Rise and Fall of Arabic Science and Society
This article is a bit long, but there are some very interesting points. The most important being that the decline of the Arabic world was caused by a move to irrationalism.
But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.
But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.
This article makes it seem like Arabic civilization went through the same problem Rome had: it over-extended and faced Mongol attacks (similar to the Roman Empire's Germanic tribe attacks), and then they adopted religious authoritarianism. By this reckoning, Arabic civilization followed the same path as Roman civilization, but Arabic civilization entered its dark ages later and is still there.
These books show very similar parallels to what is happening in the US today, including the disregard for the Constitution and Law.
In my opinion, one of the geniuses of Rome was that they gave all their conquered subjects some form of citizenship. I would argue that part of the cause of the American revolution was a failure to give the colonists citizenship.
Roman culture was built on classical Greek culture. Overtime the Senate managed to maneuver the laws so they ended up with all the land (absentee landlords) and most of the tax farming jobs. The Roman economy began to depend on conquering other countries to support its economy. This like being a thief - eventually you run out of other people's money. The advent of Christianity killed off any hope for Rome.
I think the growth of the military is another area that makes the US similar to Rome near its fall. There may have been some justification during the cold war for the large military, but no longer. I think the military is the republican pet welfare project.
And you're starting to sound like maph.
The "top-down" control began shortly before the arrival of Christ, when Caesar tried to become dictator for life, and Octavian made emperor.
This might help explain the later stages:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Rome-Fel...
"Let us step back a bit— into the fourth century— and meet a man whose style of life can show us some of the yawning absences in Roman society, absences that would lead directly to the calamities of the fifth century. He is Ausonius the poet, and he kept an impressively large, exquisitely maintained country estate in Bordeaux in the province of Gaul and, after his father's death, another equally impressive estate in Aquitaine. Born just one hundred years before the German migration over the Rhine, he was raised not by his mother, of whom he doesn't seem to have had especially fond memories, but by two battle-axes, a grandmother and an aunt, both named Aemilia.
In his Parentalia, which might best be translated Obsequies for the Forebears, he extols their virtues.
"Ausonius's poetry is full of pia verba; except for the occasional, only half-intentional epiphanies (as in the poems about the Aemilias), there is little else. There are endless sequences about forebears, about former teachers, about daily life, about classical subjects (the heroes of the Trojan War, the Twelve Caesars), endless word games, and endless imitations of Virgil. He has one hot poem, "Cento Nuptualis," hot enough to be left untranslated in the Loeb Ausonius, where it has titillated as many generations of aging Latinists as it has frustrated generations of schoolboys— a clinical, cynical description of a bride's deflowering on her wedding night. Yet even here he is deliberately unoriginal: every phrase is taken from the poems of Virgil. Thus does he mean to avoid censure by appealing to the ultimate literary authority and to win admiration by a dazzling display of his knowledge of Virgil. But, apart from these hommages, there is almost never a memorable phrase, just high-class jingles, written to formula. His letters, also endless, are no better: there is seldom any necessary information to be communicated, insights are scarce, and genuine emotion is almost entirely absent. Though his effete contemporaries compared Ausonius to Virgil and Cicero, practically all others have found themselves in agreement with the robust opinion of Gibbon: "The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age."
How could a grown man have spent so much time so foolishly? Well, it's what everyone else was doing. This is a static world. Civilized life, like the cultivation of Ausonius's magnificent Bordeaux vineyards, lies in doing well what has been done before. Doing the expected is the highest value— and the second highest is like it: receiving the appropriate admiration of one's peers for doing it."
I never took early Western Civ, btw. I taught myself, mostly. Except for American history. I aced that twice in high school... :)
Many people here may ask 'Who's Vlasimir Ulyanov?' He changed his name to Vladimir Lenin after he became the leader of the Bolshevik party. This only came about after his older brother, Alexander was tried & executed for the assassination attempt on the czar.
Anyways, who funded the Russian Revolution for the Bolsheviks? WE DID: Kuhn-Loeb & Co (bank of NY). Funny, this was never mentioned in my high school or college courses. I had to learn this on my own. Congrats on the self-education of things that interest you. Public education usually disappoints...but I digress.
http://www.easyreadernews.com/74217/lett...
Looking at the history of science and mathematics would clearly show that each culture, each race and each land has produced great minds that have changed the course of history for some or all of humanity.
The other thing it shows is how the center of thought and creativity move about from country to country around the world. There is no single spot that is the fountain of knowledge consistently.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHzwwF44...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjbtLbHn1...
This perhaps levels the playing field for a short time, but eventually the ideas and concepts that move the future will start coming from other lands, other cultures, some if not all hostile to the US and the West.
The upshot I take away from this article is religion may be more corrosive to civilization that I thought.
I know that's simplistic. When I took history, all I cared about is science. I got out of taking history in college by taking history of science and history of biology. Now I actually care about history.
This was part of my point on the post about the philosophy of science. Irrationalsim has entered into science even in the west. For instance, the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is specifically irrational. As is the basis of (most) Austrian economics. See David Kelley's paper on Rand vs. Hayek.
In the Republic, a military career (and a soldier had to provide his own kit) was a path to wealth and success. That changed as the Empire developed and weakened.
And I think the attribution of lead poisoning to Rome's fall is overwrought. There's nothing in the histories, for example, to suggest the later Romans became increasingly near-sighted.