I noticed that, on Wikipedia, the number of significant libraries listed as destroyed by “human action” is much greater than the number destroyed by natural causes. Certainly, many of these were because of disagreements with ideologies expressed in texts in those libraries. But many of them were attempts to destroy acquired knowledge that, for one reason or another, was considered “dangerous.”
This is an interesting human pathology – the attempt to deny the reality of the world in which we live. There is a constant interaction between our internal reality and the external reality from which it is derived. We all live in worlds of our own making, all suffer from delusions to greater or lesser extents, but it’s fascinating the lengths to which we will go to try to impose our internal realities on the external world.
We would consider someone pathologically deluded if they believed they could fly and leapt out a window to impose this internal reality on the forces of gravity. But the burning of a library containing books detailing that force is really no different. Gravity exists whether we believe in it or not.
Certainly, in the quantum world, the concept of objective reality appears to break down (assuming we have simply not achieved an adequate description of the phenomena we observe at that scale), but that breakdown itself still appears to be an objective fact.
It seems to me that typically this disconnect derives from our desires. We want something so much, we refuse to believe that reality will not give it to us. Wanting someone so much, we refuse to believe they do not want us. Wanting a population to believe an ideology so much, we attempt to unmake the facts that undermine it. In Arthur Koestler’s remarkable book, The Sleepwalkers, he describes how, for hundreds of years, humanity wanted the earth to be the center of the universe so much, we invented more and more convoluted explanations for the observational facts refining themselves before our eyes.
The ability to conceive how to create a connection between a desire and reality is obviously one of the core traits of consciousness. And the more able a species is to execute on this, the more conscious, the more intelligent, and the more successful it is. Arguably, it is the ability to conceive of these connections and forge them into being that is the key to human “success” on this planet.
Unfortunately, it might also be this same ability run amok that proves to be our ultimate “failure.” For decades and decades now we have tried to pretend the climate is not changing before our eyes as a result of our own actions. Like Koestler’s Sleepwalkers, we desire so very badly for it not to be true, that we keep pretending it isn’t. We don’t want to hear that we might have to give up so many things we also desire so greatly – our easy way of abundant living – so we simply “burn down the library.” If we can’t read about it, it isn’t true.
But reality marches on without us. We can pretend it does not exist, but, as someone almost once said, the thing about gravity is that it pulls you down whether you believe in it or not.