It was a long, slow road towards civilization. Now we’re sliding backwards, regressing towards a new era of the Dark Ages. Islam, wokeness, and communism find continuous victories on all fronts in the war to destroy the Western world—monuments of Western civilization are conquered daily while the people cheer. Like we were warned, those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it, and if one were to look at the life of Sir Isaac Newton and the history of calculus, one would see a reverberation in the destruction of knowledge we see today.

Sir Isaac Newton, who lived from 1643–1727, may have been the greatest genius in the history of mankind—he never married, and inventing calculus was impressive too. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz came up with calculus independently and right around the same time, late 17th century. This seems to indicate that the age was right for it; yet the people were not fully ready for it. Much like evolution is still controversial 164 years after Charles Darwin first theorized on it, calculus was at the cutting edge of what the times were willing to accept; it was even considered heretical.

Newton was born in the medieval world, at the very start of the Dark Ages slowly giving way to the Enlightenment. It was a time when witches and demons were believed to plague humanity, when the wisest of men sought the philosopher’s stone. In the world in which Newton was born, heretics were put to death in Europe just like in Islamic countries today—one need look no further than the cases of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar and mathematician, or Galileo Galilei, who recanted his beliefs under threat of torture and death, spending the rest of his life under house arrest.

Newton the Occultist

Newton was a pioneering early scientist, but he was also a medieval sorcerer.

Newton created calculus, discovered the laws of motion and gravitation, and invented the reflecting telescope. His accomplishments were even more remarkable considering he was an occultist, his real interest. Most of his body was planted in the middle ages. He just dipped his toes into the science which would become a new lens through which to view the world, a science that would not fully appear during his lifetime.

Newton was an avid alchemist, as his goal was to find the “philosopher’s stone.” This stone, which was said to turn base metals into gold and extend life, was supposedly given by God to Adam and passed down through the biblical patriarchs, giving them their extremely long lifespans, and was sought by the most learned men since at least 300 AD. Newton believed the Bible contained hidden prophecies, which he believed he deciphered thanks to his mathematical skill, proving to his satisfaction that the apocalypse would be between 2060 and 2090.

Newton had to keep his work in alchemy a secret, because it was banned in England from 1404 to 1689 under penalty of death—banned not because it was thought not to work, but because the Crown believed the philosopher’s stone existed, and in the “wrong” hands, an alchemist would be able to manufacture gold, and so devalue the gold possessed by the crown.

The Heresy of Calculus

The cornerstone of calculus is infinitesimals, which are values that are infinitely close to zero but are not zero. By the 1630s and into the 1650s, Bonaventura Cavalieri, a Jesuate monk (the order was abolished in 1668 over rivalry with the Jesuits) came up with the idea of infinitesimals, but they were the Confederate flags of the time.

Basic to the idea behind calculus is that a line consists of infinite points, which sounds absurd at first glance. If a line consists of infinite points, and if the length of each point is zero, then every line should have a length of zero. And if these points had a length, no matter how infinitesimally small, the length of every line should be infinite.

Today we can regard these infinite points as hypothetical conveniences essential to calculus. But in the 17th century, the Church held as dogma Plato’s belief that ideas and forms were the ultimate reality. God was infinite, points on a line were not.

In 1632, just as Galileo was being condemned and fighting for his life, a committee of Jesuits met and ruled infinitesimals were heretical and teaching them forbidden.

Cancel Culture has a Price

Amir Alexander, an Israeli historian of science, authored a book titled, “Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” which included these details:

But when the Jesuits triumphed over the advocates of the infinitely small, this brilliant tradition died a quick death.

…

Italy, where it all began, became a mathematical backwater, a land in which there was no future for those seeking to pursue a mathematical career.

For two hundred years, the teaching of calculus was banned in Italy. Italy as a capital for brilliance and learning never recovered.

Knowledge needs freedom. Science and discovery go to places where there is freedom. It is no accident that the pioneers of statistics, invented at the start of the 20th century (yes, that late), were all British. But where is science and the quest for knowledge to go today?

The Archimedes Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a parchment where the writing is removed for it to be reused, but some survives underneath. One such record is work from Archimedes, that survived only because it was folded, rebound, and reused for a liturgical text. In the Dark Ages, Archimedes’s writings were destroyed, but parchment was rare and

valuable, so it was routinely scraped and reused. After years of work using modern technology (Western science) such as digital imaging with ultraviolet and infrared light, Archimedes’s work underneath could be read. Amazingly, Archimedes invented integration using infinitesimals, and was on the verge of calculus. Archimedes was murdered in 212 BC by an invading Roman soldier. It only took 1,900 years for humanity to again stand where Archimedes stood. How long will it be before humanity stands again where it stood a few years ago, before woke, COVID, and Floyd?

Epilogue

Science, humanism—in the classic sense, not like today’s fascists who call themselves humanists—democracy, individualism, were created over the last 360 years. But the pendulum has swung. This is now the Age of Regress.

It took a long time, and it was a protracted painful process for Western civilization—white male Western civilization—to achieve everything we have and take for granted, and are now losing to an invading horde.

Today, Enlightenment values, science, and Western culture have disappeared under the jackboot of  “decolonization,” “indigenous knowledge,” “transphobia,” and “Islamophobia.” Objective knowledge and the concept of intelligence are now forbidden “white constructs.”

Will we be returning to “indigenous math” which, when compared to calculus is something akin to 1, 2, too many to count?

Image generated by AI.