At 11:58 29/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Keith Hudson wrote:
[snip]
In almost every conceivable way, life in 12th century Hangzhou was incomparably better than life in Ehropean capitals for centuries to come. The only cities that I can think of that come close to it in both commercial prosperity and the arts (they are, of course, closely linked) are Venice and Florence during Renaissance times. /Human Accomplishment/ is a stupendous book, incidentally, and the first attempt to quantify individual genius in the arts and sciences in terms of cultural origina and geographical distribution.[snip]
This sounds a bit like Ivan Morris's description of 10th century CE
Heian (Kyoto), the Japanese capital at the time, which I have
previously mentioned here
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/essays.html#genji
Thank you for reminding me of the existence of your website -- it is quite astonishing!
Morris's book, however, is quite modest; on the other hand,
the way he succinctly "situates" such cultures historically is
imaginatively evocative. And the Heian Japanese
were probably far less technologically acomplished than
the Chinese.
I have yet to see where scholars have really answered the
question for either China or the classical Greco-Roman world
(and late Medieval Islam? and some of the American pre-Columbian
cultures?):
Why did not these cultures "take off" scientifically and
in engineering, as Europe did aproximately beginning
with Galileo? What went wrong?
We can blame the decline of Minoan civilization on
a massive volcanic eruption, locally equivalent for the
Minoans to that meteor that changed global environmental
conditions to the detriment of the dinosaurs.
If it does not sound prosaic, I think we can understand why the rich and liberal culture of late medieval Islam declined. At about that time, the technological and artistic fruits of China were bursting into Europe, and the Islamic clerics had to take a stance on this because they were mightily afraid of the consequences, particularly the military. A series of ijtihads (learned interpretations of the Koran) by their senior divines, however, caused Islam to turn against western ways. The rich trading culture of Islam all through the Mediterranean and beyond started declining vis-a-vis European merchants declined from then on. Whereas western Europe gained some of the virtues of liberal civilisation, Islam lost them. (At the same time, a parallel series of discussions was going on within the Jewish community but the 'liberal' rabbis -- e.g. Maimonides -- held sway. It is interesting that, even while Islam was declining, Muslims revered Maimonides. I was delighted to see a statue to Maimonides, much worn since its erection in the 17th century, when I visited Cordoba two years ago on holiday. Incidentally when I went round Alhambra I saw wooden doors there, about 15' high, 8' wide and 4 inches thick. I would guess that they must weight two or three tons each. Yet I found I could move them with one finger. Nothing exceptional in 17th century technology, but what perfection in craftmanship! Ah! But there must have been something exceptional about their technology -- I've just realised. The doors swung on steel pivots set into wooden bearings. The pivots hadn't corroded so they must have been made of some form of stainless steel -- something only rediscovered two centuries later in the industrial revolution of the West.)
I think exactly the same applied to the burgeoning civilisations of ancient Greece and China. Their civlisations and all their philosophy and scientific innovation declined when their trading cultures and prosperity declined. In the case of ancient Greece the intensive network of Greek merchants all over the Mediterranean was snuffed out by the rising Roman Empire from about 300BC onwards. In the case of China, their huge network of merchants trading all round south-east Asia was suddenly stopped by an edict from its emperor in 1421. China's decline was not as precipitate as that of ancient Greece or medieval Islam, presumably because of its large size, and small pockets of industrialisation survived into the 19th century, but it didn't start to resume trading, and prosperity and its former scientific excellence until about 20 years ago, mainly due to Deng Xiaoping. This person, despite his great faults (including consent for the massacre at Tiananmen Square) will, in my opinion go down in history as the equivalent of Confucius, Laozi, Zhuxi and Mencius. He was more of a politician than philosopher but then, so was Confucius.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
