Brad, George suggested in his Law of Human Progress that the Progress of Civilization depended on "Association in Equality".
In my courses I use the more positive term "cooperation" rather than "association" but I think association is better. Equality doesn't mean we are all the same, which would be nonsense, but that societal conditions for everyone remain the same. Thus, insomuch as association is diminished and inequality rises, so does civilization decline. Do you think he might have been on to something? Harry ******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brad McCormick, Ed.D. Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 6:40 AM To: Keith Hudson Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Futurework] A glimpse of medieval Hangzhou and the Song civilisation [snip] >> 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. [snip] Well, Charles Murray proposes an answer anent the classical Greeks in today's NYT Week in Review: The invention of formal deductive logic turned the classical Greeks' heads away from empirical praxis [he probably would not use that word!] to abstracted speculative deduction. And then Newton turned modern Europe toward the reduction of the human world of daily life to physics. BUt all this happened as "unintended consequences". Let's assume that Murray is right. The question arises: How could European civilization, for over 2,000 years and continuing almost unabated today, have essentially have lost track of the universal fact that all ratiocination is human *activity* with motivations, aspirations, intentions, etc.? To answer this question and to turn the Juggernaut European humanity, including our universities and research labs, etc. -- to answer this question and turn the Juggernaut around, was Edmund Husserl's lifework, as well as the intention of others who took the other fork in the road to enlightenment at the end of the Middle Ages: Erasmus, Rabelais... and in our time, persons such as Stephen Toulmin. Why doe almost nobody take of the fact that all laws of physics which take the form: If <whatever-1> then <whatever-2> Really have the form: If we do <whatever-1a> then we will encounter <whatever-b> ? It is impossible in principle to show, e.g., that For every "action" [matter in motion..] there is an equal but opposite reaction [matter in motion...] But it may indeed be possible for us to discover that: Every time we look at matter in motion, we find that when we observe one thing strike another thing in a certain way, we observe that the first thing's speed and direction of motion changes in an equal measure but in the opposite direction of the change we observe in the speed and direction of the second object. AND, furthermore, each time we make such an observation, we do so because we have certain desires which we can describe for ourselves and for others either immediately or thru a process of self-reflection. HENCE, two "sciences" are elaborated in every experiment we do: (1) Physics, and (2) the interpretation of daily life (See! This science is so little practiced that it does not even have a name that would be generally understood. Certainly "Transcendental phenomnology" would not make sense to many educatd persons). Why is this almost never done? Or am I a member of some small fraction of the population who have not yet heard the good news? \brad mccormick --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.541 / Virus Database: 335 - Release Date: 11/14/2003 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
