On the World’s Seas and Oceans - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 30

Not least important, the Mediterranean gave humankind a secular moral compass. The
ancient Greeks were first to ask the great questions of lives lived among one's fellows:
Why be good? What is honor? What is truth? What is justice? What is the best form of
government? Is it permissible for political leaders to lie?
The roster of gifts from the Mediterranean Sea scrolls on. The Greeks gave us the first
epic, the first comedy, and the first tragedy. They invented the arithmetic that makes demo-
cracy possible (50 percent plus one equal majority rule). They also gave the world two
ways of reasoning that are still the foundations of humankind's analytic thinking: deduction
and induction. In deduction, analysis moves from a general idea to a specific conclusion.
Thus, if all swans are white, if I see a swan, it is reasonable to conclude (expect) that it, too,
will be white. In induction, analysis moves from a specific to a general assertion. If one
swan is white, then all swans must be white. Moreover, our very word philosophy comes
from the Greek: philo (love) and sophia (learning). The Romans invented the arch, which
makes it possible to span great interior space, and they also invented the dome. They laid
walls flat on the ground, building roads that spanned continents.
When Greek and Roman civilization collapsed under the onslaught of invaders from
north and east, the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople kept learning alive
in their monasteries. With the spread of Christianity, maps of the then-known world gave
visual meaning to the Sea in the Middle of the Earth. Jerusalem was the place from which
all distances were measured, the place around which all geography configured. When Con-
stantinople fell to conquerors from the east in 1453, scholars fleeing the city's Turkish
invaders gathered in the city-states of Italy to assist the birth of the Renaissance. When
Muslims overran the Near East and closed the Holy Land to Christian pilgrims, Islam's re-
ligious curtain set in motion the Crusades. And as the Crusades ended some 200 years after
the first Christian invasion of Jerusalem (1099), another chain of events was set in motion:
the search for the luxury goods that Muslim sailors carried from the Far East. That search
in 1492 brought Columbus to the New World. Mapmakers no longer regarded Jerusalem as
the center of the world. And another era in human history had begun.
The gifts of the Mediterranean continue to affect our lives; they are gifts that continue
to astound us.
PACIFIC OVERTURES
The power that rules the Pacific…rules the world.
— Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Speech Before Congress, 1900
Of the three great oceans, the Pacific is the largest. It dwarfs the Atlantic Ocean by more
than a factor of two. The Atlantic is less than thirty-two million square miles. The Pacific