Shunya's Notes: Ian Morris on Why the West Rules-For Now - 0 views
-
Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers
-
Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato
-
Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.
- ...8 more annotations...