Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (16471)	1/15/2002 7:43:58 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

As Bernard Lewis points out, When Napoleon showed up with a modern army in Egypt in 1798, Islam realized that they no longer could defeat the West. But their religion would not let them adapt. By that time, could anything have defeated the "the west"? The first great steps in technology, science and philosophy (which today we'd call social theory/sciences) took place well before Newton's Principia. The medieval invention of the new harness and plow opening the northern european plains to agriculture allowing peasants to survive running off, new methods of navigation, the spreading 'secret' of the grand banks fishing grounds, the establishment of towns and cities strong enough to resist noble depredation, the growth of 'international' credit, the practical application of hydraulics, and to be sure, the printing press and it's further spread of ongoing heresy, north american colonization financing further mercantilist industrial investment, the importation of zero, Henry and Elizabeth's imposition of law on all three estates - all happened before Newton combined mathematics and physical application. It could be argued, I think, that in additon to European human progress in medieval times and after, certain natural events also contributed to change; for instance, the cooling climate and pestilence. The importance of the Black Death is vastly under rated. For almost a hundred years after the disease burned out, Europe was freed from clerical tyranny and labour enjoyed huge demand - it was party time! Heretical invention, prosperity, new and larger towns, bigger bourgeoisie, all grew out of the catastrophe. The church and nobility never made back all their losses from the plagues. Perhaps the most important result of that late medieval time is the evolution of class as a wide spread instrument of social mobility which eventually lead to the western modern concept and practice of democracy and freedom (which, if we're not careful, we'll let the cultural-relatavist PC thumbsuckers and Foggy Bottom careerists give away in a vain attempt to reason with tyrants in the middle east and far east - see article by Ignatieff in current Foreign Affairs). Europe had already become wildly opportunistic in a free lance way before the milestone of Newton. The new scientific formulation and the shift from mercantitilism to capitalism further intensified this free lance opportunism practised by all classes of european society. I don't think most parts of Islam stood a chance after about 1400. European momentum was already too great. It's easy to be smart in retrospect, but Europe exploded, and Islam imploded as a result of the same forces that torture it today. The west, which has become modernism (even in China and India), has become the living, growing reproach to fundamentalist Islam NOT because it's outstripping Islamic culture but because it's a mirror held up to the fundamentalist dream of mysogyny, blood, buggery and the lash - to its basic structure of injustice. By its very existence westernism/modernism puts the lie to every word of the fundamentalist mullahs. Of course they're going to attack us! The alternative is to give up lying to themselves and their followers..