Posted on 11/29/2023 8:09:48 AM PST by Starman417
When he embarked on his journey to discover a path to India Christopher Columbus’ lead ship was the Santa Maria. Built in 1460 it measured 62 ft with a crew of just 40, the Santa Maria would take Columbus to the New World and would change the course of human history.
Half a century earlier there was another man who sailed ships who didn’t change the course of human history. His name was Zheng He and he commanded the Chinese navy during the early 15th century. His Treasure Ships were not only larger than the Santa Maria, they were more than six times the size, measuring 440 feet long with a crew of 600. And Zheng had an armada of them at his disposal during his seven Treasure Journeys between 1405 and 1433 that took him as far away as the Red Sea and the east coast of Africa.
Zheng’s navy was by far the most powerful the world had ever seen and he used it to explore and initiate trade and tribute routes. And what did the Chinese do with this extraordinary power? Nothing. After Zheng’s death, the Treasure Journeys stopped. The Chinese had traditionally been an inward-looking society and after Zheng’s 30-year exploration aberration, the old tradition returned.
Why are we not speaking Chinese today? Why didn’t the Chinese conquer the world (or at least try) when they had a navy exponentially superior to anything else in the world? Why did the kingdom that gave us paper and gunpowder not go on to dominate the world of commerce or ideas? Because the Chinese had very little competition in the area of said ideas. Ruled by an emperor who was all-powerful, competition in the realm of ideas was rarely tolerated in China for most of its history, and nevermind flourished. What the emperor said was gospel. And the emperor said we stay home.
Similar kingdoms held dominion over wide swaths of land yet had a very limited impact on the world beyond. The Mongol empire comes to mind, which was the largest contiguous empire in human history or the countless Muslim empires, up to and including the Ottoman Empire. Robust competition of ideas did not exist in those empires any more than it did in China, and indeed most of us do not speak Mongol nor Arabic nor Turkish.
Now compare that to the West. At one point the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s landmass and a quarter of her people. Today more people speak English than any other language on the planet. There may be a billion people speaking Chinese, but 95% of them live in China while 95% of the English speakers don’t live in England. Similarly half a billion people speak Spanish and less than 10% of them live in Spain.
Beyond that, almost every aspect of life for most people today is the result of Western ideas. Cars, phones, planes, elevators, televisions, cameras, computers, MRI machines, DNA testing, heart transplants, nuclear power, space travel, fracking, movies, advanced agriculture and much much more. For all intents and purposes, the West developed the modern world. And for all of its current deprivation, it is extraordinary.
So what accounts for the difference in the impact between what the Chinese accomplished over the last thousand years and what Europe did? Simple. Competition. And, in particular, the competition of ideas.
Competition, more than any single thing, is responsible for the advances of the West. Between countries, there’s been competition. Within countries, there’s been competition. Within religions, there’s been competition which sometimes split sides across countries and between them. And the competition was relentless, frequently resulting in bloodshed and oftentimes in war, sometimes lots of both. In addition, alliances shifted regularly between countries and within them. There was rivalry, there was espionage and of course, there was betrayal and treachery.
The real competition that helped to create the world we live in evolved in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. What we know of today as France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Britain didn’t exist then. They formed over hundreds of years of competing tribes, towns, and estates that evolved into domains and then into kingdoms.
Initially, chieftains would compete with one another for the loyalty of local peasants in an effort to increase their power and holdings using such incentives as more food in exchange for their labor or fealty. Those chieftains would eventually evolve into local nobility and continue to expand their lands. Later, particularly in times of more instability dukes or kings would compete for the allegiance of local nobility by offering lower taxes or more freedom than their opponents.
The reality of this can be seen in the evolution of European nations, particularly France, Italy and Germany. The ebb and flow of borders over the 1500 years since the fall of Rome has been nothing less than stunning. And each of those nations, plus Britain and Spain were the core drivers of the evolution of civilization over the last 500 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
The disproportionate influence of the west is exactly why the leftists want to clamp down on western power and obliterate western civilization. They will point to the author’s chest-thumping essay above as the reason for their work.
Very interesting
I don’t think there is a slackening of the rate of innovation in human conflict. Military technology in the form of drones and autonomous weapons systems is rapidly advancing. Artificial intelligence, combined with advances in social networking, is enabling greater conflict among ideologies.
So if competition and conflict are the mainsprings of Western Civ, we appear to be entering a new golden age. I hope the body count isn’t too high.
ping
“So if competition and conflict are the mainsprings of Western Civ, we appear to be entering a new golden age. I hope the body count isn’t too high.”
Well it’s not unbridled competition. The competition is tempered by the rule of law.
So it’s not totally the rule of the jungle. There is a “greater power” (the state) that makes sure that the competition doesn’t become (too) physical.
That applies within a country. Between countries the rule of the jungle is still pretty much alive and well. There are extra-national organization such as the UN to try to keep the peace, but their impact is limited.
The author misses the real reason for the success of the west. People are naturally competitive everywhere. What separates the west from the rest is we, somehow, stumbled upon the idea of letting people be free to pursue their happiness within the context of the rule of law.
Legal codes are more or less ubiquitous. Legal codes, law enforcement, a system of courts and methods of punishment are fundamental to the mechanics of rule, no matter whether by monarchs, oligarchs, or any democratic form of government.
Perhaps one innovation is that western law codes create impersonal associations with legal rights and obligations that are independent of individuals or government offices, e.g. the corporation. These enable greater collective action to compete.
Rather than defend the idea of competition by denying its inherent bloodiness, or suggest it needs to be tempered by government, I prefer to point out the deadly consequences of the alternative to competition: stagnation, poverty and mass starvation.
Lack of competition, while perhaps less bloody than competition, creates mass poverty on a scale orders of magnitude more deadly than war.
And even that is a bit generous to the Chinese emperors who stifled competition - for their solution to poverty was often mass genocide - which is as bloody as it gets.
5.56mm
“Perhaps one innovation is that western law codes create impersonal associations with legal rights and obligations that are independent of individuals or government offices, e.g. the corporation. These enable greater collective action to compete.”
That’s what is meant by the “rule of law” - that it applies to everyone equally, including the “monarch”.
Definition:
Rule of Law - “The doctrine that no individual is above the law and that everyone must answer to it.”
There is another very important ingredient that may or may not be by default part of the “rule of law”. And that’s the right to private property and its protection by the law.
I’m not particularly worried about “western civilization”, I’m more concerned about Civilizational Christianity. Maybe at one point they were the same thing. Such is no longer the case.
I think the time is close at hand where to preserve the latter we have to let the former die, as it has become a cult that idolizes hedonism and materialism.
“that it applies to everyone equally,” is not a property of the rule of law throughout most of Western civilization during most of the time 1500 CE onwards.
During that time most countries were ruled by nobility and there was a distinct class structure with serfs at the bottom and kings at the top. In central Europe, monarchs often delegated to running of courts to lesser nobility, for example.
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“that it applies to everyone equally,” is not a property of the rule of law”
The term “rule of law” has a very specific meaning. Google the definition.
If laws don’t apply equally then by definition that system of laws is not a “rule of law” system. In other words the term doesn’t refer to just any sets of laws.
If you are going to stick to that definition, then “rule of law” is not one of the essential characteristics of Western civilization. It was not a founding principle of the US, since slaves were not equal under the law.
Slaves were considered property until the emancipation.
Also, the actual application of the “rule of law” is less than perfect. It’s an ideal to strive for. Even today it’s not applied uniformly.
The West is either ever expanding and expanding, or it’s cringing in the corner full of guilt and self-hatred. It has had problems finding a middle way or a different way.
“Rather than defend the idea of competition by denying its inherent bloodiness, or suggest it needs to be tempered by government, I prefer to point out the deadly consequences of the alternative to competition: stagnation, poverty and mass starvation.”
The primal motive force behind every person is their pursuit of happiness. Everyone of us wants to be happy, but each of us has different things that make us happy.
Competition comes naturally to men - it’s not something that needs to be promoted.
The desire for freedom is also innate in all of us, and necessary in order to be able to pursue happiness.
If those two things are totally unrestricted, you have the law of the jungle.
When people come together in a “community” they still like to pursue their happiness, but they also want peaceful coexistence - they don’t want a social system where the strong can take advantage of the weak at every turn, or everyone constantly at each other’s throat. The solution to that problem throughout history has been to form “governments’ that have “greater power” than any individual or organization, and they have done that by restricting individual freedom to prevent constant mayhem, while allow sufficient freedom for people to pursue their happiness mostly peacefully.
As the Founders succinctly put it...
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Even in the case of monarchy, the power of the monarch is restricted, and he always has to make sure he keeps the majority of the people reasonably happy, or the mere size of their numbers can separate his head from his body. And that’s happened on many occasions.
Moral of the story - both extremes of too much freedom and too little are bad. 95% of politics is a fight to define the ideal middle ground.
Because, the best jobs were in government so their brightest boys took the government exam. They then proceeded to chop their balls off.
There was nothing outside the government. They ran everything. And it was being run by people who had no future generation to care about.
Not a great plan.
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply.
And I agree with everything go say - in principle.
But we live in a world of mass deceit, and therefore, the principles, while true and undeniable, are not necessarily what rules the conversation.
“Competition comes naturally to men - it’s not something that needs to be promoted.”
Sorry, I just disagree - competition DOES need to be promoted, when the lies of Marxism are so prevalent, and so accepted by the gullible.
“If those two things are totally unrestricted, you have the law of the jungle.”
I must disagree with this as well. Unrestricted liberty has no downside. Unless you think as the communists do, that some elite ruling class can judge what’s best better than individuals.
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