Jonah Goldberg - Time Traveler

Jonah is the Dom DeLuise of the conservative movement.  Either that or the Shecky Green.  I don't know comedians.  Well anyway, whichever he is, he makes the most important points in interesting ways.  Here's a classic:

When Is Your Quantum Moment?
Imagine you can go back in time. How much useful knowledge could you really bring with you? By that I mean, how much actual constructive knowledge could you deliver to the folks in, say, 1800 or 1500?

Imagine I was immediately transported back to the year 1750. Let's assume that I could even get a hearing from people who mattered (a big assumption). What could I bring to temporal show-and-tell that would move things along rapidly? Ninety-eight percent of my knowledge would be useless ("You're not exactly like a cognitive MacGyver, now" -- the Couch). I couldn't tell them how to make life-saving drugs, or how to make an electric transistor, or how the internal-combustion engine works. I'm sure I could give some helpful tips about the importance of hygiene and some general tidbits about nutrition. I could take a stab at explaining CPR -- but that'd be a real crapshoot if my credibility was on the line.

Now, of course, ideally if I were to go back to, say, the year 1200, I'd bring a lot of guns, the complete Time-Life series of how-to books, and a whole bunch of chemistry and medical textbooks, before commencing my plan to become the Kemal Ataturk of humanity.

And I know there are some readers out there who churn their own butter and solder their own personal electronics ("Wanna see my MyPhone?"). But many of us pretty thoroughly rely on the accumulated wisdom of others. As I've written before, nobody in the world even knows how to make a pencil -- and even that idea came from someone else!

The vast bulk of knowledge we have is dependent on stuff we know little or nothing about. I can drive a car and make a computer work, but I am barely better equipped to build a car or put together a computer than a Viking.

Why do I bring this up? Well, partly because I'm always daydreaming about time travel (and someday, when I write my novel, graphic or otherwise, that daydreaming will really pay off!). But also because I think it illustrates a fundamental -- the fundamental -- conservative point. Civilization has a memory cache we dare not erase. Because it is our collective wisdom, or intangible capital, that makes us rich, that makes us anything at all.


OK, cue Babs Streisand:  "People who need people are the luckiest peopllllllee in the worlllllllllllld" - did you know that she's a closet paleo?

I'll stop now.