“And yet what we call The West somehow rose out of barbarism. There is an external Factor. “
The Chinese ran a multi-year study headed by the guy in charge of propaganda. The objective was to determine why the west, a relative latecomer to them, did so much better. China had movable type print and gunpowder fully a thousand years before the west, but when we got them there was a new flowering. The conclusion they arrived at was Christianity made the difference. People could trust one another. You could even trust people you didn’t know, apparently not something that ever happened in Chinese culture. So, their answer was to create their own special brand of Catholicism controlled by the state. No word on how well that’s working at the moment. I suspect they’ll have at best mixed responses.
“The objective was to determine why the west, a relative latecomer...”
Indeed. China is IIRC the answer to the question: ‘What nation is the most technologically advanced for all time’?
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Most people today seem to be ‘chronological snobs’ who assume that July 20th 1969 was Man’s Destiny and a function of little more than sufficient time. In this context I often consider the Romans; They WANTED to figure out right from wrong, good from bad best from worst but despite having all of the advantages that the Church would one day carry through the Dark Ages in the charge to July 20th 1969 they ended with little more than they had to begin with.