Quote:
Originally Posted by TenaciousBadger
Ok, bullet vest on. Helmet? Check! Ok, going in:
I reckon losing books is part of the natural order of things. If they go, then they must have outlived their usefulness. It's what shaped out civilization, I believe (thinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls right now; what if they had not been lost? What if the Iliad and the Odyssey had not been Homer's only surviving masterpieces? What if... What if...).
You can only carry so much knowledge and information at one time. Some of it is bound to become forgotten and disappear into the mists of time (*notice the drama, wyndslash*)
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Probably the only problem with this is that in times of great upheaval (like the fall of the Roman empire) things get lost that should have been saved. The only reason we have kept a lot of ancient material (like most of what remains of Aristotle's works) was that they were valued by Eastern scholars, but thought of little importance in early medieval Christian Europe.
Unfortunately choices about what we keep are often made by religious bigots or crazy dictators, not scholars. But a good point to raise as we do need to keep ourselves open to all sides of this debate.