History is very clear, there's no misunderstanding it if you know it. We settled down about 15,000 years ago when we learned to grow grain and domesticate animals. Slowly, like over thousands of years we learned to count past two, trade demanded it; and to write and read. Two is as far as uneducated person can count. But it was a hard long slog.
Then about 3000 years ago the ancient Greeks were the first people to invent a modern functional alphabet. Shortly after that, they started writing books and shortly after that 10% of the Athenians were literate.
The entire world was barbaric when only the ancient Greeks could read and write. And the ability to read and write was what spawned discussions of abstract concepts like ethics and democracy. You will find no other place on earth where democracy was discussed. You'll find no other place on earth where people were living with the intellectual sophistication the ancient Greeks did.
It was clearly the written language that not only allowed them to develop ethics and democracy, but is the foundation of all civilization. Without a written language people have a difficult time evolving culturally. By the birth of Christ, various tribes had completely destroyed Greece, burned their libraries and all their books. Books are hard to keep because of things like mold that destroys them over the years and the fact that they had to be copied by hand one of the time.
We've only managed to rescue about 1% of what the Greeks knew. But we do know that they had discovered that the earth is round and calculated it to within 25 miles of its actual diameter.
From the birth of Christ until about 1400 A.D., all of Europe evolved back to almost total illiteracy with only the monks hold on to literacy, reading and writing. People became illiterate en masse and you will find no one to compare with any of hundreds of great Greeks. I have looked. I found no thinkers between the birth of Christ and about 1400 A.D. to compare with the intellectual sophistication of the Plato's and Socrates and Aristotle's and Thrasymachus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc., etc. They were so smart that they were contemporary to us today.
Then in 1457 Gutenberg invented the printing press, and soon millions of books were printed, people started to read and write again and out of that sprung the age of Enlightenment of reason and science upon which modern civilization, ethics, democracy and the social contract today are built.
PS you are right about the Koreans, however they kept the printing press only for the royal family and then destroyed it. And China did not evolve very well for a couple of reasons. One they had an alphabet that was so complicated it was not nearly as functional as our alphabet and still is not today.
As well China kept its knowledge separated and did not integrate. I do give Asian cultures, great credit for not devolving as much into simplistic myth. They have a very rich and sophisticated philosophical culture and embrace science and reason better than we do in the West.
I believe that is the reason the Asians do so well in school. Their entire culture is predicated on learning, they understand its power,the path to enlightenment, etc. 50% of the incoming class at UC Berkeley every year's is Asian. I had a professor friend of mine that said that every time a Japanese person came into his class he knew that was an A.
Today countries like Japan and South Korea and Taiwan are at the forefront of the most advanced cultures in the world intellectually and culturally sharing the stage with the Nordic countries and Iceland.
And it is all based on their commitments to education. The brain has to be developed with intellectual exercise, absolutely no different than the body has to be developed by working out. It is exactly the same concept
<<
| What do you think I missed about The Axemakers Gift?
Thirty-odd years ago James Burke did a series, "THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED. Like your book, it was a rather lyrical overview of particular markers in human progress. It could leave the impression with the uninformed that our escape from brutal existence came from the occasional bright discovery, i.e. Gutenberg's rediscovery of what the Koreans had centuries before. No! Our betterment came from evolutionary trial and error chains of revisions to amalgamations of what came before. That process works best in inverse proportion to interferences from a ruling class, i.e. the classical liberal positions Friedman represented
Tinkerers provided the material to supply the information to slowly take advantage of the printing press, which at time of introduction was used mostly for religious tracts. That fact was explicitly covered in your favorite book, but you seem to have missed the implications.
"THE AXEMAKER"S GIFT might serve as a beginner's foundation to understand a better primer on the subject. Shame your mind shut off after reading just that.
radical conservative. I rejected that philosophy 50 years age
You rejected something you never understood. Friedman and his kind are radical liberals, as the term meant before it was highjacked by the evil and nefarious.
You're too blinded by your preconceptions to investigate why our betterment comes only from the new order discovered by residents of the British Isles and the Netherlands in centuries past; the dreaded white men. Their offering has lately blended well in parts of the white regions not part of the Anglsosphere, parts of the Orient, now even (hopefully) beginning in the heart of the Dark Continent: Meet Johannesburg's New Libertarian Mayor; Herman Mashaba is something new in South Africa. But can a black pro-market politician make real changes?
You seem a rather extreme example of the phenomenae that gave us a President Trump. Your kind imposed a decidedly non-liberal agenda. The resulting wreckage led to desperate victims seeking salvation in yet another illiberal god figure.
Thanks a lot! |
|
