[quote]Cortes wrote:
[quote]B.L.U. Ninja wrote:
China and many Eastern countries have, since the beginning of time always been ruled by very strong and aggressive leaders. And as we all know, they don’t get along with other Alpha Male types, and shit was bound to get real sooner than later.
So, they chose to fuck each other up instead of what most of the Western countries chose to do (eventually), and therefore started the collapse of the powerful East.
The fact that we sneer at a lot of their ideologies is NOT only a reflection of what the rest of the modern West thinks, but also their own people. If you don’t think that their own people do NOT want to be “westernized”, you are wrong. But again, because they have been subject to crazy imperialist leaders/dictators for ages, they don’t have the power to stop it, even as a collective.
The perfect example of this would be the Filipino people standing up to Ferdinand Marcos and over throwing him from power. The rest of the East are simply powerless to stop such sick leaders and their ideologies, and that is why progress is slow for them. But it’s not their fault. Or is it?[/quote]
This reminds me of an obliquely equivalent point (if that is possible). Now I don’t know much about China, but from the explanations certain other members have offered, it certainly sounds like China’s isolationism was not so much one of choice, but rather necessity. This was certainly the case with Japan.
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Just look one or two posts above this post of yours’ for what I was referring to regarding China. Their isolation after the thirteenth century was by choice and that choice cost them on the global economic scale. I’m not saying the Eastern way is better than the Western way (isolation over colonialism), only that the different philosophies played different roles throughout history.
Here you are:
"By 1500 the (Chinese)government had made it a capital offense to build a boat with more than two masts and in 1525 the Government ordered the destruction of all oceangoing ships. The greatest navy in history, which a century earlier has 3,500 ships (by comparison, the United States Navy today has 324), had been extinguished, and China set a course for itself that would lead to poverty, defeat, and decline.
Still, it was not the outsome of a single power struggle in the 1440s that cost China its worldy influence. Historians offer a host of reasons for why Asia eventually lost its way economically and was late to industrialize; two and a half reasons seem most convincing.
The first is that Asia was simply not greedy enough. The dominant social ethos in ancient China was Confucianism and in India it was caste, with the result being that the elites in both nations looked down their noses at business. Ancient China cared about many things- prestige, honor, culture, arts, eduction, ancestors, religion, filial piety- but making money came far down the list. Confucius specifically declared that it was wrong for a man to make a distant voyage while his parents were alive, and he had condemned profit as the concern of “a little man”. As it was, Zheng He’s (a Chinese explorer) ships were built on such a grand scale and carried such lavish gifts to foreign leaders that the voyages were not the huge money spinners they could have been.
In contrast to Asia, Europe was consumed with greed. Portugal led the age of discovery in the fifth century largely because it wanted spices, a precious commodity; it was the hope of profits that drove its ships steadily farther down the AFrican coast and eventually around the Horn to Asia. The profits made of this trade could be vast: Magellan’s crew one sold a cargo of 26 tons of cloves for ten thousand times its cost.
The second reason for Asia’s economic stagnation is more difficult to articulate but has to do with what may be called a cultural complacency. China and India shared a tendency to look inward, a devotiong to past ideals and methods, a respect for authority, and a suspicion of new ideas…
Chinese elites regarded their country as the “Middle Kingdom” and believed that they had nothing to learn from barbarians abroad. India exhibited much of the same self-satisfaction. “Indians didn’t go to Portugal not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t want to,” Mused M. P. Sridharan, a historian as we sat on the porch of his home on Calicut.
The fifteenth-century Portuguese were the opposite. Because of its coastline and fishing industry, Portugal always looked to the sea, yet rivalries with Spain and other countries shut it out of the Mediterranean trade. So the only way for Portugal to get at the wealth of the East was by conquering the oceans."
-Nicholas D. Kristof, “1942: The Prequel,” New York Times Magazine, June 6, 1999, 6, 80:1
You are the most peculiar atheist I have ever known, though even for a philosopher. You obviously know philosphy really well, and science. But you also seem to know religion better than most religious people, not have a negative view of it and you are an atheist.