The Trouble with Books
From approximately 800a.d. to 1400a.d. Europe was in the depths of whats called The Dark Ages, where society and civilization in that area stuttered along with little or no development forward and a great many steps backward. From the 1400s onwards things seemed to turn a corner for the area, and civilization once again began to walk forward with a calm footstep from the calamities of the plagues, wars and famines that led to about two thirds of the population dying. From this point, most historians place the credit squarely on Mother Church for re-inventing civilization as we know it in the West today, yet none of that could have come about without the use of books.
During those troubled times in history, the majority of the population had little or no education at all, even those considered of high birth, with the majority of the heavy mental lifting done by priests and monks, as they were the most educated. Stemming from this time came the wonderful illuminated bibles that are so admired today, and it wasnt much after the first millennium that movable type was invented allowing for the mass production of books and the dissemination of knowledge over a much broader base of the population itself.
With common access to books now established, more and more people became literate, and so knowledge became available to those who would never have had the chance before, and so more and more people became thinkers and so on and so forth. So thats where books came from, and so its not without a totally true ring to it that the phrase knowledge is power became both a truism and a trite understatement of the effects books can have on the way people develop.
With knowledge came desire and greed, and from there we have all the problems that we face in this modern world. Revolutionaries with half baked and half formed ideas, insurgents imposing their will of back to basics on those already enlightened while not realizing that its almost impossible to take away knowledge and all that that implies. While no-one could blame the books themselves for being wrong or bad, its true that without them the world would be a much different place, without a lot of the evil that we must look on daily. But then again, without books, chances are that most of us would never know the difference, or understand the difference, as we would know no better. So read a book and rejoice, simply because you can.
