The swerve : how the world became modern

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The Swerve is a wonderful, scholarly book that I learned from, about origins of modernity.  Rarely does a book lack misspellings and typos, but all I could detect here were a couple of word mistakes (one being ‘puddle’ when the intention was ‘muddle’), at least three obscure person references that should have been clarified in end notes or bibliography entries, and one or two totally mysterious sentences.  Larger concerns are more worth noting after this establishment that I was a careful reader.  There is probably a subtle authorial bias from Greenblatt’s Jewish upbringing (which he informs readers about at the beginning) in this convincingly objective account.  On the one hand, he emphasizes many failures of Christianity, which I have no doubt is accurate (fair-minded) if unbalanced, and on the other is failure to adequately link it with its Judaism ancestor, the other parent of course being Greek (and other) paganism about which Greenblatt is abundantly responsive.  There is also a Western bias.  For example, scant allusion is made to outside influences from Asia in Greek philosophy, although in his defense apparently there is little written acknowledged evidence of them.  More specifically, Epicurus apparently followed in time the evolution of Buddhism out of Hinduism, and there are many similarities of world view.  It is easily possible that these were simply parallel developments arising from parallel cultural realities, or it could be that there was an egotistic slant weighing against crediting foreigner precedent.  At any rate, the modernity of science did arise only in one time and in one region: all the early scientists were monotheistic Christians and Jews from Western Europe and the U.S.  None were from India, China, Africa, non-European (non-British) Americas, or elsewhere, even as these regions/cultures were quite evolved otherwise and of course copied science eventually to varying degrees.  It is a really important enterprise to figure out why this happened and Greenblatt adds quite a lot.  I am reminded of another excellent book I also just read called Galileo’s Muse in which the role of the humanities is similarly emphasized as causing science to emerge.  I also recommend Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets which is included in the lengthy (in a good sense) bibliography but not even mentioned (excusably I guess).  I conclude with two other gripes, not really about the writing as the story.  I don’t get why Epicurus could disparage many, or all, primitive notions such as ghosts and yet uncritically embrace the idea of a soul.  And I don’t think the idea of the swerve was thoughtfully addressed as a concept.  Greenblatt probably should have risked the charge of talking down to his readers by explicitly linking this abstract, limited concept (tiny movements of atoms?) to the large-scale issue of the schism between modern and pre-modern mentality.  I mean, he did this indeed in terms of the entire book, just not clearly enough in so many words in a summary passage, which is, I would guess, because the concept of Epicurus was not properly investigated by either person.  Regarding the former, perhaps the soul is shorthand for recognition that people are animals but animals are not people, and regarding the latter, that there is both randomness and design (progress) at the core of reality.