风萧萧_Frank
以文会友
Steven Farron, American Renaissance, December 2009
https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/december-2009/#cover
The purpose of this article is to continue the discussion that was begun by Robert Henderson’s insightful and important article, “Why Have Asians Not Dominated?” which appeared in the October 2009 issue of American Renaissance. I will first demonstrate the little known but vitally important fact that by 1600 Europe was already far ahead of China in science, mathematics, and technology. Then I will propose a crucial cause of Western pre-eminence.
To illustrate the first point I will use what is arguably the most important single source for differences in achievement and culture between Europe and China: the diaries and reports that the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci wrote about his experiences in China from 1583 until his death in 1610. An edited version was published in 1615, and an English translation was published in 1953 with the title China in the 16th Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583-1610. Wherever Father Ricci’s account can be checked against Chinese sources, it has been found to be accurate. Sinologists recognize it as an invaluable historical source.
Soldiers from the Terracotta Army
One of the most striking aspects of Ricci’s experiences in China was that wherever he went, he was accorded the highest honors, including being welcomed into the Forbidden City of Beijing. This is remarkable because, as Ricci recorded:
The Chinese look upon all foreigners as illiterate and barbarous … They even disdain to learn anything from the books of outsiders because they believe that all true science and knowledge belongs to them alone. If perchance they have occasion to make mention of externs [foreigners] in their own writings, they treat them as though there was no room for doubt that they differ but little from the beasts of the field and of the forest. Even the written characters by which they express the word foreigner are those that are applied to beasts. (pages 88-9)
He added:
The Chinese are so self-opinionated that they cannot be made to believe that the day will ever come when they will learn anything from foreigners which is not already set down in their own books.” (page 142)
Nevertheless, Ricci was treated with the highest respect. The reason was that Chinese officials, scholars, and common people were struck with awe by his demonstrations of European geographical and astronomical knowledge, theoretical and applied mathematics, and technology.
Wherever Ricci went, his maps and globes aroused amazement. In Nanjing, the president of the magistrates “took great pleasure in studying” a map of the world, “wondering that he could see the great expanse of the world depicted on such a small surface.” (pages 301-2) In Beijing, the emperor had twelve copies made in silk on large panels of a map of the world that Ricci had drawn, so that he could give them to his sons and other relatives. (page 536)
Father Ricci’s map
These maps caused such excitement because, as Ricci explained, before he arrived, “the Chinese had never seen a geographical exposition of the entire surface of the earth, either in the form of a globe or as presented on the plane surface of a map, nor had they seen the earth’s surface divided by meridians, parallels or degrees.” (page 326)
[T]he Chinese . . . are grossly ignorant of what the world in general is like … [T]heir universe was limited to their own fifteen provinces, and in the sea painted around it they had placed a few little islands to which they had given the names of different kingdoms they had heard of. All of these islands put together would not be as large as the smallest of the Chinese provinces.” (pages 166-7)
“Formerly, they had thought that … the earth is flat. They did not know that the whole surface of the earth is inhabited or that men can live on the opposite side without falling off. (page 325)
Aristotle was 2,000 years ahead of the Chinese.
The Chinese were just as astonished by European theoretical mathematics and astronomy. Ricci had studied these subjects under Christopher Clavius, the German Jesuit who was one of the foremost mathematicians of the age and was responsible for the Gregorian calendar, which is now used in all non-Muslim countries.
Aristotle had explained the rules of logical deduction nearly two thousand years earlier. However, Ricci noted that the Chinese “have no conception of the rules of logic.” (page 30) Ricci and a Chinese Christian convert therefore translated the first six books of Euclid’sElements (of geometry) into Mandarin:
[N]othing pleased the Chinese as much as the Elements of Euclid. This was perhaps due to … the Chinese … method of teaching, in which they propose all kinds of propositions but without demonstrations. The result of such a system is that anyone is free to exercise his wildest imagination relative to mathematics, without offering a definite proof of anything. In Euclid, on the contrary, they recognize something different, namely, propositions presented in order and so definitely proven that even the most obstinate could not deny them. (pages 476-7)
As for astronomy, Ricci recorded that the Chinese “did not realize that an eclipse of the moon was caused by the earth coming between the moon and the sun … It was new to them to learn that the sun was larger than the entire earth.” (pages 325, 327)
More significantly:
Their count of the stars outnumbers the calculations of our astronomers by fully four hundred . . . And yet with all this, the Chinese astronomers take no pains whatever to reduce the phenomena of celestial bodies to the discipline of mathematics … [T]hey center their whole attention on that phase of astronomy which our scientists term astrology. (pages 30-31)
The Prague astronomical clock, built in the 15th Century, is still running.
Elsewhere Father Ricci observed, “Their primitive science of astronomy knew nothing of eccentric orbits and epicycles.” (page 326) So he made “astronomical spheres and globes … illustrating the heavens … When these various devices were exhibited and their purpose explained, showing the position of the sun, the courses of the stars and the central position of the earth,” Ricci “was looked upon as the world’s greatest astronomer.” (page 169)
Ricci still assumed that the earth is in the center of the universe. His knowledge of astronomy had not advanced beyond the ancient Greeks, who were the first people who tried to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies. To do that, they hypothesized orbits. But they thought that the earth is in the center of the universe, and to make these orbits correspond to observed celestial movements, they had to make them off-center (“eccentric”), and to hypothesize smaller orbits (“epicycles”) that revolved in the larger orbits. That is what Ricci demonstrated to the Chinese. The Chinese were amazed because they had never attempted to explain the movements of heavenly bodies.
It was because Europeans kept trying to conceptualize the movements of heavenly objects that the ancient Greeks created a geocentric model; then Copernicus, dissatisfied with its awkwardness and inconsistencies, revised it; Kepler improved Copernicus’ revision; and Newton figured out the universal laws that explain Kepler’s improved version.
The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking wrote in A Briefer History of Time that “ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. We have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world.” (page 18) He is wrong. That craving began with the ancient Greeks and has existed only in European culture and those cultures influenced by the West.
By 1600, European technology and applied mathematics were also already vastly superior to those of China. Ricci wrote that a clock “was an object of wonder.” (page 201) The Chinese were amazed not only by the fact that clocks told time, but also that they rang a bell at each hour. Ricci noted that “they could never quite make out how it could ring of itself, without anyone touching it.” (page 194)
Quadrants were unknown to the Chinese.
Clocks were hardly the only European invention that dazzled the Chinese. One of the many that Ricci mentions was the use of quadrants with limbs graduated in degrees to measure distances. “They marveled that one could figure the height of a tower, the depth of a ditch or of a valley, or the length of a road by means of quadrants,” Ricci noted. (page 326) In Nanjing, he let the public view the presents he was bringing to the emperor: “[V]isitors came in crowds to see them. The novelty of the gifts surpassed their expectations to such an extent that astonishment robbed many of their power to praise them, and they seemed never to tire of examining them and of talking about them.” (page 348)
Ricci also noted that the Chinese calendar was inaccurate and that although Chinese astronomers spent a great deal of time trying to predict eclipses, they made “innumerable errors.” (page 31) After Ricci’s death, in 1629, the emperor’s astronomers predicted that a solar eclipse would occur at 10:30 on June 21 and last two hours. The Jesuits predicted that the eclipse would be at 11:30 and last only two minutes. The Jesuits’ prediction was accurate. As a result, the emperor asked the Jesuits to revise the Chinese calendar.
Among the other innovations the Jesuits introduced into China in the 16th and 17th centuries were the Archimedes screw pump (a cylinder enclosing a screw used to lift water for irrigation), algebraic notation, the telescope, logarithm tables, the slide rule, and such European tools for making instruments as graduated scales and micrometer screws.
Europeans and Multiculturalism
Roman sewer.
I will quote one more of Father Ricci’s observations:
When they [the Chinese] set about building, they seem to gauge things by the span of a human life . . . Whereas, Europeans in accordance with the urge of their civilization seem to strive for the eternal. This trait of theirs [the Chinese] makes it impossible for them … to give credence … when we tell them that many of our buildings have withstood the elements for … a hundred years and some even for one or two thousand years … [T]hey do not dig into the ground to build up foundations, but merely place large stones on the unbroken surface of the ground; or, if they do dig foundations, these do not go deeper than a yard or two … [M]ost of their buildings are constructed of wood, or if made in masonry they are covered in by roofs supported by wooden columns. (pages 19-20)
It is typical of Ricci’s objectivity that he refers to Europeans in the third person: “Europeans in accordance with the urge of their civilization.”
Ricci also translated the Confucian Four Books into Latin because “it is no use at all to know only our learning without knowing theirs;” and, with another Italian Jesuit, compiled a Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary, for which they developed the first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet. Father Ricci’s interest in other civilizations, his objectivity when describing them, and his desire to acquaint other Europeans with them have always been fundamental and unique characteristics of Western civilization.
From the beginning of European civilization, with the ancient Greeks, Europeans have been multiculturalists; and Europeans have been the world’s only multiculturalists. The first extant European history was written by Herodotus in the fifth century BC. The Greek wordhistoria meant investigation, and Herodotus’ historia is as much what we call anthropology as history. He recorded and analyzed what he learned during his travels throughout Egypt, as far east as modern Iran, and along the coast of the Black Sea. He was fascinated by the diversity of human cultures and expected his readers to be fascinated. He was also rigorously non-judgmental, emphasizing that custom determines what people think is right and wrong; as he wrote in Book 3, Chapter 38, “custom is king.”
Ancient Greek literature reflected the same attitude to non-Greeks, beginning with the first extant work of European literature, the Iliad, which Homer composed in the eighth century BC. The Iliad narrates events in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy. Homer showed as much sympathy for the Trojans as for the Greeks. In particular, he portrayed the leading Trojan warrior, Hector, in a loving interaction with his wife and son, as well as the agony of Hector’s bereaved parents after he was killed by the leading Greek warrior, Achilles. Such sympathy is uniquely European. Surely, it never occurred to the author of the First Book of Samuel to depict the grief of Goliath’s parents after David killed him.
A sign of “surpassing religiosity?”
Sympathy often became self-flagellation. In the fifth century BC, Euripides wrote two plays — Hecuba and Trojan Women — in which he depicted the Greeks’ savage cruelty to the defenseless Trojan women and children after the capture of Troy. (All plays in Athens were performed before mass audiences.) The brutality of the Greeks to the defeated, defenseless Trojans was also a favorite subject of ancient Greek vase painting. By contrast, the narrative sculpture of the Assyrians, who dominated the Middle East from the ninth to the end of the seventh century BC, represented defeated enemies with pyramids of stacked-up skulls, communicating no feeling except triumph.
The ancient Romans had the same fascination with foreign cultures as the Greeks. Examples are Julius Caesar’s description of the Gauls in his Gallic War; Sallust’s of the peoples of North Africa in his Jugurtha; and Tacitus’ of the Germans and natives of Britain in hisGermania and Agricola. No other ancient people had such an interest. When the ancient Egyptians mentioned other nationalities, they nearly always attached adjectives like “vile” and “lowly” to their names.
The Romans also shared the Greeks’ penchant for self-denigration. The Roman Empire extended from Scotland to the Sahara Desert and from the Atlantic Ocean to the border of what is now Iraq. The population of that huge area enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity. To take two examples, literacy was so widespread that most orders and regulations in the Roman army were written, because all soldiers were literate; and the cities and towns of the Roman Empire had purer water and more efficient sewage disposal than any European city was to have again until the 1870s. Large areas of North Africa and the Middle East still have not recovered the level of literacy or of sanitation that they had when they were part of the Roman Empire. Also, contrary to Hollywood depictions, slaves never rowed ships in the ancient world, and slavery played only a minor role in the Roman economy. Nevertheless, the Romans dwelt obsessively on every injustice and brutality that they committed in their history. (When I would point that out to my South African students, at least a few would always observe, “So they were like Americans.”)
One way in which the Romans denigrated themselves was through the ethnographic descriptions of foreign cultures that I mentioned. These served two purposes. One was to provide information, which was usually accurate. But their authors also used them to cast a harshly negative light on their own, Roman, civilization.
Hollywood version of Chief Seattle.
Nearly every Roman who wrote a description of a foreign people created at least one vitriolic anti-Roman speech and put it into the mouth of an enemy of Rome. The best known is in Chapters 30-32 of Tacitus’ Agricola: The Romans are “robbers of the earth … They apply the fraudulent name empire to plunder, slaughter, and theft; where they create a desert, they call it peace.”
Another way in which the Romans used ethnographic descriptions to castigate themselves was with comparisons between the (usually imagined) virtues of other peoples and their own (greatly exaggerated) vices. The best known is in chapters 18-19 of Tacitus’ Germania, in which he contrasted the Germans’ marital fidelity with the casual attitude towards adultery of Roman society. Among the Germans, “no one laughs at vice; nor is seducing and being seduced called the spirit of the age.” I would add that Tacitus was not just the greatest ancient Roman historian; he was a senator, who held many high positions, including governor of what is now western Turkey.
Europeans have ever since used other cultures, especially primitive cultures (or even talking horses, as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), to criticize themselves. Most readers of this article can think of many examples; I will provide only three. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was as erudite, intellectually sophisticated, and skeptical a man as ever lived. His motto wasQue sçais-je? (What do I know?) Yet, in his essay Des cannibales (“On Cannibals”), he wrote that the natives of Brazil retain their “vigorous” “natural virtues” and “pure and simple” “naturalness” because they have been “very little corrupted” by contact with the vanity and frivolity of Europeans. The natives of Brazil “surpass … the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy … The words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon are unheard of [among them].”
Europeans have been so desperate to show the superiority of primitive peoples over themselves that they have even praised human sacrifice. That includes a Catholic priest. Father Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) wrote in his Apologia that the Aztecs “surpassed all other nations in religiosity, because the most religious nations are those that offer their own children in sacrifice for the good of their people.” He explained that “one could argue convincingly, on the basis of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, that God does not entirely hate human sacrifice.” (In fact, one of the main purposes of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is to show that God does not want human sacrifice. Las Casas must have known that the Old Testament repeatedly and vehemently condemns human sacrifice.)
Muslims were astonished that Europeans had translated the Koran.
My third example is more recent. In Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit(1992), ex-vice president and anti-global-warming crusader Albert Gore quoted (page 259) as an ecological ideal the reply of Chief Seattle to President Pierce’s offer in 1855 to buy his tribe’s land, “How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us … Every part of the earth is sacred to my people … [T]he earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.” Gore describes this speech as “one of the most moving and frequently quoted explanations” of American Indians’ attitude to the environment.
It has, indeed, been frequently quoted, but only since 1971, when screenwriter Ted Perry wrote it for an ABC television drama. The real Chief Seattle, who owned slaves and murdered nearly all his rivals, praised President Pierce for the generosity of his offer. The American Indians, like all primitive peoples, slaughtered animals and destroyed vegetation with wanton recklessness.
In addition to a strong propensity to self-denigration, modern Europeans also share with the ancient Greeks and Romans a powerful desire to learn as much as they can about other civilizations. From the time of the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, Europeans studied Arabic and tried to learn about the Arabs. Pope Clement V (1305-14) urged universities to establish chairs in Arabic. Permanent chairs in Arabic were established at the Collège de France in 1538, the University of Leiden before the end of the sixteenth century, Cambridge in 1632, and Oxford in 1636.
Edward Gibbon recorded in his Autobiography (page 79 of the edition by D. A. Saunders) that when he entered Oxford in 1752, he considered studying Arabic because “Oriental [i.e., Middle Eastern] learning has always been the pride of Oxford.” Well before that, Europeans had written many grammars and dictionaries of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish; translations and editions of Muslim books; and analyses of Muslim literature and religion. In fact, the first book printed by a printing press in England (1477), Dictes [sic] and Sayings of the Philosophers, was an English version of an Arabic book by Mubashir Ibn Fatik. By 1603, 49 books on the Turks had been published in English. Of all the books published in France between 1480 and 1700, more than twice as many were about the Turkish Empire as about North and South America. It was Europeans and Americans who deciphered the ancient languages of Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia and reconstructed their ancient histories.
Statue of Fr. Ricci in Peking.
This fascination with foreign cultures is uniquely Western. The Chinese attitude to foreigners, which Father Ricci described, has characterized all non-Western societies. The Arabs ruled much of the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years; the Turks ruled most of southeastern Europe for nearly 500 years. But neither the Arabs nor Turks had any interest in learning European languages. They used European converts to Islam as interpreters.
An excellent illustration of this parochialism is the most eminent Muslim historian of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Turk, Mustafa Naima (1665-1716), who lived most of his life in Istanbul. Naima was unusually objective, inquisitive, and open-minded for a Muslim historian. He was judicious and critical in his use of sources. Historians still rely on his major work, which was translated in 1832 with the title Annals of the Turkish Empire from 1591-1659 of the Christian Era.
However, Naima knew nothing about Europe. In the preface to his Annals, he saw nothing incongruous about comparing Europe of the time he was writing (1704) with Europe of the Crusaders. Both had many Germans and both had an emperor! (pages ix-x) Naima was a contemporary of Newton, Leibnitz, Leeuwenhoek, and Locke. Yet, after listing now totally forgotten Turkish religious scholars, he wrote, “This much is sufficient to awaken the envy of the Christians.” (page ix)
The French conquest and occupation of Egypt between 1798 and 1801 forced a few Egyptian Muslims to take Europeans seriously. Fortunately, one of them, Abdul Al-Jabarti, wrote detailed observations about the French in Egypt. An English translation has been published with the title Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation(expanded edition, 2004). Al-Jabarti criticized the French Republic’s hostility to Christianity and the granting of equal rights to Egyptian Christians and Jews. (pages 28, 32, 189-90) But he praised the French for their humane treatment of the Egyptians they employed in public works, to whom they paid wages, instead of conscripting them and driving them with whips, as Egyptian governments had done. (page 195) He also expressed wonder and amazement at European science and technology (pages 110, 195) and at the fact that “the glorious Qur’an is translated into their language! Also many other Islamic books … many verses of which they know by heart. They … make great efforts to learn the Arabic language … In this they strive day and night.” (page 110)
So, an obsession with self-criticism and a passion to learn as much as possible about other civilizations have been among the unique and fundamental characteristics of Western civilization since its beginning. These characteristics have undoubtedly contributed to another characteristic that is as uniquely and fundamentally Western: ceaseless, incessant change, adaptation, and improvement. This characteristic must be a basic cause of the West’s rise to world predominance, even over Orientals, despite their somewhat higher average intelligence.
To illustrate the importance of these characteristics, I will return again to Father Ricci’s diaries. He noted that the best Chinese paper was vastly inferior to European paper. “It cannot be written or printed on both sides … Moreover, it tears easily and does not stand up well against time.” (page 16) Yet, the Chinese invented paper centuries before it was used in Europe. In 1620, Francis Bacon observed in Book I, Chapter 129 of his Novum Organum(New Instrument) that printing, gunpowder, and the compass “have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world … no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” All three were invented in China centuries before Europeans began using them, but only Europeans developed them and applied them to transform their society and then the entire world. Ricci observed that “the Chinese are not expert in the use of guns and artillery and make but little use of them in war.” (page 18) By Ricci’s time, Europeans had used the compass to explore and map the entire world, while the Chinese thought that the world consisted of China and a few small off-shore islands.
Of these inventions, printing is obviously the most valuable. By 1500, less than fifty years after Gutenberg printed the first book with interchangeable metallic type, 236 European cities and towns had printing presses, and Europeans had printed 30,000 titles — about 20 million books in total — in more than a dozen languages. (By 1483, printing type had been cast in the Cyrillic alphabet and in Greek by 1501.) The Spanish had set up printing presses in Latin America by 1533 and the Portuguese in their colony of Goa, in India, by 1557. By 1600, when the population of Europe was approximately 100 million, between 140 and 200 million books had been printed. By 1605, newspapers had appeared, at first specializing in business news.
Everywhere else in the world, nearly all books continued to be copied by hand into the 19th century. The first printing press in the Muslim world was established in Istanbul in 1727, by a Hungarian convert to Islam, who employed a Jew as master printer. By 1815, 63 titles (an average of fewer than one a year) were printed in Istanbul, the intellectual center of the Muslim world; and most of these titles were printed in quantities of less than a thousand copies. The first printing press in Egypt was established by the French, when they occupied it in 1798. By contrast, the Qur’an in Arabic was printed in Venice in 1530, nearly two centuries before any book was printed in the Muslim world.
To anyone reared in the West, the indifference of the entire non-Western world to such a spectacularly useful innovation as printing seems amazing. The reason for this indifference is that all non-Western cultures have had the same attitude of smug self-congratulation and disdain for foreigners as Father Ricci noted among the Chinese.
The self-criticism and fascination with other civilizations that have characterized Western civilization from its beginning have been a crucial factor in its rise to predominance.
However, self-criticism and fascination with other civilizations could be positive forces only while large population movements between civilizations did not occur. When large numbers of non-Westerners began to flow into Western countries, these same factors became suicidal. Aristotle observed that there are two types of vices: those that derive from a vicious nature and those that are the excesses of virtues.
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115 Responses to “Why the West Dominated”SUBSCRIBE
Ok, I just want to make a quick comment.
It is true that Europeans are capable of enormous sympathy and generosity, but to say that non-Europeans are not is absolutely ludicrous (just look at the outpouring of compassion and sympathy by the Chinese people in the wake of the Sichuan Earthquake).
Second, Europeans have also been capable of enormous cruelty, not just to each other (the two World Wars as well as the Cold War, which were three white fratricidal wars), but to non-white peoples of the world (colonialism, genocide, the Holocaust, etc.).
Third, this author selects a few samples to support the notion that whites in general are self-flagellating and too respectful of other people’s cultures. Although I see this trend in recent decades with the ascendancy of liberalism, all throughout history whites have shown pure contempt for the abilities of non-whites. To give an example, a British industrialist in colonial India scoffed at the idea of an Indian building a steel factory, saying he’ll personally consume all steel made by such an enterprise (funny, because Indian steel companies now own most of British steel industry).
Now, I just want to make a general comment about white people. All of the readers of Amren, I’m guessing, are semi-educated and know your own history. The fact of the matter is, more white people have been killed by other white people than by anyone else. You guys are your own worst enemy.
So the Chinese actually did, at one time, believe the Earth is flat? People in Europe at the time of Columbus did not believe the Earth is flat. Western civilization has known since ancient Greece that the Earth is round.
After the fall of Rome, it took nearly 2,000 years for running water to be reinvented, even though it was reinvented again by the white race. Maybe if the Roman Empire continued to this day, the printing press would have been invented sooner than the 14th Century, Columbus would have landed on the Moon, Neil Armstrong would be a Star Trek kind of starship commander, medical science would be advanced enough to regrow limbs on amputees, and there would have other such advancements that only science fiction writers can dream about.
Imagine what Leonardo Da Vinci would have created if he were alive today?!
First off, thanks for bringing back a great article.
Living and teaching in Japan, I have seen the “smug self-congratulation and disdain for foreigners” in my personal and professional experience. Many of the Japanese I teach not only think that their country is the best but also display a total ignorance and lack of interest in the world outside of Japan. They are shocked to learn that McDonald’s and Coca-cola are not Japanese creations and are even more shocked that white people can use chopsticks or that we have trains in the US. If you’re not Japanese, you’re an Aborigine.
When White Americans display this level of ignorance and bigotry, other Whites ridicule them. As well they should.
As a teacher from a Western cultural background. I sometimes get frustrated by the complete lack of curiosity of the Japanese. Meticulous and industrious to a fault, yet uninterested in learning about the unknown. Virtually zero analytical thought. “What’s that?”, “What’s over there?”, “Why does…?”-these questions rarely come out of Japanese mouths. What is the opposite of wanderlust? “Stay in your place”-ness?
1-Anon: “The fact of the matter is, more white people have been killed by other white people than by anyone else. You guys are your own worst enemy.”: I fully agree with your first statement, but I don’t believe it can be used to justify your second statement. For example, if the world were made up of only those humans who were White, we would still have our fights and wars, but as long as we never fully exterminated the human(White) race, we would continue to survive. In the current world environment, Whites do NOT have a separate homeland. Policies such as taxation for welfare or societal indoctrination towards multiculturalism, etc., the world over have brought the White birth rate to below replacement level and have put the White race on the path to extinction. Currently, the world is our enemy and nowhere do you hear anyone state that there must be a guarantee of the survival of the White race. I know, I know, we can talk for hours on what the White (and Black) populations did to indigenous populations in the Americas or elsewhere, but all races are guilty and the world is a wholly different place now than it was even one hundred years ago. We may go out, but we will not go out quietly, so the world may do better to consider restricting the movement of populations, as compared to moving everyone into the White world and pushing us towards a final solution.
To Anonymous (#1):
Nonwhites around the world have indeed shown the ability to build and operate factories that produce steel, textiles, automobiles, electronics, etc.
And they did it by completely imitating white inventions and technological innovations down to the last detail.
And yet you still believe the races have equal creativity?
Another way in which the Romans used ethnographic descriptions to castigate themselves was with comparisons between the (usually imagined) virtues of other peoples and their own (greatly exaggerated) vices. The best known is in chapters 18-19 of Tacitus’ Germania, in which he contrasted the Germans’ marital fidelity with the casual attitude towards adultery of Roman society. Among the Germans, “no one laughs at vice; nor is seducing and being seduced called the spirit of the age.”
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I disagree with the author most stridently on a couple of points.
ONE: Rome, ergo, the ROMANS certainly did become corrupt (too tainted by vice), else they would not have crumbled and been over-run. Any fool could see this.
TWO: If Tacitus noted that the Germans did not laugh at vice, he was pointing out VIRTUE.
I can think of a few times where Germans really, really blew the virtue thing, (let’s say Naziism , mass murder, and their current multicultural spinelessness), but by and large, the Germans have been a beacon of many great virtues.
Rome was once great, but it ran it’s course, decayed, and fell.
So , it appears all societies must do.
Nothing lives forever.
We ought to stop trying to revive or celebrate the past. Our brethren have abandoned it, and are determined to smash themselves with the hammer of multiculturalism.
Time to move on and build anew.
A mild rebuttal to comment #1.
“It is true that Europeans are capable of enormous sympathy and generosity, but to say that non-Europeans are not is absolutely ludicrous.”
The article didn’t say non-Europeans were devoid of “sympathy”. It suggested sympathy for one’s enemies was “uniquely European”. Your example of Chinese helping Sichuan as an example of “compassion and sympathy by the Chinese” does nothing to dispel this since they were merely helping their own — not their enemies.
Second, Europeans have also been capable of enormous cruelty, not just to each other (the two World Wars as well as the Cold War, which were three white fratricidal wars), but to non-white peoples of the world (colonialism, genocide, the Holocaust, etc.).
Similarly, the article didn’t say Europeans were incapable of “cruelty”. Everyone is capable of cruelty. Still, your examples regarding western behavior towards non-whites are inaccurate. I’m not aware of any example of western colonialism under which the quality of life of natives didn’t measurably improve with colonialism. Nor am I aware of any instance in which whites actually committed genocide against non-whites — including native americans. Though one will occasionally hear extremists claim otherwise.
“To give an example, a British industrialist in colonial India scoffed at the idea of an Indian building a steel factory, saying he’ll personally consume all steel made by such an enterprise (funny, because Indian steel companies now own most of British steel industry).”
Yes. A hundred years later. But the industrialist was right at the time he said it.
“The fact of the matter is, more white people have been killed by other white people than by anyone else. You guys are your own worst enemy.”
Is there any population for which this isn’t similarly true?
It is true that by the 17th century the West pulled ahead of China in astronomy, optics, mathematics, map-making, cannon- making, musket-making, clock-making (along with cannon, gun rocket, mechanical clock was first invented in China in the 8th century). Before the coming of the Industrial Revolution, science’s contribution to improving technology was very minimal. Up to the end of the 18th century China was overall ahead of Europe in technology, particularly in such areas as agriculture, metallurgy, ceramics, textile, shipbuilding, mining, medicine, botanical knowledge, printing.The Jesuits transferred many of advanced Chinese technologies to Europe at the same time they transferred such advanced European technologies as cannon-making, clock-making. map-making optical knowledge. The Jesuits were excellent cannon and clock-making experts. So Chinese made sure they transferred the technologies to them. Until the end of the 18th century, China made excellent cannon, clocks. it is a nonsense China closed itself off from the rest of the world in the pre modern era. During the 16th century thru the 18th century, about 40% of silver from the Americas ended up in China in exchange for the Chinese porcelain, silk, tea. Even in this time period Europe had vast trade deficits with China, In the 18th century, China produced about one third of the world GDP. At the end of the 18th century China was one of the most powerful countries in the world in terms of economy, military power, technology. In 1776 Adam Smith said in his WEALTH OF NATIONS, China was not only richer but also technologically more advanced than Europe. China fell behind in the 19th century because it missed out on the Industrial Revolution. When we look at the way China is going right now, there is a good chance that China will become the most powerful country again by the middle of this century.
Yes, history took different courses in the East and the West, but could it have been just that, namely, accidents of history rather than genetics?
It should be borne in mind that cultural memes behave similar to genes and can be passed down just like real genes, and make a difference even if the genetic pool of two populations is identical.
Maybe it has to do with Confucianism which discouraged questioning of authority, and this aspect was subconsciously embedded in the national psyche of the Chinese.
In the West, we have had the same issues with Catholicism and Mormonism versus Protestantism. In the Middle East, it was Islam.
Wonder where the latter would have been today had Prophet Mohammed not been born. Arabs had produced great mathematicians before the 14th century or so.
The Chinese & E.Asians in general are too introverted, Westerners are too extroverted, in the middle stand E.Europeans in general, Orthodox peoples especially & Slavs specifically. Eurasia adapted the best of the West (technology/science) but the West didn’t adapt the best of the East: ethnocentrism & spirituality. Instead Western extroversion & materialism rejected by Eurasia disfigured the Western Mind into Autism with an Obsessive-Compulsive obsession with trolling the world with Liberalism.
To poster # 5 ( Madison Grant) :
Just like whites have shown capacity to build technology and factories all over. And they did it by completely copying / using the borrowed knowledge of cardinal Mathematics ( numerals, polynomials, zero, algebra and geometry etc) invented by Asian groups such as the Indians, Chinese and Mesopotamians. The ancient Harappan culture of India gave rise to the world’s first complex towns with geometric regularity and the concept of a sanitation system. The world’s first university ( Taxila) and Medicine / surgery came from India. The Chinese made even more rapid advances in technology from which the west copied. Without the building blocks of Science / Mathematics which first emerged from India, Babylon, Egypt and much later Greece…..Europeans would have been unable to build the 20th century!
Also, the contributions of one of the greatest superpowers in world history and the future world Superpower to overtake the US & the European west in a few decades – China. I’ll leave you with this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVOL3F9Iv6c
“to say that non-Europeans are not (smpathetic) is absolutely ludicrous.”
The article didn’t say non-Europeans were devoid of “sympathy”. It suggested sympathy for one’s enemies was “uniquely European”. Your example of Chinese helping Sichuan as an example of “compassion and sympathy by the Chinese” does nothing to dispel this since they were merely HELPING THEIR OWN — not their enemies (or others).
……………………
In this regard, I would like to ask how much aid China has lavished on the Haitian earthquake victims? How many Haitian babies and orphans has China taken in?
I’m Anonymous Commenter #1.
Let me add a further point to the author’s assertion that whites are unique amongst all races in their capacity for sympathy for their vanquished enemies.
First, it’s always dangerous to make broad generalizations like this. The fact of the matter is, the conquistadors that decimated the indigenous populations of Latin America through violence, disease and forced labor can’t be said to have evinced such sympathies. Likewise, the Nazi War Machine that ravaged much of Central and Eastern Europe (I doubt) shed too many tears for their enemies.
Second, let me give you a very specific example of a non-white showing such sympathy after victory. In 1905, Admiral Togo of Imperial Japan led his navy to triumphant victory (second maybe only to Trafalgar in its decisiveness and impact) against the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima. Afterwards, Admiral Togo had the grace to visit the injured, defeated Russian admiral to commiserate with him and to offer his professional respect from one admiral to another.
From the tone of this article, you’d think that non-whites were only capable of graceless victory dance in the wake of any martial triumph.
I see this tone among many whites, that of self-pitying resignation at the foibles of whites for being too good and too nice. I think this is very disingenuous. You guys should be honest, especially with yourselves.
Whites have contributed much, but they have also inflicted much cruelty on the world. For example (one example out of many), the British introduced a salt tax on the Indians. That means a poor Indian, wanting to have some salt for flavor and for diet, couldn’t even walk over to the shore to collect salt without fear of punishment from the Colonials. As a result of such inhumane policies, tens of thousands of Indians died from starvation, disease and lack of proper nutrition.
The fact of the matter is, you whites haven’t been at the receiving end of injustice and cruelty from non-whites, so therefore you can’t understand what impact you guys have had on the rest of the world (maybe this is a uniquely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, not having lost many wars). The Germans, on the other hand, having lost 2 major wars and bearing the guilt conscience over the Holocaust, seem more capable of seeing things from the other side, so to speak.
Be honest, and then you can have constructive dialogue with non-whites and with yourselves.
I think the trait the article is grasping for is: curiosity.
I am always struck by people (whites and others) who lack it.
It’s very likely that Europeans simply produce proportinally more curious seekers who will, quite illogically at times, spend themselves even unto ruin, investigating the world with neither a definite advance in sight, nor a definite PRACTICAL problem to be solved.
Other races certainly produce people like this, but their numbers and influence were probably too insubstantial to affect the culture at large.
I doubt that the Germans encountered by the Romans were trying to learn about Roman culture or thinking about the movements of heavenly bodies. But look what they’ve become, today!
2 Ross:
It could have been even faster. Some historians think that the industrial revolution could have sprouted in the Hellenistic Empire, because a lot of the prerequisites that spawned the Industrial Revolution in Britain were also present in the empire Alexander the Great conquered.
There were not many original things about the European civilization until the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. The ancient Greek civilization was an offshoot of the Egyptian civilization. It was not one of the original civilizations (Mesopotamia,Egypt,Indus valley, Chinese). The Greek astronomy and math were greatly influenced by the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. The Greek Alphabet which was the basis for the Roman Alphabet was derived from the Phoenician Alphabet of a non European people in the Middle East. Also the eventual European religion, Christianity, is an offshoot of Judaism of another non European people of Palestine.
But the Industrial Revolution was the game changer for the Europeans. From the 19th century on, the Europeans along with Americans invented a great number of original things. But things will change again. By the middle this century there is a good chance that China will become the most innovative country again.
According to John Hobson who wrote the Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, from 500 thru 1700 there were very few 100% original genuine European inventions. His claim is also collaborated by Joseph Needham,the author of Science and Civilization in China, who said from the 1st century thru the 18th century, there were more than 30 Chinese mechanical inventions such as compass, printing, cannon, gun, transmitted to Europe which created profound changes in Europe while there were only 2 genuine 100% European inventions which were introduced to China, crankshaft and Archemedian Screw.
It would appear than nothing gets the blood boiling faster than claims that one group or another has demonstrated technological, cultural, or intellectual superiority over another, or even all others.
The historical fact is that all major civilizations have had or will have their day in the sun at one time or another, usually through accidents of history that often defy clear analysis.
And we all (or most all) love our families, countries, and ethnic backgrounds not because of any rational analysis to the effect that they’re better than others, but simply because they’re ours.
“The Greek Alphabet which was the basis for the Roman Alphabet was derived from the Phoenician Alphabet of a non European people in the Middle East.”
Yet the Greeks have an extensive literature, and the Phoenicians do not. That is the difference. If this does not bespeak a distinction of the West, let’s have the name of the Phoenician Sophocles, Homer or Aristotle.
The European Renaissance was greatly influenced by the Islamic civilization in such areas as astronomy, optics, math, literature, music. Specially the European science was heavily influenced by the Islamic science. The Scientific Method which is fundamental to the modern science was born in the Islamic civilization in the 11th century which Europeans further developed it in following centuries. It is reasonable to say that the propagation of the Renaissance ideas owed a great deal to the Islamic software and the Chinese hardware such as paper, printing. Can you also imagine the European overseas expansion without such Chinese inventions as compass, cannon, gun? Francis Bacon was right saying that compass, gunpowder, printing were the three greatest inventions in human history up to the 17th century, I might add one more thing to that list, the Scientific Method pioneered by the Islamic civilization. According to Robert Temple who wrote The Genius of China said that more than half of the inventions which had laid the foundations for the modern world came from China. As you can see, before the Industrial Revolution, Europe was a more or less copying and adapting culture. But I must admit that with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, specially since the 19th century the West invented overwhelming numbers of things. But no country or race has the monopoly on creativity and innovation. The power of creativity and innovation waxes and wanes among countries. The way things are going right now, China has a good chance to become the most creative and innovative power again by the middle of this century.
Anonymous Poster #13 wrote “The fact of the matter is, you whites haven’t been at the receiving end of injustice and cruelty from non-whites”. Well, I guess if you omit centuries of Islamic onslaught, conquests and subjugation by a decidedly non-white enemy then I guess you are right.
You brought up India (wonder why) and its mostly imagined suffering with regards to the relatively short and benign period of British colonization. You are right again, the Islamic conquest of India was so much more humane and altruistic.
The fact of the matter is, more white people have been killed by other white people than by anyone else. You guys are your own worst enemy.
Fine. Then stay out of our homelands! Stop immigrating to cultures created by whites because YOU have made a mess out of your own. Nonwhites love to bash us but fall all over themselves to live amongst us because they are not capable of creating what we have created for ourselves,not for you.
“There were not many original things about the European civilization until the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. The ancient Greek civilization was an offshoot of the Egyptian civilization. It was not one of the original civilizations (Mesopotamia,Egypt,Indus valley, Chinese). The Greek astronomy and math were greatly influenced by the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. The Greek Alphabet which was the basis for the Roman Alphabet was derived from the Phoenician Alphabet of a non European people in the Middle East. Also the eventual European religion, Christianity, is an offshoot of Judaism of another non European people of Palestine.”
Though you are correct that Europeans did absorb a great deal of foreign culture, they also produced a great deal (even before the industrial revolution). You seem to be going to the other extreme of saying that prior to the 19th century; Europeans invented nothing and depended on non-white cultures to innovate. Europeans (especially more isolated ones) had been excelling in astronomy, religion, engineering, mathematics, etc often in isolation. White Christians, actually heavily Europeanized Christianity. What were once European folk gods and spirits had suddenly become Saints. Customs, art, architecture, etc had turned a Semitic belief system, into a European one.
The Egyptians influenced the Greeks, you are right, but their influence only went so far, a great deal came from the genius of Ancient Greeks who produced such amazing figures as Socrates, Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Phidias, etc. The Romans later produced a great deal more on their own. Just look at such marvels as the Pantheon. Even in the “Dark Ages” Europeans were still innovating, and during the renaissance we only excelled even more. European history is a history of invention and modernization, though that was to some level, aided by other cultures (as you said, Middle Eastern, East Asian, etc) but never to the level that present-day Asian cultures are by Western culture.
You guys are your own worst enemy.
Just like the Chinese, right? Not like they killed any of their own citizens during the 20th century!
Communist China: 35 million murdered
Nationalist Regime: 10 million murdered
Second, Europeans have also been capable of enormous cruelty, not just to each other (the two World Wars as well as the Cold War, which were three white fratricidal wars), but to non-white peoples of the world (colonialism, genocide, the Holocaust, etc.).
But the Chinese weren’t capable of enormous cruelty to their own people, right?
Comparison of Nazi Democide to That of Other Regimes:
Communist China: citizens 1949-87 35,236 killed 1 in 833
Nationalist China: citizens 1929-45 10,214 killed 1 in 345
Nazi Germany: citizens 1933-45 762 killed 1 in 1,235
Bon
Source used: China’s Bloody Century, Professor RJ Rummell
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM
I suggest you read it.
Bon
America hasn’t been all that creative and innovative for some part of it’s history. From the 19th century to the early 20th century, America was the counterfeit capital of the world. America was very good at copying European goods and ideas without regard to patents, trademarks, copyrights. There is a good article on this subject in the Aug 26, 2007 edition of The Boston Globe. The title of the article is A NATION OF OUTLAWS A CENTURY AGO, THAT WASN’T CHINA —- IT WAS US. The people who are proud of American originality and creativity will be very shocked ,if they read this article. At the turn of the 20th century Europeans laughed at the the ridiculous idea of America ever becoming a scientific and technological power ,because of a large number of robber barons, rampant disregard for environment and intellectual property rights, lack of world-class universities. Does it sound like any country you know? But by the 1930s, America became the scientific and technological superpower and the rest is history. I think America has one fatal problem, a population replacement process in progress. By about 2060 or a little after, the Hispanics and blacks will be a majority in America. As of now, less than 60% of the Hispanics and blacks graduate from high school and only 1 out of 7 poor people get a college degree. unfortunately most of these people belong to this group. Unless America brings up their educational level, America is doomed.
There were not many original things about the European civilization until the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century.
Nope, the Printing Press* didn’t matter much, neither did the Magna Carta, referred to as the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.
This gave rise to British Common Law, a system developed and refined over 1000 years, upon which Our Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are based. Our Founding Fathers recognized the Common Law and it is the basis of all law in America today.
Common Law recognizes the Power of Government lies in the common people and not in an elite group of power brokers.
Let me repeat that:
Common Law recognizes the Power of Government lies in the common people and not in an elite group of power brokers.
This system of laws, developed by Whites and only Whites, secures the rights of individuals to private property and is what “freed the human sprit”, giving rise to the Industrial Revolution, and later, the technology revolution.
Nowhere except in the White homelands, is there a commitment to the Rule of Law rather than of men, the right to private property and the development of individual liberty.
I’ll leave you with this:
The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind.
Bon
*Please don’t tell me the printing press was invented in China; it was not.
In China a simple system of pattern inking had been developed in which a strip of material was lain against a water based painted picture. This only worked for very basic patterns and was consequently was not widespread.
There is also no evidence that this technique was ever exported anywhere as it had virtually no applications.
Johann Gutenberg, of the German city of Mainz, invented the technical aspects of printing in 1450. Basing the design of his machine on a wine press, Gutenburg developed the use of raised and movable type.
I would add Colonel Kurtz’ various monologs in “Apocalypse Now” as another shining example of European self castigation. The people who hack off freshly inoculated arms are, to him, the epitome of moral exemplification. Yet Westerners are all assassins, mutts, nabobs, errand boys, et al.
A mild rebuttal to comment #13.
We can play tit for tat with each of us coming up with examples and counter examples. But I’ve already said no one has a monopoly on either cruelty or sympathy. Still, not every culture possesses them in equal measure. And the general tone of the article is accurate in spite of your objections.
The simple fact is that sympathy for one’s enemies and a sense of universal justice originated in the west and it only exists in other countries as a result of contact with the west. Indeed, those concepts have declined as western influence over others has waned.
Nothing illustrates this more than the practice of slavery. The west is often smeared as the arch purveyor of slavery. But the west is one of the few cultures to have ever abolished it. Indeed, it was mainly due to western influence that the practice has been abolished around the world. Moreover, nearly everywhere that western influence has declined slavery has reemerged to the point that there are now over 100 million slaves currently living throughout Africa, Middle East and Asia.
I see this tone among many whites, that of self-pitying resignation at the foibles of whites for being too good and too nice. I think this is very disingenuous.
It’s neither self-pitying nor disingenuous. I’m simply fed up with being fair to those who won’t reciprocate.
The fact of the matter is, you whites haven’t been at the receiving end of injustice and cruelty from non-whites, so therefore you can’t understand what impact you guys have had on the rest of the world
Mongols, Huns, Turks, Moors. Not to mention over a million Europeans enslaved by Barbary pirates. And the current genocide being perpetrated against the Boers. One might even consider the non-white crime rate. You don’t recognize it because it doesn’t interest you. And yet you seem to know all about some obscure salt tax from a hundred years ago.
#16 – I thought Phoenicians were Greeks, simply ones that lived in Asia Minor (like Trojans).
As for China, I don’t think they’ll be so much innovative as rich (as in, we owe them all our cash.) They sell us lots of stuff, sure, but it all seems to be garbage. Yes, I know the Japanese started off the same way, but I just can’t see the Chinese being capable of taking the same path the Japanese did – ie, they’ll never be the kings of electronics. And the only reason they even have factories over there, is because of union-busting, worker-hating businesses who want to save a dime by hiring scab labour, and if they’re allowed to move out of the country (like Mulroney allowed businesses not to operate in Canada as they had to do previous to him) they’ll go set up shop right where the scabs live. And if they can’t move, they’ll promote mass immigration to bring the scabs here.
Sorry, I’m originally from a manufacturing city which is now apparently dead, dead, dead, thanks to this junk.
Thanks, Wal-Mart, for sticking your nose so far up Chinese backside.
A rebuttal to Anonymous:
As a white Anglo Saxon Londonner in the UK or what once seemed like England, I have certain issues regarding your comments with respect to British colonialism. Now, granted Indian immigrants have starting dominating every sphere of economics and science ( especially Medicine and Engineering) in Britain. The wealthiest man in Britain and Europe is Lakshmi Mittal an Indian and how they have successfully taken over the world’s diamond and jewellery trade from the Hassidic Jewry or the fact that Indian kids outperform native white kids in higher education test scores at the Cambridge level. My point is at what time is it enough?
This is our land, inhabited for the beginning of time by my ancestors. Britain does not belong to Indians and other non whites. Even if some of our policies were unfair and cruel, that was the past. Get over it. Besides, as I commented in the previous paragraph – Indians unlike Africans and Moslems don’t depend on welfare, quotas ( Affirmative Action in the United States) or reparations to become the wealthiest & most successful ethnic group along with other such groups such as the Jews and the Han Chinese. So I say we call it even considering how man Indians have successfully prospered in the west. I don’t need to take anymore guilt trips – Thank you!
#16 Anonymous (and a few others) – RE China as a new superpower – I used to think so too but now I think China will never amount to particularly much, despite popular opinion being otherwise. They have displayed no innovation in their past few decades of growth. They have not created a stable of innovative companies like other East Asian countries did (Sony, Samsung, etc) by which to move to higher tiers of manufacturing (in terms of quality etc) and what they have that is well known is pretty much all stolen technology from the West (mostly), eg Huawei who stole a lot of its tech from Cisco. If you read accounts from China from beginning-mid last century, they could just as well have been written today – some of this stuff is just inherent to their culture. The copying, the cheating, the ripping off, general lack of innovation – none of it is new or recent.
An example – http://feer.wsj.com/tales/?p=572 – dated back to 1937, true as ever today. There are earlier examples out there. I have not seen anything to suggest they will move beyond this way of thinking.
On top of that they have too many internal problems and have not advanced quite as much as people credit them for (‘Red Capitalism’ and ‘Poorly Made in China’ are good reads on that but I realise this is not an economics site so will stop there). Perhaps by 2050 they will be doing ok, but in the nearer-term I am short on China. Quite a few expats I know that have been in China for 15-20 years feel the same and are starting to wind down their involvement in the country.
Can you also imagine the European overseas expansion without such Chinese inventions as compass, cannon, gun?
The cannon and gun were not invented in China:
The oldest Chinese canon dates from 1332, whereas in Europe, the oldest smoothbore cannon found so far dates from 1300.
“Gunnis cum telar” – guns with handles – showed up in the 1350s, marking the emergence of the personal firearm. The bamboo fire lance was the ancestor of the cannon. In Europe, this technology met that of the iron forge and the bell foundry
The Chinese had firecrackers for a very long time, but they contained no gunpowder…Roger Bacon already knew about this in 1257, and described it in Epistolae de Secretis Operibus.. as a device to make noise like thunder and a flash like lightning, giving an anagrammatic recipe for the powder. The invention proceeded no further in China, beyond incendiaries, fire lances, and firecrackers. European gunpowder and cannon were reintroduced to China under the Ming dynasty by the Portuguese and others.
http://goo.gl/K7gCd
Yes, we could go tit for tat all day and night ad infinitum and it would get us nowhere, and what’s the point? We Whites have a much larger issue to deal with besides worldwide vilification, our history being re-written, our accomplishments and achievements assigned to others: That of race replacement in our homelands.
For Whites, Nothing Else Matters.
Perhaps you are cheering the following information:
As of 2010, whites account for only about 9% of the world’s population, compared with 17% in 1997, according to demographer Harold Hodgkinson; whites are now the world’s smallest minority.
If we complain or speak out against our demise we risk our careers, pensions and reputations, in Europe and Canada we are thrown in prison, and we are called every name for Nazi and hater.
Does your government do this to you?
You see, unlike non-White countries, racial discrimination against Whites is mandated by law. Our governments work actively and forcefully against us, by flooding our homelands with destitute non-Whites, continually, and openly legislate against us by passing hate speech laws that ONLY prosecute Whites, cover up non-White-on-White crime.
You see, we have a larger enemy than you: Our “own” governments that hate and despise us and seek our demise.
Bon
It is interesting that despite the fact that mankind has
been on the earth for so many thousands of years, there are
some who are bragging of how great one group is over
the next because of technologies that were developed just
centuries ago. One poster wrote that China was ahead
of Europe in the 17th century and that according to Adam Smith
was ahead of Europe even in the 18th century.
Mankind has spent most if its time on earth living without the
technologies we enjoy today . So there is no need to feel
better than other group given how some racial groups have been
used and abused by other racial groups during this period
of accomplishment.
There is also a misconception that some nations , particuarly
in Europe, would have independently be as advanced as they
are without copying from their neighbors. It is not so.
Countries learn from each other. Even the so called Asian tigers
have learnt from Japan and Japan has learnt too from the West.
#26 the movable type was invented in China in the 11th century and the metal movable type was also invented in Korea in the 13th century. These two events preceeded Gutenberg by about 200-400 years. These are historical facts. Magna Carta had nothing to do with protecting the rights of common people. It all had to do with protecting selfish interests of the British nobility against the equally selfish Crown. What’s so gerat about the Western-style dysfunctional multi-party democracy? Look at what’s happening in America and Europe right now. The whole political process is hijacked by the selfish interest groupes at the expense of the collective wellbeing of the society. This dismal political system is in the process of destroying the Western countries. Just look at the illegal immigration problem. What has been done lately except for endless political arguments?
To#29 Phoenicians were not Greeks, they were a Semitic people.You better read my post#25 before making a hasty judgement on China. What do you mean by “they own our all cash”? If you are refering to how much China owns in the U.S. treasury bills and notes,then it’s about 1.15 trillion dollars. Does it sound like China owns all the America’s cash to you?
China will be a power in the short term, but long term they are doomed. Demographically, they will be old fast. Millions of female babies aborted in favor of males- which will create a social crisis with not enough women for all the excess men. Also, if the USA stopped buying all their goods, their economy would collapse.
To#29 Phoenicians were not Greeks, they were a Semitic people.You better read my post#25 before making a hasty judgement on China. What do you mean by “they own our all cash”? If you are refering to how much China owns in the U.S. treasury bills and notes,then it’s about 1.15 trillion dollars. Does it sound like China owns all the America’s cash to you?
I’d just like to make a few revisions here. First of all, printing, movable type, and the printing press are all separate things. Three separate inventions. The reason why the Chinese didn’t make much use of their movable type is because their language has thousands of characters and their movable type machine was vastly inferior to the mechanized printing press invented by Gutenberg. Also, to the poster who said:
“After the fall of Rome, it took nearly 2,000 years for running water to be reinvented, even though it was reinvented again by the white race”
First of all, running water wasn’t invented by the white race. It was invented by the Indus Valley Civilization. Second, running water was relatively common in the larger cities and towns of Medieval Europe as were sewer systems.
http://books.google.com/books?id=3emwfa6rwFcC&q=medieval+water+technology&dq=medieval+water+technology&hl=en&ei=jSDQTeWSFs7TgQfCv6CxDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA
#23 As we know the Greek civilization is not one of the “original” civilizations( Egyptian,Mesopotamian, Indus Valley,Chinese). None of these original civilizations were created by Indo-Europeans. The Greeks were the copycats of the ancient world. They copied profusously from the Egyptian and Babilonian astronomy,mathmatics,medicine,mythology. The Greek alphabet which was the basis for the Roman alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet of a non- European Semitic people in the Middle East and it’s religion,Christianity, also came from another non-European Semitic people of Palestine, eventually replaced the Roman( indigenous European) religions. When your writing system and dominant religion came from foreign and non-European cultures,please don’t tell me about the originality of the European civilization. From the beginning the European civilization was almost completely dominated by foreign civilizations.
Let me ask all those Eurocentric people, if the Euro-whites are really so smart, then why are they commiting self- induced genocide against themselves in America and Europe? I’m sure you know that by the middle of this century, the Euro-whites will be a minority in America and by the end of this century,Europe will be at least one third Muslem and non-white. If you are really so smart, then why do you permit this racial replacement process against your own people? This doesn’t sound like a smart people to me. I think Euro-whites are their own worst enemy always fighting each other with the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism. The multi-party democratic system you cherish has become very dysfuntional because it’s political process is dominated by the selfish special interest groups at the expense of the general good of the society. I don’t think America or Europe will ever abandon the dismal multi-party democracy. Euro-whites,I think you don’t have a great future, unless you make drastic political changes to protect your own self-interests like anybody else. But I’m less than optimistic about your collective future as an ethnic group.
Your example of Chinese helping Sichuan as an example of “compassion and sympathy by the Chinese” does nothing to dispel this since they were merely HELPING THEIR OWN
That is ridiculous. Look at the massive Chinese foreign aid – especially during the Mao era. Have you heard of the Tanzam railway built by the Chinese? Even now, poll after poll find that Africans vastly prefer Chinese business and aid practices over Western, and all in all Africans find the Chinese to be more fair in their dealings with them than Westerners.
Of course one could look to the way minorities in China are given massive affirmative action benefits that dwarf anything afforded to minorities in the West.
http://tinyurl.com/6zzurcn
The problems in Tibet and Xinjiang exist only because the Chinese actively encouraged these people to maintain their own identities, languages and folkways.
Indigenous people colonised by Western powers were by and large exterminated. In China they flourished and increased in numbers – at least since 1949.
And even the tiny Russia minority in China numbering just tens of thousands benefits from affirmative action policies and guaranteed representation in the National Peoples Congress.
The Chinese are far kinder to non-Han’s than whites have ever been to any of their minority groups.
A reply to comment #20
Islamic cultures had almost nothing to do with the Renaissance. The Renaissance came about because of the preservation of Roman civilization that existed in Italy after the Empire’s fall in 476. Art, literature, and architectural progress was still occurring long after Rome fell. Ever heard of the philosopher Boethius? More than anything the sheer work conducted by the Roman Catholic Church in preserving books, scrolls, and documents was fundamental. It wasn’t Islam that started the Renaissance – it was monks.
Europe gained very little of value from Islam. By the time any serious contacts were even being made, the Renaissance was already in full swing. Stop your propaganda.
The scientific method was developed by Church scientists, not in the Islamic world. The same goes for the university system.
Sorry, try again.
#26 THE CHINESE INVENTION Of THE MOVABLE TYPE. China invented the movable type in the 11th century and Koreans introduced the metal movable type in the 13th century. That is 200-400 years before Gutenberg. A lot OF Eurocentric people claim Gutenberg’s introduction of the movable type was an independent European invention. But their basis for the claim is very weak. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that the knowledge of the movable type was transmitted to Europe from China and or Korea. In the 14th century both China and Korea were under the Mongol domination and there were a lot of contacts between the Mongol empire and Europe. As matter of fact, during this time period the compass and gunpowerder technologies were transmitted to Europe from China either directly or via the Muslems. So there is no reason to believe that only the movable type technology was uniquely not passed on to the Europeans. Albert Kapr,a reknowned German type designer and typographer said “in the view of one Western scholar of printing the notion that knowledge of printing(movable type)in the Far East found it’s way to Strasbourg or Mainz becomes more insistent and persuasive”. Also G.F.Hudson, a British historian said “the burden of proof really lies on those who assert the compelete independence of the European invention (of the movable type)”. You should remember that in court of law,even if there is no smoking gun, a person can be convicted of a crime, if there is a lot of circumstantial eviddene. I think the same logic applies to the Gutenberg’s case of the movable type. What is wrong with a lot of Eurocentric people is that they suffer from intellectual dishonesty. Not alaways, but many times they claim an independent European invention if some invention had already taken place in the non-white world before it happend in Europe. Sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due.
“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Netwon
New developments in science/math/engineering rarely occur in a vacuum. Netwon himself relied heavily on Analytical Geometry (from Descartes who in turn relied heavily on developments from the Persians -> Arabs -> Greeks).
In terms of technological development, the West has excelled at both synthesis and genesis.
The notion that the West was not producing important technological developments prior to the Industrial revolution is risible. Substantial advances were made in mechanics, optics, materials, civil engineering, chemistry and especially shipbuilding.
By the late 15th century, the West had unsurpassed maritime capability (which requires a great deal of technology) particularly military transport (of horses and weaponry).
It was the West whose ships first circumnavigated the globe in the early 1500s and which could sail where they wished with virtual impunity.
The conquest of the new world was mostly a result of seapower and landpower in the form of cavalry and steel plate armor coupled with steel melee weapons. Firearms were few and far between not to mention cumbersome and inaccurate.
To poster #11 (Chinese American):
For the past 500 or so years the “copying” has been extremely one-sided: whites create, non-whites imitate. But you knew that given the number of Chinese-Americans arrested in recent years for espionage. http://tinyurl.com/5vnrnts
While China does have a chance of becoming the world’s top superpower one thing that may prevent it is their calamitous one-child /forced abortion policies which will soon lead to a collapse in their population.
#3 the white guy in Japan. I bet an average Japanese knows a lot more about America than an average American knows about Japan. An average American doesn’t know much about other countries or about their own country.
#35- Very true. American pop culture is extremely extroverted. How many Australian movies can you think of? (Recent personal interest)
In my seven years in Japan, I have been quite shocked at how many of my students seem to know nothing about the rest of the world. Explaining basic geography to Japanese postal workers has been amusing at times.
Could be any combination of things. Attitude of superiority combined with a disdain for foreign things. Throw in a school system based on rote memorization of disconnected facts (thus irrelevant to life and easily forgotten) and you can produce something that rivals the Ugly American.
Don’t get me wrong. On the other hand, the Japan is also a well-organized, polite, comfortable and quite interesting society.
36 — Wayne wrote at 6:04 PM on May 15:
Your example of Chinese helping Sichuan as an example of “compassion and sympathy by the Chinese” does nothing to dispel this since they were merely HELPING THEIR OWN
That is ridiculous. Look at the massive Chinese foreign aid – especially during the Mao era. Have you heard of the Tanzam railway built by the Chinese? Even now, poll after poll find that Africans vastly prefer Chinese business and aid practices over Western, and all in all Africans find the Chinese to be more fair in their dealings with them than Westerners.
Of course one could look to the way minorities in China are given massive affirmative action benefits that dwarf anything afforded to minorities in the West.
http://tinyurl.com/6zzurcn
The problems in Tibet and Xinjiang exist only because the Chinese actively encouraged these people to maintain their own identities, languages and folkways.
Indigenous people colonised by Western powers were by and large exterminated. In China they flourished and increased in numbers – at least since 1949.
And even the tiny Russia minority in China numbering just tens of thousands benefits from affirmative action policies and guaranteed representation in the National Peoples Congress.
The Chinese are far kinder to non-Han’s than whites have ever been to any of their minority groups.
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You say, “The Chinese are far kinder to non-Han’s than whites have ever been to any of their minority groups.”
“Even now, poll after poll find that Africans vastly prefer Chinese business and aid practices over Western, and all in all Africans find the Chinese to be more fair in their dealings with them than Westerners.”
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YOU have got to be KIDDING! What a load of PROPAGANDA. Keep drinking the kool aid, kid. Here’s drinking to you and your life in CHINA (or Africa). “wayne”….
“#23 As we know the Greek civilization is not one of the “original” civilizations( Egyptian,Mesopotamian, Indus Valley,Chinese). None of these original civilizations were created by Indo-Europeans. The Greeks were the copycats of the ancient world. They copied profusously from the Egyptian and Babilonian astronomy,mathmatics,medicine,mythology. The Greek alphabet which was the basis for the Roman alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet of a non- European Semitic people in the Middle East and it’s religion,Christianity, also came from another non-European Semitic people of Palestine, eventually replaced the Roman( indigenous European) religions. When your writing system and dominant religion came from foreign and non-European cultures,please don’t tell me about the originality of the European civilization. From the beginning the European civilization was almost completely dominated by foreign civilizations.”
Original? Copycats? Where are you getting this? You do realize that even the “original” civilizations borrowed extensively from one another, correct? Including such basic things as agriculture and city building.
Most Europeans are aware that their alphabet originated in the Phoenician one (which by the way, there is debate as to whether or not Phoenicians were Semitic but that is beside the point). However, look at the Phoenician alphabet. It is completely different from the Greek alphabet and Roman one. What you don’t seem to get is that the Ancient Europeans borrowed and reshaped what they absorbed. They took the Phoenician alphabet and over time improved upon it, changing it to their own. I don’t believe that Europeans created everything, East Asians produced a great deal, as well as the Ancient peoples of the Middle East, but to sit there and claim that Europeans have been imitating foreign civilizations is very ironic, considering that many non-whites will claim that while using the European computer! Had Europeans simply been imitators there would be no Gothic cathedrals, no Parthenon, no European art, no Baroque music, European languages, railroads, computers, skyscrapers, modern medicine, etc, etc, etc. If Europeans weren’t innovators, the modern world wouldn’t exist.
Christianity was Europeanized as I have said before, Christendom become another word for Europe. Just as Buddhism was absorbed into China, Korea, and Japan. It is, in its roots Semitic, you are correct, but it has evolved into a Western religion. Today’s European Christianity is unrecognizable to early Semitic Christianity. Many Christian Saints are actually Pagan gods, Saint Bridget for example.
“ Let me ask all those Eurocentric people, if the Euro-whites are really so smart, then why are they commiting self- induced genocide against themselves in America and Europe? I’m sure you know that by the middle of this century, the Euro-whites will be a minority in America and by the end of this century,Europe will be at least one third Muslem and non-white. If you are really so smart, then why do you permit this racial replacement process against your own people? This doesn’t sound like a smart people to me. I think Euro-whites are their own worst enemy always fighting each other with the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism. The multi-party democratic system you cherish has become very dysfuntional because it’s political process is dominated by the selfish special interest groups at the expense of the general good of the society. I don’t think America or Europe will ever abandon the dismal multi-party democracy. Euro-whites,I think you don’t have a great future, unless you make drastic political changes to protect your own self-interests like anybody else. But I’m less than optimistic about your collective future as an ethnic group.”
Why do you think we are here?
#31 I want you to read my post#25. If you read that you will know why China,not America might be the superpower by the middle of this century. Remember that America has one big problem,the racial replacement process in progress.Hispanics and blacks will be a majority in America by about 2060 or soon after. What are you going to do about it?
To #32: The oldest surving Chinese gun was dated to 1288. So it is possible the gun was invented earlier than this date. The world’s earliest cannon was dated 1282 found also in China. It is safe to assume that the Chinese cannon might have been invented earlier than this date. You can find all this information under the heading of cannon in Wikipedia.Now I’m going to quote a passage from THE GENIUS OF CHINA written by Robert Temple”the similarities between earliest European erupters and cannons and slighly earlier Chinese ones are so striking that it seems likely guns(cannons) were trnsported to Europe for direct copying”.
@ Anonymous (1):
Do not believe all that has been written and said about the so-called Holocaust, my friend. Some of it is just Hollywood stories and legends.
To#36:Right now China has a defacto two- child policy, if somebody from a one-child-family marries a person from another one-child-family, they can have two children. Since the implementation of this policy in 2007,the Chinese fertility rate has been going up. A prominent Chinese demographer found out there were 23 million births registered in 1990,but there were 26 million 10-year-old children in 2000, an increase of 3 million. Some Chinese demographers think there are at least 1.5 billion people in China. China’s population problem is nothing compared to the racial replacement process in progress in America. By 2060 or soon after, Hispanics and blacks will be a majority in America. Do you thinl it is good for America?
To White Guy In Japan: Let’s talk about the American kids’deficiency in reading, math,science. They seem to be further behind the students from other countries, specially the problem of Hispanics and blacks whose highschool graduation rates are less than 60%. I hope you know that American K-12 education is in a mess. What do you suggest America should do to correct these problems?
Europeans were the best shipbuilding culture in the world, from ancient times, up to the Vikings and of course, beyond. There was only a relatively short period where Christian dominated nation believed that the earth was flat, but it was political and there was always a debate.
To#42: The Islamic infulence on Europe before or during the Renaissance was great in such areas as science,astronomy, math,medicine,literature. The Scientific Method which is foundermental to the modern science was born in the Islamic Civilization in the 11th century ( don’t believe everything Colson says). As a matter of fact, Ibn al-Haytham pioneered the Scientific Method in the 11th century. That is why he is sometimes called the first scientist. Specially the infulence of the Islamic science on such European scientists as Copernicus, Newton,Descartes was substantial.
We can go on and on about how much more advanced the West is compared to the Chinese, but it is undeniable that they have also been successful in their own right. China’s ancient culture has withstood the test of time – something that VERY FEW other peoples can claim. Many here worry about the future of the White race, but I doubt the Chinese have similar concerns. Their cohesiveness and ability to survive has produced an unshakeable sense of continuity.
Ask yourselves this. Who is more successful? A productive race that invents a lot and then dies out?… or a less productive race that lives? Nature would say the latter.
To #38 Anonymous: You have many wrong ideas about Chinese printing and movable type technology. Chinese used both movabable type and block printing extensively. As a matter of fact in 1726 Qing dynasty printed by using metal movable type, an enormous encyclopedia which contained 5020 volumes and 80000 pages,100 millon words. I’m going to quote from Robert Temple’s THE GENIUS OF CHINA “it(illstration)shows wheel-shaped rotating case for the classfied storage of fonts of movable type—– all the characters were—- cast into metal fonts and stored according their rhyming spoken words in 24 compartments——- by spining the composor’s wheel round,the pieces of type were readily accessed according to this easy system,making for speedy typesetting.According to the Jesuits, the Chinese printing method was as efficient as the European one but also the Chinese method had various advantages over the European method. Specially China’s five-color printing and illstration technologies were ahead of Europe until the end of th 18th century. Jacques Gernet,a French sinologist state that only in the 19th century the European printing press became faster than the Chinese one, until then it remained a slow and expensive form of printing.
Many of the comments posted here came as a pleasant surprise. They also illustrated Steven Farron’s assertion that many in the West have been willing to criticize their own culture, and appreciate aspects of others.
We should keep in mind that when Matteo Ricci wrote about China the West had passed through the Renaissance. That was when Europe achieved a scientific and technical dominance over the rest of the world that has persisted since, although it is currently being challenged by China and Japan.
When Marco Polo visited China before the Renaissance and reported of his findings, many in the West doubted a civilization so advanced could exist. After Polo’s visit China lapsed into its version of American exceptionalism. Most Chinese thought the rest of the world had nothing of value to teach them. Many Americans think that way now.
@ John Engleman:By the 17th century, Europe surpassed China in science and mathmatics but China was still overall ahead of Europe in technology until the end of the 18th century. According to Robert Adams, a British social socientist, the reason for this gap between science and technology is because science’s progress was very minimal until the fast pace of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century and most technological advances were made by craftsmen and technicians rather than scientists. Joseph Needham who wrote SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA stated that even after the Renaissance,China was still ahead of Europe. Also Adam Smith stated that in his WEALTH OF NATIONS IN 1776, China was richer and technologically more advanced than Europe. Yes, Europe was ahead of China in science and math but China was still ahead of Europe in technology at the end of th 18th Century. From the 16th century thru the 18th century, the Jesuits in China tansmitted a lot of advanced Chinese technologies to Europe at the same time transmitting some of advanced European technologies to China.
60 — John Engelman wrote at 7:23 PM on May 16:
Many of the comments posted here came as a pleasant surprise. They also illustrated Steven Farron’s assertion that many in the West have been willing to criticize their own culture, and appreciate aspects of others.
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I bet you were pleasantly surprised, John….why is that not a surprise? hummmm.
Excuse me, but I will not join in with your obvious “pleasure” at even more willingness of those who delight in bringing us down even further. Are you sure you are not a “professor” of some ethnic study or of anti-White history 101?
55 — Anonymous wrote at 3:11 PM on May 16:
To White Guy In Japan: Let’s talk about the American kids’deficiency in reading, math,science. They seem to be further behind the students from other countries, specially the problem of Hispanics and blacks whose highschool graduation rates are less than 60%. I hope you know that American K-12 education is in a mess. What do you suggest America should do to correct these problems?
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Maybe White guy in Japan can explain that in Japan as in China they don’t have millions of blacks and hispanics, and all other races in their country that would bring down any nation of peoples! Especially our school kids! You should know by now how our schools and curriculum has been dumbed down to accomodate our beautiful multiracial paradise. We are out in the playing field with both hands tied behind our back! Comparing the America of TODAY with the America of the past is foolhardy.
@ #44 and #56 Anonymous; From about 3rd century BC to the end of the 18th century, China was the most advanced shipbuilder. According to Dr.Michael Guillen, China built and sailed a three-mastered ship by 300BC– AN ACCOMPLISHMENT never achieved by the ancient Egyptians,Greeks,Romans. Chinese also used “true” rudder in 1ST century AD,about 1100 years before Europeans,leeboards in the 2nd century AD about 800 years before Europeans, watertight compartments in 2nd century AD(Europeans did not employ the watertight compartments in their ships until the 19th century). In the early i5th century about 60 years before Columbus sailed for America, about 300 Chinese naval ships with 28000 men sailed all the way to Tanzania in Africa. The biggest Chinese ships were about 500 feet long and 180 feet wide had 9-10 masts all equiped with many cannons. In comparison to Columbus’s flagship NINA, which had the maximum displacement of 100 tons, the largest Chinese ship has a displacement of 3100 tons. But around the middle of the 15th century, China decided to downsize their navy ships in both size and quantity to cut costs in order to concentrate on defense against Mongols in the north. In the 16th thru the 17th century, Portuguese and Dutch warships tangled with Chinese warships that manhandled them, in almost every land or sea battle Chinese came out on top. China even subdued Russia in it’s numerous border skirmishes in Manchuria in the 17th century. So in the i8th century,no European power dared to mess with China. It is a myth that Europeans dominated the seas in Asia from the 16th century thru the 18th century. They took possessions of some Asian coastal areas here and there, but they simplly had too few ships to dominate. The European domination of the Asian seas happened only in the 19th century. But the China declined rapidly in the 19th century,because of weak political leadership and missing out on the Industrial Revolution.
@#32 Bon: The oldest surving Chinese gun was dated to 1288. That means the gun might have been invented even earlier in China. The world’s earlist known cannon dated i282 was also found in China. Again there is a good chance the cannon had been invented in an earlier date. You will find all this information in Wikipedia under the heading of cannon.
@ John Engleman: By the 17th century Europe was indeed ahead of China in science and mathmatics, but China was overall still ahead of Europe in technology. According to Robert Adams a British social scientist, the advancement of science was very minimal until the the late 19th century when the faster pace of the Industrial Revolution started to bring about the advancement of science. Up to then, most technological advancements were made by craftsmen and technicians, rather than scientists. Joseph Needham who wrote SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA stated that China was ahead of Europe in technology even after Renaissance. Also Adam Smith mentioned in his WEALTH OF NATIONS in 1776 that China was richer and technologically more advanced than Europe. From the 16th century thru the 18th century Jesuits transfered a lot of advanced Chinese technologies to Europe at the same time transmitting some of advanced European technologies to China.
@#53 Anonymous:I agree with most of what you said. Instead of whining and complaining, do something about the impending disatrous racial replacement. If you care about your own race.
“I can think of a few times where Germans really, really blew the virtue thing, (let’s say Naziism , mass murder, and their current multicultural spinelessness), but by and large, the Germans have been a beacon of many great virtues.”
I think you are missing the point here. The German people’s main virtues are that they are idealistic, earnest, hardworking and unselfish. All of these traits are/were on prominent display among modern leftist Germans and during the Nazi period.
You will find all this information in Wikipedia under the heading of cannon.
Wikipedia is wrong about this as they are about so many other things.
Wikipedia is anti-White:
see here:
http://www.amren.com/features/200807wikipedia.html
When it comes to controversial questions—race in particular—the everyone-is-an-editor model breaks down. Wikipedia suffers from the same liberal biases as any mainstream publisher, but exercises them even more ruthlessly. This is because many contributors offer factual but subversive information—which forces many Wikipedia administrators to spend their time actively rooting it out.
Wikipedia has coalesced into something of a leftist cult…The definition of “reliable source” is anything reliably left-wing. Sources can include liberal college newspapers and even what amount to fundraising letters from the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League. Wikipedia articles almost never cite the one medium that actually employs fact-checkers: magazines.
My daughter’s AP friends used to challenge each other to post the most ridiculous information on Wiki, especially about science and history–and then bet each other as to how long the misinformation would remain posted. Often, it stayed up for months.
Oh, and have a nice day!
Bon
@#49 Anonymous: Before you get upset with me ,why don’t you read my post#16 and#20. I duly credited Europeans and Americans for inventing a lot of original things since the 19th century. Europeans and Americans did a remarkable job of advancing science and technology, specially in the 20th century. I believe in giving credit where crdeit is due. However Europe was a more less adoptive culture, rather than an original one, before the Industrial Revolution starting with Egyptian,Babilonian influence and the great influence of the Islamic civilization on European science,mathmatics,astronomy,medicine,literature,music during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. and also such Chinese hardware as paper, printing(including the movable type).compass cannon,gun, differential gear. All of these Islamic software and Chinese hardware profoundly changed Europe before the modern era. As you can see,the power of creativity and innovation waxes and wanes among races. No one race has the monopoly on it.
Let’s be honest. China really hasn’t contributed that much to the modern world. True enough, China has a very old civilization. And they’ve made some original discoveries. But they appear to have reached a certain level of development and just stagnated for about 800 years.
So let’s turn this question around and get back to the original topic. Considering how long China has had a civilization and how populous the country has been one has to wonder why China hasn’t contributed more. After all, China’s population was over 100 million by the 12th century. That is an enormous population. Most countries don’t even have that many people today.
I shouldn’t have to say that a large population means a lot more potential Isaac Newtons and Albert Einsteins. All things being equal, China should have invented the industrial revolution and thus, the modern world, in the 12th century. But they didn’t.
Instead, the industrial revolution and modern world had to wait another 600 years until Europe’s population reached 100 million in the 18th century. And this in itself gives a small clue as to why the ancient world was dominated by cultures along the equator ie Sumeria, Egypt, Indus and even Greek, Roman, etc.
Simply put, Europe’s harsh climate suppressed agriculture and kept the population low.
Cold weather = Less food = Fewer People
It wasn’t until the end of the Little Ice Age that most of Europe was able to sustain a growing population and develop. As far as I know, all of the previous civilizations also had their golden age at a time when the climate was favorable. Who knows? If they had reached 100 million maybe they would have invented the modern world instead. But they didn’t.
#37 – I said we would “OWE” them all our money, not that they “own” it. As in trade deficits, etc. Oh, and if you’re an American, didn’t that cheque that Bush gave you come from the Chinese? Don’t you have to pay that back? Oh, wait, yes, countries are not like individuals, they can say to heck with debt and walk away from it scot-free.
Someone mentioned their one-child policy as being the thing that will keep them down. It’s their overpopulation that will, because prosperity declines with population after a point (just like anything else, the population effect can top out and become a detriment, as it is in the world in general today. Maybe if that one child policy drops their population to less than half of what it is now, they might be OK – more wealth to spread around to fewer people. But now? Forget it, just a huge population of disposable scabs. Keep the work safety rules low, lots more of ’em where those came from, even with the one-child policy.
The poster who pointed out that the Chinese will endure without the worries of the White race (that of dying out), well, yes, nature would say they’re more successful. It would also say that rats are more successful than humans. Rats can survive the fall of technological civilization quite handily. Most humans won’t be able to (yes, even the Third Worlders who don’t know what a toilet is. They still rely on Western medicine to shore up their unnaturally high numbers.)
Liberal dogma holds that the world’s different cultures are of equal value. Conservative dogma holds that the American way is the best way in every respect. When the Chinese felt that the Chinese way was the best way in every respect they fell behind.
Currently the United States is falling behind. The Chinese are catching up.
The definition of a “cannon” is a tricky one. The Chinese “cannons” from the early-mid 13th century fire arrow like projectiles rather than the more efficient and deadly rounded shot/stones that we commonly associate with cannons.
You need a combination of relatively advanced metallurgy, projectile shaping and slow burning but high overpressure generating gun powders (corned gunpowder for example) to achieve the type of range and velocity necessary to make the cannon competitive with torsion/mechanically powered weapons like steel crossbows. There’s not much in the way of evidence to suggest that China possessed all three of these essentials advances but we know for a fact that Europe did.
@64
You refer to the (much embellished) voyages of Zheng He. The ships used in these voyages were basically sail powered, coastal barges and not vessels capable of operating in the open ocean for extended periods of time.
Zheng He’s voyages took him along well known *coastal* routes with only minor excursions into the Arabian Sea. Compare (mostly) coastal Voyages of Zheng He:
http://ultimateexplorer.wikispaces.com/file/view/zheng_he_voyages.jpg/31637395/zheng_he_voyages.jpg
To the deep ocean voyage of Magellan just a few decades later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Magellan_Elcano_Circumnavigation-en.svg
The Chinese were so good at maritime navigation and shipbuilding that they didn’t even discover Australia or the New World. The flooding of China with New World gold and silver did more to undermine the Ming dynasty than all of the cannons in the world.
@55&63-My negative comments about Japan do not mean that I think the American school system is better. I have friends back home who work as teachers and they tell me the stories. Massive political pressure from above to increase test scores or else lose funding and the blunt reality is that their students generally occupy the 80IQ range and thus incredibly reduced ability (or even desire) to learn. Even the average and above average students have to spend a lot of time and energy taking Diversity Studies (White Guilt 101) classes when they could be studying trigonometry and so forth.
As a whole, American students’ test scores are quite bad compared to European and Asian nations. If you look only at white, middle class students (throw in Asian-Americans as well), the scores are comparable to European and Asian nations. That still leaves us with a huge underperforming underclass.
You want my advice? Segregate students by race and IQ and then see the test results. Or, trying to be democratic and fair, have mixed schools up until 6th grade and then give everyone a test and separate them accordingly. Segregate teachers as well. Black students get black teachers. Then they can’t complain about discrimination.
On a personal level, I went to school in New England, generally ranked as having the best public schools in the US. Can you guess why?
While I am on the subject of IQ, check out the international distribution of IQ scores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#National_IQ_estimates
Anyone notice all the “anon” posters all of a sudden who seem to have made John Engelman very happy?
JOHN, I have a newsflash for you. You think you are the “expert” on here and have to inform us that we are backward thinking about other races and cultures if we don’t agree with your take on your obvious delight at “taking us down a peg or two”.
You are so transparent with most of your posts here, that it doesn’t take a genius to see where your true loyalties lie.
Most of us have had the “pleasure” of living among these other “cultures” DAILY and have experienced and seen up close just how “beautiful” and “enriching” they truly are. NOT! Take your lectures somewhere else.
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60 — John Engelman wrote at 7:23 PM on May 16:
Many of the comments posted here came as a pleasant surprise. They also illustrated Steven Farron’s assertion that many in the West have been willing to criticize their own culture, and appreciate aspects of others.
metal movable type was also invented in Korea in the 13th century
I find it odd that you should claim this since Korea didn’t have its own written language until the 15th century.
Movable type’s not much of an edge unless you have an alphabet. Before the 15th century, there was no Korean written language, alphabetic or otherwise. Documents were written (or printed) in Chinese. Han’gul (the Korean phonetic writing system) was not invented until the 15th century.)
http://goo.gl/0evwe
If you look only at White, middle class students (throw in Asian-Americans as well), the scores are comparable to European and Asian nations. That still leaves us with a huge underperforming underclass.
Yes, you are quite correct.
From Steve Sailer’s article on PISA scores, PISA defined as:
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These are tests of school achievement for 15-year-olds in the 34 OECD countries, plus 31 other countries or regions.
IF you look at Mr. Sailer’s graph here: http://goo.gl/aaIyo
of American reading, math and science scores broken down by RACE, you’ll fine the following:
Math: Whites: 512 Asian: 506
Science: Whites: 523 Asian: 499
Reading: Whites: 525 Asians: 541
And, remember the following categories are lumped in with “White” — this is my school district’s official definition of White for state testing and other classification purposes:
whites: Having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa.
I copied this as is from the official form — notice the small “w” for White, and ONLY used for White! Asian, Hispanic and African-American are ALL CAPITALIZED.
You can use the link provided above to find out the average IQ scores of countries in the Middle East or North Africa. For example: Armenia, 93, Iran: 84, Egypt: 83, Syria: 87. These are not small populations in S. California.
The use of a small “w” in reference to White is being done on purpose by the educational system and government to debase Whites.
Stop using a small “w” for White!!
Bon
To Poster #50, drastic political changes are coming. It’s inevitable, and the non-white hostile aliens are going to be the cause of them. Changes that will lead to whites putting aside their petty disputes among themselves and taking back what is rightfully theirs by force, violence and killing. When whites kill in battle, they are mercilessly efficient at it, whether or not they turn their weapons on each other or non-whites. That is namely homelands to call their own, and to preserve their race, culture and languages. All of you non-whites gloating over us right now, don’t be so sure you’ve won, because the coming wars will thin your numbers even more drastically than they will reduce ours.
@#74 Marander: Advanced European metallurge? You must be joking! The cast iron technology China had invented in the 5th century BC did not reach Europe until the 14th century and also “Siemens” steel process which China had invented in the 5th century reached the West only in the 19th century. The first metal cannon in Europe was called pot-de-fer which ejected arrow-like projectiles in the 14th century,by this time Chinese were already using metal cannonballs. But by the 16th century, Europe started to make better cannon than China. Even though most of his voyages were made of coastal voyages, Zheng He’s voyages consisted of both open ocean voyages and coastal voyages. The open ocean voyages were made from Galle, Sri Lanka to Mogadishu,Somalia in a straight line without stopping, also from Galle, Sri Lanka to Aden in the same manner. Chinese ships at this time were far superior to European ones. Chinese ships had batten sails which were far better than the European square sails and watercompartments which European ships did not have until the 19th century, also fenestrated rudder which Europeans did not employ until the 20th century. Columbus did not find the Americas on purpose but by accident. He wanted to find a direct route to China and various speice islands, the dreamlands of Europeans who were at the time at the bottom of the developmentental stage, compared to other civilizations. Until his dying day Columbus believed Cuba was Japan. China had no need to go to Europe because Chinese heard about how backward Europe was from the Arabs and Indians. If Chinese really had wanted to make an ocean voyage, they would have made it without any problem. After the Chinese ocean voyages to Africa and and further out into the Indian Ocean, they came to conclusion there was nothing of value, out there.
@#71 Anonymous: I want to talk about the European intellectual stagnation from the 6th century to he 14th century, After the collapse of the Roman Empire, for about first 500 years the Western Europe went backwards. Do you remember the Dark Ages? But the Eastern Europe under the Byzantine Empire did a little better because of it’s contacts with the advanced Islamic civilization nearby. For these 800 years, there were almost NO MAJOR 100% ORIGINAL,GENUINE, EUROPEAN inventions. According to such scholars as Joseph Needham and John Hobson, from 500-1700 there were more than 30 major ground-breaking Chinese technologies trasmitted to Europe directly or indirectly. but only 2 genuine original European inventions were trasmitted to China, namely Archemedian screw and crankshaft( these things were invented in Europe long before this time period). I checked a few sources about the world population from 1000-1700. The European population was roughly two thirds the population of China in this time period. When you compare the population ratio with the invention ratio, the European performance was very dismal to say the least.
@#71 Anonymous: You talked about the Industrial Revolution. China had it’s own industrial revolution in the 11th century in Sung dynasty. They achieved mechanization and mass production using water power. Water wheels operated doble-action piston bellows which continuosly blew a stream of air into iron or steel mill blast furnace that was burning coke(or coking coal). The use of coke is very important because of it’s crucial importance to the British iron or steel mills during the British Industrial Revolution 7 centuries later. As of a matter of fact, Europe did not surpass the iron production of the 11th-century China until 1700. Also the water wheels operated trip hammers for grain mills. Chinese also used steam power but it was not economical because you need fuel to heat water and make steam. Since China was blessed with a lot of water power sources such as little streams,rivers, they stayed with water power.It was an economic decision. The Bitish Industrial Revolution was greatly infulenced by Chinese inventions. Even the Chinese water-powered doubled- action piston bellows which had been invented 2nd century, had influence on the development of the steam engine. It is generally recognized that James Watt’s machine was an improvement of Wilkinson’s machine which was more or less identical to the Chinese double-action piston bellows, only difference was it had a crankshaft. So it worked in a reverse order from the Chinese piston bellows, instead of wheel moving a piston, a piston moved the wheel( the function of steam engine). A case of “true” reverse engineering. Another machine I want to mention is the famous British “spinning jenny”. According to Dieter Kuhn, a German scholar stated that in the 13th century, Chinese had already invented the all the spinning machines which were very similar to the British spinning frames which were essntial to the Industrial Revolution. So knowingly or unknowingly or directly or indirectly, the British used such Chinese inventions as coke,water-powered double-action piston bellows, spinning machines which were extremly essential to the development of the Industrial Revolution. So you should realize that the Industrial Revolution just did not happen in vaccume without the inputs from non- European culture or cultures,
@#77 Bon: So you don’t trust Wikipedia’s information about the history of the cannon and gun. Then you can find the same information in Joseph Needham’s THE SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA volume5 part7 and also Robert Temple’s THE GENIUS OF CHINA. Koreans introduced the metal movable type in 1234,no kiding it was the year 1234. The Korean alphabet was invented in 1443. From the ancient times Koreans like Japanese,have used the written Chinese characters to communicate with each other. THE SELECTED TEACHINGS OF BUDDHIST SAGES AND SOEN MASTERS was published in 1377, making it the earlist existing book printed with metal movable type. This book is all prined in Chinese written characters. Contrary to the misconception, China and Korea used extensively the movable type in addition to the wood block printing. As for using Chinese written characters by Koreans, even today the Korean highschools teach the written Chinese, it’s a mandatory course. Right now Koreans basicly use the Korean alphabet but a Korean must have a good knowledge of the written Chinese, because about 90% of the Korean nouns have the Chinese origin. Japanese are even more so than Koreans. When they write, they use both Japanese alphabet and written Chinese characters. As for your PISA SCORES ,only the reading scores are from 2009 when the most recent PISA test was given. The science score was from 2006 and the math score was from 2003, I want to see the complete 2009 PISA scores by ethnic group. Usally Asians do better than whites in math and science, and whites usally do better than Asians in reading. If Asians scored higher score than whites in reading in 2009 PISA test, There is no reason to believe that they did worse than whites in math and science in 2009 PISA test. I have a better comparison. Here are SAT scores from 2003-2009. 2003: Asians 1093 whites 1064. 2004: Asians 1094 whites 1065 2005:Asians 1092 whites 1061 2006:Asians 1088 Whites 1063 2007:Asians 1091 whites 1068 2008-2009:Asians 1084 whites 1057. It looks like Asians beat whites every year. You complain about the other non-Euro whites being included in the white clasification, well northen Asians have the same problem. In the Asian-Pacific Islander classification, they include not only northen Asians such as Chinese, Japanese,Koreans, but also people from Philipines,Indonesia,Malaysia,Thailand,even Samoa.
@ White Guy in Japan. All of your ideas are excellent, but reallistically can they be implemented? When you have so many bleeding heart liberals in America.
PISA scores:
@82 writes: I want to see the complete 2009 PISA scores by ethnic group.
So do I:
PISA and the U.S. government apparently conspire to keep the ethnic breakdowns of American scores a secret, except for whichever subject is the main theme of that year’s PISA (reading in 2009, science in 2006, and math in 2003). Thus the only American scores broken down by ethnicity yet released for 2009 were for reading.
Instead, PISA conveyed the ethnic data confidentially to the U.S. government—which then released the racial breakdowns for just the reading test on its National Center for Educational Statistics website.
http://goo.gl/bXiu9
You write:
In the Asian-Pacific Islander classification, they include not only northen Asians such as Chinese, Japanese,Koreans, but also people from Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia,Thailand,even Samoa.
Not true.
N. Asians DEMANDED that they be separated from PIs and other, lower IQ Asians — and they got their wish.
Here are the educational classifications for Asians in S. California for testing purposes:
Each is a separate category, BTW:
Chinese
Filipino
Guamanian
Hmong
Japanese
Korean
Laotian
Native Hawaiian
Samoan
Tahitian
Vietnamese
Declined to state option is no longer available.
This is my final post on this thread, I feel like I’m on a Möbius strip going around and around with multiple, buzzing, White-hating ‘anonymous’ posters on the attack!
It never ceases to gall me that Asian Supremacists continue to come onto WN sites to tell us Whites 1. How stupid and violent we are 2. How inferior we are to them. 3. How all of our innovations were stolen from Asia, as we are obviously beneath them, beneath their contempt, and too stupid and violent to create anything except war against non-Whites.
Ha!
This while using WHITE innovations (the Internet, the Computer) powered by other WHITE innovations (electricity, electrical grid) while communicating in a WHITE language — using yet other WHITE creations (internal combustion engine, jet engine) while falling all over yourselves to join White societies.
Yeah, you hate us so much, find us violent and stupid, but push your way into OUR homelands, the culture we WHITES created for ourselves and our posterity, not for you or any other non-White.
What’s up with that? Why do you feel the need to learn MY language and join MY culture?
With your high IQs and innovative, creative spirit (according to you) the countries you create for yourselves should be paradises on earth! Peaceful, harmonious, innovative — the envy of the world!! But…they’re not, are they?
Bon
@79
Who said anything about cast Iron? The best cannons of the 14 – 16th century were made of cast Bronze because Bronze is non-corrosive (important for naval artillery), lighter than Iron and safer as Bronze will distend and bulge rather than shatter like Iron cannons.
Europe had well established and continuous Bell founding techniques since the 5th century which translated directly into Cannon foundry.
The “pot-de-fer” was the first cannon recorded in England; the English were well behind the curve on cannon artillery development.
“The open ocean voyages were made from Galle, Sri Lanka to Mogadishu,Somalia in a straight line without stopping”
Not particularly impressive as there are Indian ocean circular currents (well known since antiquity) that naturally propel even the most primitive vessel in this direction and back again.
“Columbus did not find the Americas on purpose but by accident.”
Thank you! This is a great example of how truly lateral thinking (literally circumventing the Ottoman land domination and Portugese naval domination of East West trade by sailing in the opposite direction) and a bit of luck can produce tremendous benefits.
This is the sort of high-risk/high-reward endeavor that has characterized Western innovation and development since antiquity.
How many Chinese innovations were stumbled upon by happy accident? Serendipity is a huge component of invention/discovery right up to and including the present day.
In the final analysis, Zhang He was not embarking on a voyage of discovery. His expeditions were the “Great White Fleet” of their day; a naval recon in force of known potential and current vassal states.
“China had no need to go to Europe because Chinese heard about how backward Europe was from the Arabs and Indians.”
The Ottoman Turks were the dominant power by this period; and it was from backwards Europe that the Ottomans acquired most of their advanced weaponry, from the 14th century onward, particulary firearms.
The exporting of firearms to the Ottomans had become so prevalent that by 1373 a Papal Bull prohibiting the exporting of firearms to the Ottoman infidel had to be issued!
Doesn’t your statement that the Chinese weren’t the least bit curious about European civilization despite the abundant physical evidence of an advanced civlization at the other end of the Silk Road basically confirm the premise of this article?
I too, am in 100% favor of White separatism and White genetic preservation.
..But I have been thinking, maybe the unprecedented low birth rates, miscegenation, and rapidly growing senior citizen population our race is turning into is an act of Nature?
Maybe Nature feels humanity is changing/evolving much to quickly and needs to stop it? In the last century we have gone from horse and buggy to airflight and spacecraft. In the last century, the common man has gone from hearing of world events as they happen days or weeks afterward to now just seconds or minutes afterward. Don’t get me wrong, I love our genotype, our culture, our nations, our traditions but maybe the White man’s thinking cap has exploded too much for nature to handle? I’m just speculating.
At least the East Asians are doing something right. East Asians understand the basic law of nature “If you don’t think of yourself (family/tribe) as #1 you will not survive” East Asians have not been brainwashed with the liberal-feel good, “let’s embrace all cultures and dilute our own” which almost all White nations have been notorious at. East Asians may have not contributed a whole lot to the world, but they know how to imitate the greatest White technologies and their biological and cultural existence is not threatened.
Another thing, there is A LOT of cases of autism now in White males. The whole spectrum from Asperger’s Syndrome to severe low-functioning autism. Even with mild autism (such as Asperger’s) the vast majority of people who have it do not find a mate and reproduce. ;( So there is another factor that’s lowering our birthrate.
Combined with the lax acceptance of homosexuality in White culture. Fortunately, East Asians have no acceptance for people who practice homosexuality in their culture. You can not have social cohesiveness and spirituality with people practicing unnatural lifestyles.
Young white teens and adults are brainwashed with secular ideas and that “religion makes you racist”. Religion strengthens group identity and sense of place in the world, which is why the Liberal-Marxists want to fade religion from all White nations.
@83-Thank you! And, yes, I realize that my suggestions are not likely to be implemented in the near future.
On a side note, although many people thought that White Flight was a collective act of passivity and even cowardice, perhaps it will give whites a chance to re-group and do what we do very well: create healthy, productive white societies. Of course, the rest of the USA would get jealous and angry.
Sorry, I really don’t have any practical advice at this point. The US has painted itself into a corner and doing absolutely everything wrong trying fix a problem that really can’t be fixed. Namely, forcing intergration among people who are so cognitvely and culturally incompatible.
Back to Japan. The nation is facing a labor shortage due to their ticking demographic time bomb. Japan was recently paying Japanese-Brazilians to go back to Brazil. “Thanks, the experiment is over.” Some of the larger companies are trying to build more robots for their factories. Japanese robots, of course.
Still, I am a bit worried about Japan.I may move on to Malaysia after I finish grad school.
PS-Does Amren have a more convential internet forum? It would be nice to have more direct conversations with other readers.
@#77 Bon: According to Steve Sailer of VDARE,in 2009 PISA test Asian-American students outperformed all the Asian students except Shanghai and white American students outperformed all the students from 37 predominantly white countries except Finland. That was all he said and did not give any details about the 2009 PISA scores except for reading. So I did some checking and tabulating. Here are top 7 countries or political entities. #1 Shanghai(1831) #2 Hong Kong(1639) #3 Finland(1631) #4 Singapore(1630) #5 Korea(1623) #6 Japan(1588) #7 Canada(1580). Since Asian-American students’ score must be lower than 1831 of Shanghai but higer than the Hong Kong score of 1639 and white American students’ score must be lower than the Finland’s score of 1631. The total score of Asian students must be higher than that of white American students. I suspect that Steve Sailer being Eurocentric, did not use the new 2009 PISA scores for math and science, because Asian-American students outperformed white students instead he used 2003 and 2006 scores to give the wrong impression that Asian-American students did worse than white students in the 2009 PISA math and science tests. I found about Steve Sailer’s statement by clicking on “US MESSAGE BOARD on 2009 PISA test”.
@White Guy in Japan: According to IQ and Global Inequality published in 2006, China’s IQ was upgraded to 105 from 100 in 2002. The people who wrote this book also had written IQ and the Wealth of Nations in 2002
#80 & 81
First, there was no “intellectual stagnation”. The west was decimated by several hundred years of plague that cut the population by more than half. It destroyed classical civilization. But they weren’t stagnant. They just had to rebuild everything from scratch. By the 12th century they were back on top. But you shouldn’t be so dismissive of the “dark ages”. I don’t know of anyone else building things like this a thousand years ago. http://goo.gl/1ryje
Second, the Byzantines did not do “a little better because of it’s contacts with the advanced Islamic civilization nearby.” The other name for Byzantine is the East Roman Empire. The Middle East and North Africa had been under Rome for hundreds of years. Nice try, though.
Third, I just looked up the two guys you’ve been quoting. No wonder you’re in love with them. Needham was a pro Chinese communist and Hobson was an anti western Marxist. And they’ve both been heavily criticized. Needham, in particular, has been criticized for exaggerating Chinese accomplishments as well as being a ChiCom tool.
@#85 Marauder: From 600-1300, the other civilizations such as Chinese,Islamic were far ahead of Europe, Anybody who has studied Tang and Sung dynasties and Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates will recognize that without any problem. As I said before Columbus set out to go to China and South Asia for spices and Chinese silk and porcelain not to find a “new world”. Indeed it was lucky for Europeans to have found the Americas, because from this point on the poor Europeans had someting valuable in their hands, to pay for their craving for spices,Chinese silk and porcelain and tea, the silver from the Americas. According to such economic historians as Andre Frank, from the 16th century thru the 18th century about 40% of the silver mined in the Americas ended up in China. The bottom line is that the superior Chinese ships would have had no problem to sail anywhere else in the world in the 15th century.
@#90 Anonymous: In the 12th century,Europe was at the bottom of the heap compared to other civilizations such as Chinese and Islamic. The Islamic art greatly influenced that of Byzantine Empire and after the 10th century,the Islamic science also influenced Byzantine a great deal. Yes, Needham was a communist,but nobody comes close to his great work done on the understanding of China’s past achievements in science and technology.
@#84 Bon: I might sound anti-Euro white, but I’m neither an Asian supremecist nor Chinese. I have a lot of admiration for the Euro-whites for their great accomplishments in science and technology for the last 2 centuries. All the humanity have benifited greatly from this. I sincerely hope you people solve the ethnic problems in America and Europe to your advantage.
#92
I’ve read back through your comments and it’s obvious you are emotionally involved in this issue. You’re looking to belittle the west to salve your bruised ego. You’ve touted exaggerated claims from authors whose bias is known. And you’ve adopted an insulting tone when others wouldn’t agree. And, to be honest, when you broke out the “laundry list” I was embarrassed for you. That’s the sort of thing I expect from Afrocentrics ie. George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. What’s next — General Tso invented “chicken”? At this point, I just don’t see having a reasonable discussion with you on this. Good luck to you, though. And I hope you continue reading the site. Because I there are probably a lot more issues that we would agree than disagree. Just not this one.
“In the 12th century, Europe was at the bottom of the heap compared to other civilizations such as Chinese and Islamic. The Islamic art greatly influenced that of Byzantine Empire and after the 10th century,the Islamic science also influenced Byzantine a great deal.” ….#92 anon.
…………………….
No, no, no! You have it all garbled backwards.
Byzantine civilization PRECEDED Islam. As a matter of fact, Islam destroyed much of it. Islam also absorbed much from Persia and others. Islam TOOK from others, but it created very little.
As for Europe in the 12th century, those Gothic churches were already being built — even in the 11th century. They began in France in 1140. e.g. The great cathedral of Chartres was built 1194-1260. Notre Dame de Paris was started 1163. The basilica of St. Denis in 1137. Strasbourg cathedral — started 1015. Would you call those backward?
Let’s stick to FACTS, and stay away from wishful thinking and speculation! Something isn’t so just because you say it is. That’s typical third world thinking right there (and so is your use of English btw).
The future belongs to Asia. China & India will overtake the United States & Europe in terms of Economy, Science-Technology, Military power and eventually Infrastructure and Academia. I have already s started learning Mandarin because I know what the future holds. Lets face it: We have lost!
Even if there is a major racial awakening all across the country, there is simply no way we can take back all our glory. Its finished. I apologize for sounding so defeatist, but thats the plain truth. I see no point in anymore wishful fantasy. The biggest traitors are those that pushed the 1965 open borders act and since the 60’s everything has gone “progressively” downhill ever since.
@96-Dark thinking there, but that is totally plausible. Actually, one of of us should write a science fiction novel with the Chinese as the lords as masters of the Earth.
White people will be kept in detention camps and forced to create new technology for the masters. Similiar to Marx’s free market zone and China’s Shenzen, the Chinese will round up all the smart, creative Whites and put them to work. Dumb Whites will get sent to work in the mines and fishing boats.
The Chinese guards, products of rote learning and Confucian ethics will be high IQ but unimaginative, cold and cruel. No cultural relativity or critical thinking.
Japan? Nature hates a vacuum. China will buy Japan.
@91
The Abbasid and Ummayyid caliphates had a relatively brief period of quality intellectual output (much of it inspired by Greek/Roman learning) before the coming of the Turks to the middle east in the late 10th century; the ensuing Turkish expansion was not effectively halted until the success of the First Crusade.
The establishment and endurance of the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant (established and preserved mostly due to superior western seapower) should tell you something about Western power projection capabilities even in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.
I repeat, there is no evidence that Chinese maritime technology produced deep ocean going vessels. If the Chinese had such naval power projection why didn’t they surge across the Pacific and secure the sources of European silver and gold in the New World?
Did the Chinese produce anything even remotely resembling the Greek Antikythera Disk (circa 50 BC)? You are also conveniently leaving out the many accomplishments of the Byzantine Greek empire who during the timeframe you describe achieved quite a bit in many areas.
@#98 Marauder: After the fall of Roman Empire, a lot of the knowledge of the ancient Greece was lost to the Europeans, because of the neglect and eventual loss of the ancient Greek texts. Europeans were much more intetrested in preserving Christian writings than the Greek texts. But fortunately the Arabs translated a lot of the Greek texts into Arabic. In the few centuries preceding the Renaissance, European scholars started copying the the Greek works in Arabic, into Latin. So the Renaissance itself owed a great deal to the Arabs. Islamic scolars disproved many of the wrong Greek theories.Ibn al-Haytham contradicted Ptolemy’s theory of vision that objects are seen by the rays of light coming from the eyes. He discoverd that light rays to be streams of minute particles that traveled at a finite speed.He also discovered the laws of refraction. Ali Kuscu discovered the rotation of the earth which Aristotle wrongly thought, was stationary. You should remember that the astrology and mathmatics of ancient Greece were greatly infuenced by the ancestors of the Arabs, the Babylonians.
@@98 Marauder:European ships did not use leeboards(until the middle of the 16th century), watertight compartments(until the 19th century),fenestrated rudder(until the early 20th century). Chinese have used them from the ancient times. The Chinese batten sails were a lot better than the European square canvas sails, for example in order to furl and unfurl them, European sailors must go up the yardarms, but Chinese could control their sails from deck using windlass. Also the Chinese batten sails could be adjusted accorging to the strength and direction of the wind much more easily than the European ones. I’m going to quote a British nautical historian H.Warington Smyth. Here is what he said about Chinese ships “As an engine for carrying man and his commerce upon the HIGH and STORMY SEAS as well as vast inland waterways, it is doubtful any class of vessel is more suited or better adapted to it’s purpose than the Chinese ship, it is certain that for flatness of sail and for handiness, the Chinese rig is unsurpassed”. I’m going to also quote Robert Temple, a noted sinologist “After a gap of about 1300 years, Europeans thus adopted Chinese way of rigging. In every way whether for navigation, propulsion, or steering, Europeans were dependent upon Chinese ideas in order to be calable of the great voyages of discovery”. Derek Price, a British professor of history of science suggested that Antikythera Mechanism had used the diffential gear. In his book PUBLISHED IN 1974 THE GEARS FROM THE GREEKS said “(differential gear) must surely rank as one of the greatest basic mechanical inventions of all time”). Michael Wright, a former Curator of Mechanical Engineering at The London Science Museum who investigated the Antikythera Mechanism for more than 10 years, in his 2005 book “Antikythera Mechanism and early history ofthe Moon Phase of Display” conclusively proved that the Antikythera Mechanism did NOT use the differential gear. Either 1000 BC or 260 AD, China invented the south-pointing carriage using the differential gear, which no matter which way the carriage turned, the figure on the top always pointed south(no compass was used in making this device). The south-pointing carriage was the first PROTO- cybernetic machine in the world. Here is a quote from Needham ” The south-pointing carriage would have been the first cybernetic machine, had the actual steering corrected itself”. It looks like the honor of inventing the differential gear(according to Derek Price, ” must surely rank as one of the greatest basic mechanical inventions of all time”) belongs to Chinese not Greeks.
@99/100
You are definitely missing the forest for the trees. The fact that Europe was capable of regular, successful deep ocean voyages beginning in the mid 15th century suggests that whatever naval technological innovations the Chinese had developed were useful but not essential for deep ocean transit.
As I said, European dominance of the Mediterranean (the basis for the success of the 1st and 3rd Crusades) as well as the North and Irish seas indicate a high degree of naval sophistication with no evidence of Chinese influence.
If you argue that the Arabs, Persians and later Turks may have transmitted superior Chinese technology to the West it stands to reason that the Arabs, Persians and Turks would have adapted the Chinese tech themselves to displace the European naval powers. That. Did. Not. Occur!
There’s no evidence that the Chinese did or could engage in deep ocean voyages until *after* contact with European naval powers. Note that H. Warington Smyth makes no mention of the suitabiliy of Chinese ships for warfare, exploration or deep ocean travel.
The presence or absence of a differential gear in the Antikythera Mechanism is *totally* irrelevant. You cite Michael Wrigth but ignore the fact that his analysis established that the mechanism actually contained more innovations than previously realized.
It was, indisputably, the most sophisticated mechanical device (and by implication the most sophisticated early analog computer) from antiquity until the European clocks of the mid-15th century and there’s zero evidence that the Chinese had influenced it nor created anything comparable.
@98
Greek was never widely spoken in the west even during the height of the Roman Empire. Despite this, there were translations of Greek to Latin (arguably the most important being Euclid’s Elements) in the waning days of the Western Roman Empire.
The rapproachment between the West and the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century was arguably just as important in transmission of classical Greek texts to the West as any translations from Arabic.
Note, the fact that the West could read and translate Arabic scientific and mathematical texts as early as the 11th century supports the fundamental premise of this article.
The Renaissance owes more to the individual European inventors and scientists who initiated it. In my view, Europe’s great leap forward was not the Renaissance (the renaissance being a culmination of many existing trends) but the Enlightenment which is wholely European in origin.
@#101:You basically stated that for the European ships to make open ocean voyages beginning in the middle of the 15th century, it was useful, but not essntial to use the Chinese naval innovations. Something is not right with the statement. You tell me how Columbus and Da Gama could have made their open ocean voyages without using the navigational compass which had been invented by Chinese. If the inferior European ships without leeboards,watertight compartments,fenestrated rudder,also with inferior square canvas sails could make deep sea voyages, then what makes you think the superior Chinese ships with leeboards, watertight compartments,fenestrated rudder,with superior batten sails couldn’t make deep sea voyages? Common sense tells you that Chinese ships would have less problems in making deep sea voyages than the European ones.Even H. Warington Smyth essentially said that the Chinese ships are better than any other ships to sail on both high seas and inland waterways. What do you think high seas are? They surely are not small lakes, are they? In July 1522,there was a naval battle involving Chinese fleet and Portugese fleet. The Chinese captured 10 Portuguese warships, killed 35 Portugese sailors and also captured another 43. This event was recorded in Ming Emperor Shizong’s Factual Chronicles. Again from 1547-1549, there were various both sea and land battles involving Chinese navy and Portugese warships. According to the Portugese records,about 800 portugese salors were killed and 37 Portugese warships were destroyed. These kinds of battles broke out many times involving Chinese warships on one side and Portugese and Dutch warships on the other side from the 16th century thru the 17th century. The Chinese came out on top almost all the time in these engagements. So in the 18th century no European warships tried to mess with Chinese warships. China even subdued Russia in many border skirmishes in northen Manchria in the 17th century.
@#101 Marauder: There is no doubt the Renaissance was greatly influenced by the Islamic civilization. Any fair-minded person would agree to that.The scientific method which is FUNDERMENTAL to the modern science was born in the Islamic civilization in the 11th century. This is why Ibn al Haytham who pioneered the scientific method in the 11th century is called the first scientist. You said that Enlightment was WHOLELY European. But you are wrong again. The Enlightenment was also influenced by China. The Jesuits transmitted not only the advanced Chinese technologies but also many of Confucian ideas to Europe. The Enlightment scholars such as Montaigne,Leibniz,Voltaire,Quesnay, were heavily inflenced by the Confucian philosophy. Specially Voltaire drew on Chinese conceptions of politics,philosophy in order to attack the European preference for hereditary aristocracy. This is why these Enlightenment scholars loved the idea of Chinese civil service system based on merit. This is one of the Chinese-influenced ideas that came out of the Enlightenment. The famous Enlightenment ecomomist Quesnay was known as the European Confucius. Quesnay was also the advocate of the Chinese idea of wu-wei which means to let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does so that it’s nature will be satisfied. Wu-wei is translated into French as LAISSEZ-FAIRE. From the Han dynasty in the 2nd century BC, Chinese government stayed out of the economic affairs as much as possible. So the economic doctrine of LAISSEZ-FAIRE was influenced by the Chinese idea of wu-wei. During the period of Enlightenment, Not only Quesnay but also Nicholas-Gabriel Clerc whose book Yu Le Grand et Confucious urged Europeans to imitate China if they wanted significant economic progress. You can see there was substantial Chinese influence on the Enlightenment. So when you say the Enlighenment was WHOLELY European, I can say you are wrong.
@103
Portolan charts, the Mariner’s Astrolab, the Mariner’s Quadrant and the Mariner’s Compass were all European inventions and were absolutely essential to deep ocean navigation.
The Chinese innovations you cite have too disadvantages: weight and bulk neither of which are desireable for deep ocean voyages. You are relying on a single quote (taken out of context) for your entire line of argument.
The fact is there’s no evidence that the Chinese ever embarked on deep ocean voyages; but the Europeans did.
Of course the Chinese emerged victorious in several naval engagements; the Portugese and Dutch were fighting at the absolute limits of logistics and endurance (both of man and machine). The Chinese had the advantage of numbers, supplies and local knowledge. The same applies to Chinese border wars with the Russians; the Russians were fighting at the limits of logistics and communication; the Chinese were not.
@104
Influenced, yes. Greatly influenced? Probably not. The Renaissance was as much a culmination of existing trends as it was a great leap forward. Also, there had been several Renaissance prior to “The Renaissance” they just aren’t as well known.
Let me be specific; the scientific/technical/mathematical developments of the Enlightenment were almost wholely European. Gregory, Barrow, Wallis, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Fermat, Cavalieri etc had no peers outside of Europe in terms of accomplishments and innovations.
By the 14th century, the Chinese were way behind the Europeans, Indians, Arabs, and Persians in terms of mathematical sophistication.
“I bet an average Japanese knows a lot more about America than an average American knows about Japan. An average American doesn’t know much about other countries or about their own country.”
Not true at all and the average American is very much interested in or knows about their own or other countries. Americans know more about other nationalities than the Japanese or many others also due to the diversity here, which is much greater than Japan. Here in the USA, people all the time discuss other nations, world events etc. Of course in the USA as in any other country, there are certainly individuals who don’t know or care about anything outside of their own little world and I have run into those, both here and abroad, in equal measure. On the flip side, one does see a lot of Japanese tourists snapping pictures with their cameras, so certainly some of them are interested in th world.
@Marauder: I want to hear about your opinions about the racial replacement process in progress in America. It seems to me that the Euro whites in both America and Europe are committing genocide against themselves by being unable to control both legal and illegal immigration of non whites into their countries. By 2060 or soon after, the Hispanics and blacks will be a majority in America and also by the end of this century, at least one third of the European population will be either Muslems or non whites. What do you suggest the Euro whites do to save themselves from this situation?
@Marauder: Long before the the 15th century, starting in the 8th century Tang dynasty, Chinese ocean-going merchant ships regularly sailed to Somalia in the East Africa by crossing the Indian Ocean.This maritime trade continued throughout the succeeding Sung and Yuan dynasties. As matter of fact,the first Yuan emperor’s envoy sailed all the way to Kenya in the East Africa. the British nautical historian H. Warington Smyth’s description of ocean -going Chinese ships is very accurate. I don’t see why he had to lie about them. Because of the superior technologies they employed, the Chinese deep-sea going ships were the best until the end of the 18th century. You should remember the fact that the navigational compass was first invented by Chinese in 1117 or earlier. As for Chinese math,China used negative numbers since 2nd century BC. In Europe negative numbers appeared in 275 AD in a book written by Diophantus.But he dismissed them as absurd. The true acceptance of negative number did not happen until Jerome Cardan wrote The Great Art in 1545.Along with Persians, Chinese also invented Pascal’s Triangle in the 12th century more than 400 years before Europeans. But in the 17th century Europe overtook China in mathematics.Specially the Islamic civilizations’s contribution to the development of European science was large before and during the Renaissance. The Muslems’ invention of the scientific method which is fundermental to the modern science changed drastically how science was done. The most important influence of the Enlighenment was on the Europeean political,social,economic areas. One can not deny that Chinese influence on the Enlighenment on rebuking of absolute divine rights of king and hereditary privileges of nobility,creation of laissez faire economic doctrine, installation of civil service examination based on merit. This is why I think the Enlightenment’s influence on political,social,economic areas was much more important than on any other areas. All these radical ideas eventually became reality and led Europe to democracy based on laissez faire capitalism. So when you say the Enlighenment was WHOLLY European, I disagree with you.
@Marauder: As for the Antikythera Mechanism it is an “analogue computer” in the sense of a calculator just like an abacus which is a digital computer,and the common slide rule which is also an analogue computer. The Antikythera Mechanism is not an analogue computer in the modern sense of truly “programable” analogue computer.It is a fancy calculator but still just a calculator. The ancient China was far more advanced than the ancient Greece in the field of automata . Here is the description of a mechanical human robot in action in Zhou dynasty in the 11th century BC. “The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides,moving it’s head up and down so that anybody would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched it’s chin, and began singing perfectly in tune. He touched it’s hand and began posturing,keeping perfect time.——–“. You will find these paragraphs in Needham’s Science and Civilization(voulme2,53). Also in the 3rd century BC,Chinese technicians created a mechanical orchestra for the emperor. These ancient Chinese machines are “PROPRAMABLE” analgue computers which are far more advanced than the Antikythera Mechanism. The south pointing carriage that used the differential gear was the first machine which used passive(negative) feedback for the first time in history. This is why the south pointing carriage is called the first proto cybernetic or homeostatic machine in the world. In pure technological terms, the Chinese south-pointing carriage is much more important than the Antikythera Mechanism which is just a calculator.
@109/110
The ocean voyayges you refer to were not “deep ocean voyages” a la Magellan and Columbus. India to east Africa and back follows the clockwise currents in the Indian ocean that have been well known since antiquity. No particular technological sophistication is required to exploit these currents. The simple Arab dhows could readily traverse this route. Hence, Zhang He’s barges could negotiate these currents with ease.
The first proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus was a Euclidean geometric proof by Gregory for the first quadrant of the x-y Cartesian coordinate system. It didn’t require algebra or negative numbers.
Newton’s Principia (widely regarded as one of the greatest scientific works ever) didn’t require negative numbers; the first editions were not presented using the framework of Calculus but Euclidean geometry.
None of the Persian or Chinese mathematical developments you cite were of any real consequence. The world would still be largely the same had they never been conceived.
Most of the Persian and Arab contributions were important *refinements* and *restatements* of Greek, Indian and Babylonian developments. I think the Arabs and Persians greatly clarified and refined the presentation of many important concepts that predated the rise of Islam. The Arabs and Persians made very valuable contributions in this regard; presentation is just as important as conception.
The last 500 years of European math and science are vastly more important than the 25,000 years of human civilization that preceded it.
I don’t really care about the philosophical developments of the Enlightenment; the great leaps forward in science and mathematics from this period have had a *far* greater impact on the world than any philosophy.
The Greeks were not the least bit slouchy in terms of automata and had achieved everything the Chinese had and more.
Who said anything about programmable? Since when is that a requirement for being a computer? Just a calculator?!! I suppose a modern widebody aircraft is just a tube with wings if you want to play a vacuous game of Reductio ad absurdum.
The Antikythera Mechanism is not a turing complete, general purpose computing device for sure but nor was it intended to be. It was a very sophisticated device designed for a very specific purpose. There is *no* compelling evidence that any other civilization produced a device of comparable complexity until the clocks of medieval Europe.
We have written descripitions of even more complex devices from the Greeks which unfortunatley have not survived but we can state with confidence, based on the Antikythera mechanism, that the Greeks had the theoretical knowledge and engineering aptitude to build devices of high precision and complexity.
@Marauder: The ancient Greeks didn’t have decimal system, decimal fractions, negative numbers. Ancient China had all these things. Even though the Greeks developed the geometry which had been heavily infulenced first by the Babylonians, to a competent level, the Greeks could not develop algebra(another very important part of mathematics), because of their inferior number systems based on the Greek alphabet. The ancient Greeks had to solve algebraic problems only by using geometry. Meanwhile the ancient China developed both geometry and algebra to very high levels. The Renaissance math at the beginning was very primitive. It had no symbols: no plus sign,no equal sign,no zero, no use of x as an unknown. The Renaissance mathematics only started making progress in the 16th century. The Islamic astronomy also heavily influenced the formulation of Copernican heliocentric theory. Also The Book of Optics by the Islamic scholar, Ibn al Haytham influenced the works of Bacon,Kepler,Galileo,Da Vinci,Descartes,and NEWTON. The main contribution of the Enlighenment was it’s earth- shaking influence on the European political,social economic areas because all the radical ideas of the time brought on the French Revolution,the American Revolution which eventually led to the democracy based on laissez faire capititalism. So I can say the Enlightehment’s influence on the European political,social,economic areas was much more epoch making than on science which even though made a great progress during this time. As for the ancient Chinese automata, China started making automata at least 1000 years before the Greeks( Hero of Alexandder began to make various gadets in the 1st century). The ancient China produced in the 11 century BC, walking and singing human robot, in the 5th century BC, mechanized flying bird,automated carriage,mechanical horse and in the 3rd century BC, mechanical orchestra and many more throughout the ancient times. Antikythera Mechanism was a fancy calculator but still just a calculator. In 600 BC, China had the best digital computer, the Chinese abacus which could do not only addition,subtraction,multiplication, division, but also square root and cubic root. The south pointing carriage which was first invented in the 11 century BC and was reinvented many times throughout the succeeding centuries. It was the first machine in the world that used passive or negative feedback. This is why it is called the first proto cybernetic or homeostatic machine in the world history.
@Marauder: Let’s talk about the Columbus’1492 voyage to North America.Before he set sail, he had known about the the trade wind moving in a clockwise circular fashion in the North Atlantic. All he had to was place his ships on the westward currents created by the trade wind. Any run of the mlll sailor could have done that. He eventually reached the Bahamas 29 days after he left the Canary Islands. However on the way back to Europe, he found out he was wrong about the langitudinal degrees and also wrong about the distance traveled per degree. He turned out to be not as good a navigator as people thought him to be. The only reason he made it back to Europe was because of that the same trade wind carried him eastward this time. You should also remember that Primitive Polynesians had criscrossed the Pacific ocean and reached Chile and other parts of the Pacific coast of the South America,long before Magellan rounded the southern tip of Chile. So Magellan’s crossing the Pacific ocean was not a big achivement either, considering that the primitive Polynesians had done that many thousand times before Magellan did.
Actually, the Greeks were quite sophisticated algebraically with Diophantine and Menaechmus being particularly advanced in concepts and notations.
You denigrate the Greeks for their predominantly geometric approach to mathematics but this was the approach employed by the Renaissance and Enlightenment European mathematicians to develop analytic geometry and calculus not to mention physics, optics and mechanics.
The Book of Optics by the Islamic scholar, Ibn al Haytham is a refinement of Euclid’s Optics which predates al Haytham by about 1000 years.
Face it: Chinese mathematics was neither particularly sophisticated nor particularly influential. It was focused on mundane computation. In any event, its development ceased around the 13th century AD.
Newton alone accomplished more in the span of 60 years than 2000 years of Chinese mathematical development.
Heliocentricism predates Copernicus by several centuries. Europe was making steady progress in mathematics by the 14th century.
I hate to resort to an ad hominem here but it’s clear that your knowledge in this domain is only Wikipedia deep.
Are there any surviving relics of these miraculous automata that the Chinese allegedly made? It’s like the massive “Treasure Ships” of Zheng He. The archeological record is long on written descriptions but short on any extant, physical evidence.
Richard Feynmann famously said that in 200 years time the 19th century will be remembered more for Maxwell’s equations than for the American Civil War or the Napoleonic wars. It’s the same with the Enlightenment. Political developments come and go and the vaciliation between atomized individualism and rigid authoritarinism is a feature of the western tradition.
An answer to previous Adam Smiths quotes.
Some quotes from Adam Smith about China :
The Wealth of Nations (1776)
“China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times.”
Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.86
“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals.the subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.”
Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.86
“Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.”
Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.87
“China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.”
Book I, Chapter XI, Part III, (First Period) pg.221
“The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of Europe.”
Book I, Chapter XI, Part III, Third Period, pg.240
Source:http://tiny.cc/xh066