The way great books influenced human advancement

The way great books influenced human advancement

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Books, and the amount of people who might read them, have actually been absolutely important to human advancement over the centuries.

With such a rich history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's often easy to forget how extremely fortunate we are to have the likes of the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones or the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books supporting access to a big percentage of all the books that have actually ever been composed (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can easily change the manner in which you take a look at the world, which has been true throughout all of history also. The contemporary world is built on understanding that has been passed down through books, whether that is philosophy, science, or history, and human civilisation would not be anywhere near as advanced as it is today if it had not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.

It is necessary to remember that, although plenty of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for most of humankind's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. The majority of stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, merely because the vast majority of people could not read, implying that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who might comprehend them. After a quick boom throughout the classical period of antiquity, the quantity of literate people dropped dramatically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became rare treasures, with monks painstakingly copying out the surviving classic texts by hand so as to preserve them, as they were some of the only members of the populace who could read or write. They were the specialist keepers of knowledge like biology and religion that we all have access to in the modern world.

It can be hard to envision what the world would resemble today if the huge bulk of individuals were unable to read, but for the large bulk of history the large majority of people could not, and nor were books accessible even if they could. It was the invention of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books much more available. Naturally, it was still just actually the wealthiest and well-educated that could read or write, but it enabled a whole host of breakthroughs in science, art, and thinking to be spread out throughout great distances. Consider what would have taken place if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have actually been distributed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a foundation of books, and we are lucky to be able to merely log onto a site like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and quickly gain access to the totality of human knowledge.