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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (142237)	8/1/2004 6:58:23 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

you kind of remind me of the General in The Last Samurai who called those warior poets "savages" I actually thought the same thing. I also thought "The Last Samurai" gave interesting insight into how Buddhist cultures are structured differently than Western cultures. Same for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Anyway, don't be too hard on Neo. He was educated at St. John's College in Annapolis, which is a small but elite liberal arts college with a curriculum centered around "the classics," by which they mean European classics. Nothing farther East than Greece and Russia, not even China, not even Japan, not even India, not even "Gilgamesh." sjca.edu Many American conservatives get huffy when you try to get them to study Asian, African and Latin American culture, history, science, and literature, and use the term "multicultural" as if it were a bad thing. They start with the "multiculti" rant and the "homely women with hairy armpits and poorly designed clothing" rant. In contrast, many American liberals feel the same way about Western culture, history, science and literature, and start the "but what about the buffalo and the blankets infected with smallpox?" rant.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (142237)	8/2/2004 7:34:11 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

The principal Greek city- state was Athens, and it was, indeed, considered an Empire, with many colonies throughout the Mediterranean. Additionally, ancient Greek societies, including Athens, relied on a massive system of slavery. About one tenth of the Athenian population was free, the rest were slaves. I used the term loosely because you seemed to contrast Empire with small human enclaves. I am content to say that Empire in the strict sense is not absolutely necessary. I said that medicine in the ancient world was "hit or miss". The fact that some remedies were discovered to work is not a contradiction of my point. Nothing that you post contradicts my points,it merely shows that you do not understand what I have said. Science is not philosophy (or religion), which is the provenance of most of the ideas you mention. It is not even engineering or invention. You can come up with all kinds of ancient achievements, and will still not arrive at science. It is a method of accumulating and verifying facts, of testing hypotheses, and of formulating theories with some rigor and confidence in their predictive power. Science does not become a going enterprise until about the 16th century. I did not say that there was nothing important in human life or history but science. However, the rise of science and technology has been very beneficial, and it is a boon of the modern world.