germanic warbands, things like giving your children a classical education or making copies of Aristotle's Metaphysics tend to look rather unimportant by comparison. Basically, any plausible scenario in which more ancient texts survive the Dark Ages would have to be one in which the Dark Ages were less serious in the first place, making it hard to tell cause and effect.

As for any future Dark Ages, or post-Nazi Dark Ages, I think that, whilst it's perfectly possible for some pre-Fall works to survive and be rediscovered, anybody deliberately seeking to preserve what knowledge they can would probably choose a more up-to-date volume than Diderot's work. Maybe the Encyclopaedia Britannica?
 
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