Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper
That may be so, but why is it that modern society ended up developing amongst Western Europeans?
1. Geography. Eurasia has far more domesticable plants and animals, navigable rivers and inland seas for water transport, and an east-west axis, which allows domesticated plants/animals and ideas to be shared. While one Eurasian civilization could fall for a time (China to the Huns, the Western Romans to the Germans, etc.), others would survive and would eventually transmit their ideas to the fallen civilization, bringing them back up to speed. Africa, the Americas, and Australia have none of those advantages, so civilizations there weren't in the running for creating modern civilization.
That leaves us with several contender civilizations: Western Greco-Roman Civilization, China, India, and Islam.
2. Separation of Church and State. The fall of the Western Roman Empire resulted in a separation of church and state that has never occurred in Islam. The Catholic Church had power due to its communicaiton networks and preserved knowledge, but it had no significant military and the legal system was a hybrid of pre-Christian Roman law and Germanic common law. Islam united the Arabs under the Caliphs, who were leaders of both church and state, and promulgated its own Sharia law. These were initial advantages, quickly producing an empire that extended from Spain to India, but were long term disadvantages.
3. Political disunity. In the 14th century, I would've bet on China to discover Europe and the Americas and not on Europe. The ships of Zheng Ho were far more advanced than those of Columbus (whose ships look about the size of one of the Chinese dinghies.) However, after Zheng Ho explored Asia and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the Emperor died and his successor forbade further voyages. China lost the technology to build such ships and their age of voyaging ended.
Columbus, on the other hand, was able to make his momentous voyage despite the refusal of several royal sponsors because Europe was divided into multiple competing principalities. If one country rejected progress, it didn't prevent the civilization as a whole from progressing.
Perhaps they were more advanced during the Dark Ages, but the Renaissance changed all of that.
Ironically, the Renaissance was the result of Islamic incursions into Europe. The Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire caused hundreds of Greek scholars to flee to Italy, carrying the long lost (to the West) knowledge of classical civilization with them.
I see. So you're saying that Western nations are forcibly keeping them down? You might be right--but not in the fashion you suggest--rather, to the extent that we don't install secular governments, rule of objective law, the concept of individual rights and free market economics, and teach reason (and population management) to the people, we aren't helping them.
The first world keeps the rest of the world in place through a complex set of institutions, primarily including the World Bank, IMF, and America's network of military bases and carrier battle groups to ensure that the first world's political-economic constraints can be enforced with force in those rare instances where it is necessary to do so.
Actually, we have a tremendous amount to offer the world from an ideological standpoint. Historically, what other nation set an example of the benefits that freedom and the concept of individual rights provide?
Iceland and Switzerland were republics long before the US. The UK had a parliamentary government long before too. It's also worth noting that almost no country not under US military control at the time it wrote its consitution has followed the US model of government. They've instead followed the British parliamentary system in most cases.
America did not become wealthy by accident. It had everything to with the nature of its government and relatively capitalist-leaning mixed economy.
True, government is important and while the US government wasn't the first or the best of democratic government systems, it has been an effective one.
I agree with you. However, we didn't lose our manufacturing base because Americans are incompetent, but rather because Americans have lost any sense of rational economic self-interest and failed to maintain tarrifs and trade protections to protect against labor wage arbitrage with the billions of impoverished people in the third world, retard.
The Americans who designed the "free trade" agreements had their rational economic self-interest in mind, but the majority of Americans didn't understand the full nature of such agreements, which made trade free in certain senses which benefitted one class of Americans while restricting trade in areas where free trade wouldn't benefit their class.
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