More Faculty Thoughts on the Past 1,000 Years

Nostradamus: he thought a lot about the meaning of the millennium too.

As part of the CSJ's continuing millennium series, here are some additional faculty views on the most important ideas of the past 1,000 years.

"Limiting strictly to science in the past 1,000 years, I would have to say that the inductive method, attributed to Roger Bacon around the year 1200, would have to be first. It basically states that you can learn about nature by doing experiments, rather than simply observing nature passively. Once you accept this point of view, as Galileo and Newton did, all the rest of Western science follows naturally. As a corollary to this idea, the ideas of Galileo and Newton that the laws of nature are regular, and that mathematics can be used to express them, basically defines modern science, which is the single most distinctive characteristic of Western civilization. Western civilization invented science in the modern sense, and it is the only way that science is done today." -John W. Durso, professor of physics

"The slave/colonial era mythology of race is one of the most important constructs of the past one thousand years. The creation of a notion of race and the mythology surrounding that concept have changed the way human beings relate to one another and to themselves. The 'I' and the 'we' were both dramatically transformed. There has been an impact on all social relationships. Geography has been altered by social processes, including wars, that were influenced by this mythology. And so on. There are few ideas that have had such a wide-scale and deeply rooted impact upon humanity." -Satyananda Gabriel, associate professor of economics

"It seems to me that all the brouhaha about "the greatest X of the millennium" is sadly misguided, though there does seem to be an awful lot of it. All of those ideas or people or events are intertwined, not only with other great and significant things, but also with many minor and insignificant ones. Could we have 'Thomas Jefferson and liberty' without nameless slaves, women, and unimportant men who actually did the work?

Could we have 'Mao Tse-tung and revolution' without the myriad soldiers and farmers and workers who made the revolution happen? My biggest problem with the enterprise is defining what is 'important' or 'great' or "significant" means, a task historians grapple with every day and have never solved to any universal satisfaction. Given my own proclivities, I guess that calculus would have to be the greatest single idea of the millennium, since it has had the most impact (for good or ill)." -Jonathan Lipman, professor of history

"Feminism--or, more generally, ideas about and movements for the social, political, and economic equality of women. Film--an idea of exactly a hundred years ago, which has changed the way we see, experience, and imagine the world." -Elizabeth Young, associate professor of English