Re: Ethnic Hegemony and World-System

        This is a very selective and misleading reading of historical
Buddhism and Christianity, nor does it answer the question of why these
intimations of equality never produced societies that came anywhere near
being egalitarian, democratic, socialist, or free.  Ashoka was a good
Buddhist, so we believe, but he was also a tyrant from first to last, and
his main impact on history was to help spread Buddhism outside the Indian
subcontinent.  But, sure, there are intimations of progressive thought in
numerous pre-modern and non-Western cultures, as I implied in my first
post.  The most progressive societies in many ways were the Paleolithic.

        Warren

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Gregory Wilpert wrote:

> Just another note to Wagar's comment that Western Europe "sired" human
> rights. There are plenty of non-western cultures/belief systems that
> have "sired" human rights. The earliest I am aware of is Buddhism. 500
> years before Jesus Christ proclaimed that all humans were equal Buddha
> proclaimed pretty much the same thing, going so far as opposing the
> Indian caste system and allowing women to become nuns, something
> unheard of in India at that time. Also, the Buddhist Indian leader
> Ashoka (3rd century BC) tried to institutionalize these "human rights
> values", long before the European Enlightenment. For more on the issue
> of Reason and East and West, see Amartya Sen's article in the July 20,
> 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books:
> http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20000720033F
> 
> Greg Wilpert
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------
> Gregory Wilpert
> Visiting Fulbright Professor
> Escuela de Sociología
> Universidad Central de Venezuela
> ----------------------------------
> 
> 
>