Modern Science

There really cannot be an over estimation of how much modern science has impacted our world today. We wouldn’t have pretty much anything if we were still in the days of looking to the divine or the ideas of ancient philosophers. Switching to a thought system that is based upon experimenting and observing things logically is the largest factor that got us to where we are today. Moreover, I found it interesting that the newer thinkers saw themselves as combatting the older ways of thinking. It almost seemed as if they were not trying to improve thinking by adding new ideas but rather destroying the old and starting with something completely new. I think it took some kind of bravery to go against the social norms and the prevalent thinking of the past thousand years or so. Not only was it going against the norms of society, but also going against the church itself which held a lot of power. I guess that nothing is ever completely good or bad, and the bad thing that came with science that I never really thought about before was the cementing of inequalities, whether they be racial or based on gender, science had a hand in making them more legitimate. It seems to me that the main reason that Europe developed scientific thought ahead of any other part of the world was because Europe was not afraid to value higher learning over religion and government. The advancements made in the Islamic world and China ceased in part due to valuing their religion and government over the education of their people. I find it a bit ignorant to not authorize independent institutions because they thought that education was “useless knowledge”. Besides the impact the scientific revolution had on people’s ideas about the world around them, it also influenced how they saw the world in relation to other celestial bodies in outer space.

            One of the more surprising things was that scientists like Galileo and Newton never rejected the ideas of Christianity or the notion of God, they never even thought that their ideas contradicted faith. However, as expected, the church initially denied the ideas of these thinkers and even burned some as heretics. It was strange to read about how the church developed somewhat of a love hate relationship where they hated the thinkers’ ideas and all they stood for, but still accommodated some of their ideas. This point in time was really critical for human development as it gave us a new approach to thinking logically, that is, using our own minds to reason things instead of declaring everything a work of the divine and believing that angels and a God was overseeing every little detail. I also liked how some of the thinkers did not denounce religion in its entirety; rather saw them as compatible and necessary. The only parts that science really seemed to reject was the superstitious and ignorance of religion, and that itself was probably the most important thing that came out of this period. Not any specific law or idea or the renouncing of religion, but the movement to encourage people to think for themselves.

Sugar connections

Nowadays it’s strange to think that something as simple as sugar was once considered a rare commodity only available to elite upper class citizens. Not just sugar but other things that we take for granted everyday like pepper or sweetened coffee, something we could easily obtain, was once extremely difficult for people to obtain. In the world we live in now, getting these things are as simple as a trip to the grocery store. It just goes to show how dependent we were, and are, on the rest of the world. All the things that are easy to get for us now would not be so readily available if not for expansion and conquest. It’s a sad thought but the truth is that without the exploitation of other societies, a lot of things that we use every day would not be around. More specifically, something like sugar would not be around if not for Muslim expansion. Honestly, I don’t think that anyone in the present would ever think that sugar would not be in America if not for expansion alone, let alone Muslim expansion. If anything, this shows that everything that happens has an impact on the world. Even major events such as a war in another country don’t just impact one region, there is always a global impact in these kinds of matters whether we notice them or not. This is the beginning of sugar becoming an isolated product to a mass commodity. This in itself was a complex process that didn’t happen overnight. After it became known in Europe it became a luxury for people to have that only was available to the elite in society. To me, thinking of sugar as a luxury is a bit of a difficult concept to grasp because it’s found everywhere now, especially in our society. Finding people who cannot easily find sugar would be a difficult task. From the introduction of sugar in Europe came the desire for it to become available to the masses. And because the process of growing sugar requires large amounts of labor, the need for slaves also started to come up, not to mention a need for more land to grow the sugar on. Again the idea of things that could seem totally unrelated actually are more interwoven than they may seem. I mean personally, thinking that the want for sugar eventually caused more slavery in the world is not some type of connection I would have made. Sugar created a connection between things worlds apart like money from one part of the world bought slaves from another part of the world to grow in an entirely different part of the world. And if this is the connection made just for sugar, imagine what kind of impact things like salt or pepper had on the world when they were becoming more popular; not only those but all spices in general. 

First post!
-Done.