11/30/97, Nico wrote:
>Just realized someone might have gotten the mistaken impression that "what
>a devastating critique" was meant as a compliment. It was not. Forgot to
>put in a smiley or something.
Quite right -- a one-page dismissal of western philosophy cannot be a
serious critique: it was simply a point of view, presented slightly
tongue-in-cheek (foot in mouth?). But am I the only one who harbors doubts
about our methods and results? Does western philosophy lead to wisdom?
Have we defined wisdom to be superstition, like heaven?
At 6:22 PM 11/28/97, james m blaut wrote:
>"It seems clear to me that Euro expansionism and dominance was primarily
>due to this focus on creativity and narrow rationalism..."
>
>This argument falls into the category of what I call Walrus and Carpenter
>explanations for the rise of Europe: How sad that our European civilization
>was so inferior to others in understanding the true meaning of life and the
>world. How sad that our rationality, creativity, "rational restlessness"
>(Weber) fored us to eat up these other civilizations, but didn't they taste
>good!
Does humorously slotting a view into a category constitute a rebuttal?
My fuller characterization of Euro dominance, quoted below, was posted on
12 Nov. But I do think our Western heritage points to the primacy of
"creative exploration and exploitation: _development_ itself".
I saw a Dutch documentary on "Gold" this week which portrayed how the
Romans washed away entire mountains in Spain, filtering out the gold in the
leaves of some plant. One might suspect the Spanish sought gold in order
to supply a commodity they had grown accustomed to exploiting, but were
running (had run) out of domestically. Again, that points to "motivation"
above "circumstance" re/ expansion factors.
rkm
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From: "Globalization as a world system"
...In 1492 Columbus demonstrated (with entrepreneurial intent) that sea travel
need respect no boundaries other than the globally connected oceans.
Societies for the first time began to plan and act on a scale that could be
called global. European powers competed to exploit this new-found global
mobility, setting up trading and colonial networks that became the first
examples of human-engineered systems on a world scale.
With the help of this far-flung trading network, together with
industrialization, precious metals taken from the New World -- and an
aggressive imperialist attitude -- European powers eventually achieved a
globally dominant position. Their world-system became _the_ world-system,
and it is thus the structures developed during the Euro-expansionist period
that form the foundation for modern globalization. This period lasted from
1492 to 1945.
The Euro world system was an anarchic system of sovereign nation states:
there was no central global management and very little in the way of
reliable international law -- especially when "national interests" were
deemed to be at stake. Some states had their sovereignty taken away due to
imperial domination, but this was part of the constantly shifting anarchic
competitive game.
The leading Euro nations (later including the USA) competed with one
another not so much through warfare among themselves (although such did
occur), but more through the expansion of their spheres of influence.
Indeed most European wars in this period can be characterized as expansion
by other means -- court battles as it were. The spheres amounted to a
partition of the global economy, with each core nation enjoying privileged
access to trade and investment opportunities in its own partition.
This 500-year old world-system dynamic changed abruptly in 1945, with the
end of World War II and the emergence of the USA in a dramatically dominant
global position -- militarily, industrially, economically, and
psychologically...
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