No, no not the dreaded English but the Scot and the Irishman are the ones who are responsible for the modern world, esp. the Scotsman [I am a great admirer of all things Scot, from whiskey to oats; was married at Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities].
en.wikipedia.org
The Scot almost singlehandedly invented the modern world, politically, economically, culturally and philosophically. Considering Scotland's small size [hundreds of Scotlands could fit in Amazonia], her influence is altogether disproportionate to that of any other country:
"I am a Scotsman," Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, "therefore I had to fight my way into the world." So did any number of his compatriots over a period of just a few centuries, leaving their native country and traveling to every continent, carving out livelihoods and bringing ideas of freedom, self-reliance, moral discipline, and technological mastery with them, among other key assumptions of what historian Arthur Herman calls the "Scottish mentality."
It is only natural, Herman suggests, that a country that once ranked among Europe's poorest, if most literate, would prize the ideal of progress, measured "by how far we have come from where we once were." Forged in the Scottish Enlightenment, that ideal would inform the political theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers who viewed "man as a product of history," and whose collective enterprise involved "nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge" (yielding, among other things, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1768, and the Declaration of Independence, published in Philadelphia just a few years later). On a more immediately practical front, but no less bound to that notion of progress, Scotland also fielded inventors, warriors, administrators, and diplomats such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Simon MacTavish, and Charles James Napier, who created empires and great fortunes, extending Scotland's reach into every corner of the world.
^^^^^^^
The 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, embodied by such brilliant thinkers as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume, paved the way for Scottish and, Herman argues, global modernity. Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, championed political liberty and the right of popular rebellion against tyranny. Smith, in his monumental Wealth of Nations, advocated liberty in the sphere of commerce and the global economy. Hume developed philosophical concepts that directly influenced James Madison and thus the U.S. Constitution. Herman elucidates at length the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment and their worldwide impact. In 19th-century Britain, the Scottish Enlightenment, as popularized by Dugald Stewart, became the basis of classical liberalism. At the University of Glasgow, James Watt perfected the crucial technology of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine. The "democratic" Scottish system of education found a home in the developing U.S.
amazon.com
The Irishman kept alive what was worth keeping alive from the ancient world:
amazon.com
Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the West's written treasury. When stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture.
And the Brazilians and their rubber? Naturally, it took a Scotsman and an American, Macintosh and Goodyear, to make it worthwhile by inventing a solvent for it as well as the vulcanizing process. Since then, the Brazilians have invented.......samba?
wisedude.com
They are also good at digging holes in the ground and burying cable in them in exotic places, hardly a difficult art, I should think, certainly not harder than stringing cable or bytes of bits from pole to pole considering the leg up Irwin Mark Jacobs and others gave generations of pole climbers [in other words, let the Brazilians do the hard physical part while QCOM and its shareholders collect their regularly paid toll] vbg. |
