Hi Hong,
Thanks for your comments.
What did it do in response to discovering a new world? It beached it’s massive fleet, burned it’s ships, and built a giant wall.
Huh?
There is compelling evidence, though not verified, that the Chinese discovered the new world around 1418
From - http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5381851
“It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.”
From - http://www.perceptivetravel.com/issues/1205/stephens.html
“Zheng He was more than a military officer and a naval commander. He was a gifted scholar too. He spread abroad the Chinese calendar, metrological system, medical skills, and technologies of agriculture, manufacture, architecture, sculpture, and shipbuilding. It is said that thanks to Zheng He's visit, the people of Malacca learned how to construct city walls, how to dig wells for water, and how to build roads on mountains. The Siamese learned water treatment from him and the method of burning straws to fertilize farmland. The people of Vietnam learned of mountain and field reclamation and the agricultural system of growing three crops a year.”
Shortly after Zheng He died, suspicious of the outside world many people suggest, the new Chinese emperor had Zheng He’s fleet beached and burned, turned the culture from one of exploration to isolation, and built one of the largest additions to the great wall. Hence my perhaps disingenuous comment that upon discovering the new world China burned its fleet, turned inward, and built a giant wall.
“In the 1940’s the nationalists lost to the communists and again China turned inward.”
“But Taiwan turned outward, didn't it? While the once "Western" Eastern European blocks including East Gemany also turned inward, is that right?”
But as Bill points out, Taiwan turned outward because of western influence, and because it left behind the Eastern influence of isolation that the rest of China was being engulfed by. I do not consider communism to be “Western” in the context of this discussion, “western” culture is science, reason, progress, capitalism, and individual rights. Communism in every manifestation has been in opposition to all of these, this disagreement obviously stems in how we define “western culture” and I think Bill has done a great job of that. How do you define it?
“And it also brought the annihilation of whole peoples such as the Aztecs by the Spanish Conquistadors and Native American Indians who initially helped the earliest European settlers. "bring the ideas of...individual rights, and the ability to pursue your own dreams"? Ironic, isn't it? “
It certainly brought the end to cultures, but not to whole peoples. Individuals are all that matter, not cultures, or whole peoples, and the cultures of many native American tribes were as bad as modern communism, being collectivist, anti individualist and focused on war. The Aztecs regularly practiced human sacrifice and certainly didn’t embrace rationality and individuality as any core component. Additionally the vast majority of these native peoples were killed inadvertently from disease, not intentionally from genocide (though unfortunately some certainly were killed intentionally) The very earliest settlers to the new world brought diseases with them and wrought devastation across the Americas before any significant number of European settlers were there.
“The slave trade in Africa, the opium trades with China, the missionaries spreading one of the most irrational religions in the world, backed with the superior western guns and warships, are shameful episodes amidst the spreading of the more enlightened Western ideas. Don't forget that and never let that happen again. Though I am not too optimistic.”
While European and western explorers certainly brought some bad things with them, they also brought a great deal of good ideas with them, and one of the most effective way colonies were able to reclaim independence was to insist that Europeans be held to their own professed values (in the case of India, for example), yet they adopted the western institutions of science, progress, reason, and capitalism before the colonialists left. They brought bad ideas and good ideas, the good ideas being the best yet mankind has come up, but all other cultures only brought variations of bad ideas and offered very few good ideas. Take a look at any picture of a UN gathering, those in suits and ties tend to be progressive and freer nations of the world, those in other clothes tend to be from the oppressive and brutal nations of the world.
“You are not saying that only Westerners want to prosper and have a better life, don't you?”
Certainly not, I think everyone given a informed chance at a choice would choose that, but most people are never given that chance with half the population in this world living in murderous brutal dictatorships or theocracies with the brutality of those rulers generally being inversely proportional to their influence by modern western ideals.
“And please, I don't consider ignorance by itself is a sin. Nobody knows everything in the world. However, making sweeping judgment based on incomplete knowledge and false conceptions is one of the sins in my book.”
Lets be clear here, I am not talking about Chinese or eastern culture being wholly deficient nor western culture being completely virtuous, but clearly of all aspects and ideas incorporated western culture has many more positive ones with regard to human rights and liberty. While I could never make an assessment of eastern or Chinese culture “as a whole” (i.e. knowing all particulars of it) I can certainly judge it by it’s conceptual basics and fundamentals. A fundamental of Chinese culture is being ethnically Chinese, or partly Chinese. No surprise there, the vast majority of cultures in the world are tied to a nationality or ethnicity. It is only the new culture born of the west and the age of enlightenment that disregards nationality and ethnicity for cultural inclusion, what other cultures do that? Perhaps a few rare ones whose names few people know, but I can not think of any.
I think where part of this conflict originates is in what you think I am saying. I am not making any sweeping judgment that Chinese or eastern culture is only bad and Western culture is only good. I am saying that when weighing all the most important fundamental aspects of a culture the western cultures tend to be more favorable to individual rights and human liberty than eastern ones, the only things that really matter to me, and eastern ones are more likely to not be based on these, or not as centrally focused, both historically and as a consideration of currently adopted cultural ideas. But again this all depends on what you define “western culture” as.
Perhaps we should say “Enlightenment culture” instead of “western” vs “eastern” and just acknowledge that to the extent that any culture adopts the “enlightenment ideals” they prosper and the lives of the people in them are better. My statement would be then that “western” nations tend to or are more likely to have adopted more of the “enlightenment culture” ideals, though many “eastern” cultures have as well, and both “Eastern” and “Western” cultures have adopted “Anti-Enlightment culture” to some degree. But yet again this all depends on what criteria you use to consider something part of “western culture” or a “western nation”
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