IF YOU WORRY about the polarization of intellectual life, you’re certainly not the first. Consider Zera Ya’icob, the Ethiopian philosopher who defended a form of intellectual freedom in his Hatata (Inquiry) of 1667. Zera Ya’icob was torn between the religious sects that mingled in 17th-century East Africa. He engaged with Muslims, Coptic Christians, Jesuit missionaries, African Jews, and the local Oromo people, finding that they all said the same thing: “My faith is right and those who believe in another faith believe in falsehood, and are the enemies of God.” At once stimulated and bewildered, he wondered, “Who would be the judge for such kind of an argument?” [1]
It is easy to sympathize with Zera Ya’icob when reading recent scholarship on the origins of modern science, which is riven by two orthodoxies in particular. One orthodoxy is that modern science was invented in early modern Europe. Important contributions came from other times and places, of course, but the decisive move toward modern science happened in Western Europe in the 17th century. The task of the historian of science is to understand how and why. If you disagree with this narrative, you may be accused of relativism, postmodernism, political correctness, or of not doing your job.
