Well, I'm finally back with power. > Dan, why do you say Richard's history lesson is an aside to the main > thrust of your argument? Because most ancient regimes did not place value > on individual human rights, and are often replaced with different despots? > Of course some despots are worse than others, what else is new? Wouldn't > you agree that the human race has been making progress since the > enlightenment? What do you think are the reasons for that?
I think the human race is better of now than before the enlightenment. I attribute this to these reasons. 1) The increase in per capita wealth allowed for a structure in which people could have wealth without pushing folks to the margins. Historically, humans have had marginal existences. For example, in "The Birth of Christianity" by John Dominic Crossan, Crossan argues that if perfect Christian charity and sharing were practiced in the Roman empire, it would push back starvation no more than one generation. To have enough wealth to allow one's sons to study full time and become scholars required having access to the products of many people. This slowly changed with the advent of new technology, such as the horse collar and new techniques, such as three crop rotation in Europe. But, the industrial revolution allowed for great leaps in productivity...which allowed for a different type of model. 2) The Enlightenment brought forth new ideas about the rights of individual human beings. They weren't, of course, developed in a background, but were well grounded in earlier arguments made within Christianity. In a real sense, they were the direct descendents of Erasmus, who took a middle, and reason based position during the reformation. 3) Two Republics formed out of the Enlightenment: the French and the US. The US was extremely fortunate in the people it had to found its Republic. Not only were they great thinkers and orators, they developed a novel answer to the age old question of who guards the guardians. The answer was to use separation of powers to have the self interest of one guardian motivate him to watch the others guardians like a hawk. 4) The US was lucky enough to have the North win the Civil War. If the South had won, most (including Lincoln) believed that the West would follow suit and secede. We were very fortunate to have Lincoln, especially since there is a great risk in a very non-experienced leader run the country. But, even given his skills, and his ability to break the law and then pull back within the law, we had to have external events go for us. If Egypt didn't have record cotton harvests that coincided with the war, and the mills of England needed Southern cotton to keep going, things would probably have turned out differently. 5) Key leaders in the US relinquished power. The most important of these is Washington (a general who stood in sharp contrast to Napoleon), who set a strong example in stepping down after 8 years. 6) We were lucky during the Cold War to find ways from having nuclear war, from the Berlin airlift, to the Cuban missile crisis, to the Yom Kipper War (when the US threatened to stop any resupply of their allies by the USSR), to the time when Yelsen (sp) reversed the coup against Gorbachov (sp). 7) The US was not interested in empire. It didn't keep Germany and Japan as conquered subjects (the reverse certainly would have been true if we lost). You can call the US cultural and economic dominance as empire, but it really is quite different from the USSR, from Japan's sphere of influence, from the European empires of the 17th-20th centuries. So, that's a start. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
