I got a general check-up today, the first time in a doctor's office in ten or eleven years. The test results are a ways off, yet, but I'm expecting a high cholesterol count, since Eileene and I eat together, and her count is high.
While sitting far too long in the waiting room, the thought of cholesterol got me ruminating about a relatively new medical procedure for treating blocked arteries. No longer do they resort to crude bypasses, which were impressive enough in itself. Now they slip an optic fiber camera down the blood vessel to pinpoint the problem, then send down a second tube with a tiny rotating attachment to clean the plaque off the arterial wall. And away go troubles down the drain.
Learning of this procedure didn't surprise or amaze me, nor, I expect, did it surprise or amaze you. But the fact that it didn't surprise me is amazing.
Now think about this. Fifty years ago, the operation would have been unthinkable, in part because miniaturization hadn't yet appeared. A couple hundred years ago, nobody had the slightest notion what cholesterol is, nor what it can do to your body. Five hundred years ago, the world's greatest scholars were only dimly aware of what even goes on in your veins. And yet today, not only do we have the tools and experts to do the job, but the man on the street can immediately grasp how the procedure works, and why it is necessary. If he's had occasion to think about the matter, the basic principle of the operation may have occurred to him independently.
Virtually the entire body of higher education in classical Greece is contained in a solid high school education, minus a bit of law, plus a bit of science. The ancient Romans divided higher learning into seven subjects, the ?trivium? (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and the ?quadrivium? (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) ? roughly equivalent to our undergraduate and graduate degrees. So commonplace has this learning become that ?trivium? has become the root for ?trivia,? insignificant knowledge.