The world that should have been ours

This post is about an idea which has fascinated me for much of my life and forms a major part of how I think about the world, but which I've barely ever mentioned here on the blog.  A few weeks ago I wrote this:

More distant than the farthest stars
The stillborn world that should have been
The world in which I should have lived
That never was, so never seen.

Trapped in this dreary changeling-land
I dream the world I would have known
If mankind's rise had gone unchecked
If Alexandria's seed had grown.

Where Rome and Athens never fell
Where cross and crescent never rose
Where now those farthest stars are ours
Where truth and beauty man still knows.

But my true home I cannot reach
For things that never were lie far
Across the sea of yearning dreams
From grey and dismal things that are.

The Classical (Greco-Roman-Persian) civilization was, compared with most pre-modern societies and certainly compared with the Dark Ages that followed it, remarkably tolerant, culturally pluralistic, and open to contending ideas.  Especially during the Hellenistic* period, after the conquests of Alexander spread Greek culture and thought across the Middle East and the ideas of Aristotle nudged Greek philosophy toward real scientific thinking, there was an explosion of progress in human knowledge and understanding in many fields.  This was the age of Euclid and Eratosthenes, of the Library of Alexandria, when Aristarchus worked out the heliocentric solar system 1,800 years before Copernicus, when the Babylonians developed a precursor of calculus, when Archimedes, Hero, and others turned advances in abstract knowledge toward practical technology.  These advances laid the groundwork for the massive engineering achievements of the Roman Empire, whose ruins lie scattered across Europe and North Africa to this day.

It certainly looked like the beginnings of a revolution of modernity such as the Western world has actually seen since the Renaissance.  But ultimately it was stillborn.  Last week I posted about the destruction of Classical civilization.  But what if it had continued to thrive and progress -- say, if Alexander had lived longer and consolidated his empire, or if Constantine had never existed?  What if, for example, the Greeks or Babylonians had developed positional notation, the lack of which held back their development of mathematics and thus blocked the way to many further advances in science?  Ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia accepted a plurality of contending viewpoints and ideas, almost as modern Western pluralistic societies do.  Some Greek states had democracy and trial by jury, while the early Romans had a form of representative government.  What if these early experiments had not died out but evolved and become more inclusive, as American democracy did -- but almost 2,000 years earlier?  Yes, these cultures had slavery (though never race-based), subjugated women to varying degrees, and were often warlike -- but true modernization would have mitigated these evils over time, just as it did in real history over the last 200 years or so.

How far might civilization have advanced by now?  How much better would the world be, if the intervening millennium of stagnation brought about by Christianity and Islam, with their miasma of intolerance and taboos and anti-intellectualism and sheer stupidity, had never happened -- and the upward trajectory of progress launched by the ancients had continued?

Aside from technological progress, there is the issue of the taboo on homosexuality, which did not exist in Classical-era Greek, Roman, or Persian culture.  Certain standards about what was and was not "proper" in sexual relationships did exist, but the taboo on same-sex relationships did not -- in Greece, male bisexuality was practically a social norm.  This taboo was imposed on the West entirely by the triumph of Christianity; without Christianity, it would never have been part of our culture.  This would have avoided a staggering amount of suffering -- all the horrific executions of homosexuals during the Dark Ages by regimes enforcing the taboo, all the centuries of bigotry and cruelty that ruined the lives of countless innocent people and which persist to this day in the more backward parts of the West.  All of that would simply never have been.  And as I observed here, Classical culture was much more open and less repressed about sexuality in general.

In short, we are living in a failed timeline in which the Western world's natural progress was derailed and sent into reverse in late Roman times, and only got started again about four hundred years ago.  The history that should have happened, to which we should now be heirs, would have been far different and far better.

I'm not the only one who has thought about this.

When I originally posted the poem above, I included this image:

It comes from Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos, which included a discussion on this very point in the episode "The Backbone of Night".  Sagan speculated that if the Hellenistic age of science exemplified by the Library of Alexandria had survived and continued to progress, by now we would be proficient in interstellar travel.  The image depicts a starship, with the Greek (of course) inscription on its hull superimposed over the image of the dodecahedron in tribute to the ancient pioneers of geometry who launched Greek mathematics.

Stephen Hawking once made a documentary series called Favorite Places** in which he explores various places in the universe that fascinate him.  In one episode, he depicts himself visiting an alternate-history version of Earth in the present day, finding the planet long deserted.  He discovers a beacon pointing the way to where mankind, having left Earth to revert to nature, long ago migrated into space.  Following this path, he is intercepted by several advanced spacecraft which hail him in a form of Classical Greek.  Finding his intentions to be peaceful, they escort him to mankind's new home, a vast ring-shaped artificial world bearing the name "New Alexandria".

In his book God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens describes meeting the Jewish religious fanatic Meir Kahane, which set him thinking about conflict in Classical times between fervent Orthodox Jews and those Jews who had assimilated to the dominant Greco-Roman culture of their age -- and the tragedy that the former won out in the end, leading to the rise of Christianity (and eventually Islam) and the death of Classical civilization.  Had the more cosmopolitan Jews won out, he observes, "We could have been spared the whole thing."  Of Kahane, he says:

Sniffing this insanitary barbarian, I had a real pang about the world of light and color that we had lost so long ago, in the black-and-white nightmares of his dreary and righteous ancestors.  The stench of Calvin and Torquemada and bin Laden came from the dank, hunched figure whose Kach party goons patrolled the streets..... here was a poisonous branch that should have been snapped off long ago, or allowed to die out, before it could infect any healthy growth..... yet we still dwell in its unwholesome, life-killing shadow.***

In his short story "Eutopia", science-fiction writer Poul Anderson postulated a parallel world in which the Hellenistic civilization survived and went on to colonize North America, establishing an ideal society ("Eutopia" translates as "Good Land").  By the present day, Eutopia has the technology to visit various alternate versions of Earth to see the outcomes of their different histories.  The story follows an Eutopian researcher, Iason Philippou, who is traveling in not our own version of Earth but a somewhat similar one he finds almost equally barbaric.  Anderson's version of a modernized Hellenistic culture strikes me as improbably stodgy and closed-minded, but at least he explored the idea.  You can read the whole story here.

On my original post, a couple of commenters wrote "I wish that world existed" and "I wonder about this other universe, too".  Others, including some major thinkers, have felt the same.

o o o o o

*Don't confuse "Hellenistic" with "Hellenic".  "Hellenistic" refers to the specific period after Alexander the Great and Aristotle (that is, starting at the end of the 4th century BC) when Greek culture dominated the Middle East and Greek science reached its highest level of development.  "Hellenic" just means "Greek" in general.

**This series is, as far as I know, available only on CuriosityStream -- which is a paid service, but well worth it.  The cheapest option is $2.99 per month and gives access to hundreds of documentaries at a perfectly acceptable video quality level.

***Hitchens is referring to the whole Abrahamic religious blight including Christianity and Islam, not just to Judaism.