Anytime nationalistic pride is stirred hard, it's hard to be not biased. So my bias is pretty pro-Chinese and anti-West, so just to start off there.
>Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men
You are referring to Confucius and also perhaps the highly hierarchical nature of the Chinese community party. Chinese philosophy in general is a mix of Taoism, Buddhism and Confuciusm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters) with conflicting tenets that respectively focuses on individual conduct, moral values and social harmony. In general, Western media focuses on the governance of the Communist party; that’s analogous to reduce Western philosophy down to Locke and Mills and ignoring Heidegger, Nietzsche and Rousseau that is concerned more with the individual development than the social contract/utility. Note that a lot of Westerners also attempt to find spiritual alternative in Zen Buddhism which is of Chinese origin.
>While Europe was worse off early on, it allowed the region to discover math and science and make use of it.
I’d argue that the reason for the lack of a Chinese industrial revolution is not because any inherent “thought” deficit but due to the Empire’s decision to employ a Closed Door Policy and Sea Ban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin). Compare China during the Sea Ban and Japan’s Meiji Restoration at the time or even more recent economic development of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (all of which are very Confucian) as an argument against any culture having an monopoly on innovation. Unfortunately, at the time the traditional Chinese culture is very inward looking and arrogant toward foreign thought because we thought we were the best. But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will inevitably decline. Thankfully, we’ve learned this lesson in the 20th century.
>China had a big fleet, but cancelled the project … China invented gun powder, but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage.
Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept. Note that China at one time had the most population and military power and built a great wall at the Northern boundary; because China is more interested in governing from the within. Even with Sinosphere neighbors at the time that were heavily influenced by Chinese culture, Emperors were happier to have tributary states than conquering the neighboring countries.
>Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it.
That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of Chinese medicine. Again note the Western movement to seek out holistic medicine and more importantly, major Western pharmaceutical companies push for personal genomics treatment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_genomics) which takes into account the patient’s individual genetic variation. This is not an attempt to conflate Chinese medicine with 23andme, but rather the perspective that modern medicine is constantly evolving - from the discrete scientific method of breaking down chemicals to their individual interactions to a systematic view of complex metabolic pathways and cascade signaling networks, which echoes the Chinese medicine’s idea of feedback cycle of Qi.
> which echoes the Chinese medicine’s idea of feedback cycle of Qi
Qi may have some vague similarity to the basic metabolic path, but it's rediculusluy far from being a useful medical principle. Sort of like calling humorism a precursor to the idea of homeostasis.
PS: Older forms of medicin like Homeopathy are based on a foundation of incorrect assumptions, they are often but not always more useful than doing nothing. However, the foundation of western medicine is do no harm. It replaced the assumption that we know what's going on with the pragmatic acceptance that the human body is to complex to actually understand in detail. At some point we may understand / simulate the human body well enough to change that but no philosophical approach has shown anywhere near the same bennifits simply because randomly choosing a theory when the search space is so large is a waste of time.
> That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of Chinese medicine.
It's implicit because it's the conventionally accepted view around here. I'm yet to see any evidence that would convince me otherwise, in fact–though I'd be very happy to hear some if you have it!
But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will inevitably decline.
I kind of have the feeling that's been going on here in the USA since WWII. The 40s gave us a really good reason to be arrogant about our own superiority in the 50s and into the 60s, but since the 70s things have been going downhill and no amount of "USA! USA!" chanting seems to help.
>Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it.
That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of Chinese medicine.
My take on Chinese medicine, and this goes for a lot of non-western 'science', is that it's based on very-long-term observation of cause and effect, with untestable/untested theories to explain 'why' the cause causes the effect. In contrast, western science is much more focused on breaking down causes and effects into very small pieces and doing repeatable experiments to discover 'why' in ways that can be applied more generally.
For example, acupuncture: Chinese doctors learned through observation that if you stick a bunch of needles along this line, and give them a little tweak, it'll help that organ over there to function better. "Why?" "Well, there's this energy you can't see flowing though you, and the needles make it flow better." "Oh, neat." As long as the explanation is internally consistent with the observation, the theory is sufficient. It just can't be used to accurately predict new causes and effects that haven't been observed yet.
The big drawback to the western approach is that by focusing on the details, it looses the holistic overview, and we wind up with drugs that help one particular health issue while causing a bunch of other health issues. Thankfully, as you mentioned, western medicine is moving back towards the holistic viewpoint, but now it's based on fundamental understanding of the individual biologic processes unlike traditional Chinese medicine. Best of both worlds, I think.
>But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will inevitably decline.
While it is easy to get up votes claiming America is like this the fact is we get the best and brightest to such an extent that other countries have to work very hard ro keep their smartest people.
It's also a fact that our country is collapsing in on itself. We're still on top in a lot of ways, but the trend is definitely downwards in too many ways. We'd hardly be the first "empire in decline", and like many we can probably last decades or centuries without becoming completely historical and overshadowed by the next great empire. So I guess it's not all bad.
Honestly, if someone else can take over the "World Police Force" job so we can stop with the insane military spending, we could probably start taking care of our debt and getting our economy into reasonable shape again.
Your examples demonstrate the point, because the Persians, Arabs, and Mongols did not conquer in the colonialist model common to Western powers.
The closest would be the rapacious Mongols, who burned much and built little. That is not exactly colonialism either.
The Arabs did not really have any kind of empire to call their own until the Caliphate, and that was not colonial conquest either.
The ancient Persians invented the concept of empire, and were greatly influenced by the benign tendencies of Zoroastrianism. They preferred light taxes and light tribute, and good roads to promote trade. (For a point of comparison, when the great and mighty Rome's legions attempted to elbow in on the remnant on the Persian empire, the Parthians, the legions were utterly annihilated. Rome learned its lesson.)
> Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept.
I had a fantastic history teacher many years ago that described the differences something like this:
In the West, they look outward towards new horizons, to plunder and send goods back home. Always forward, but never time for home.
China looks at China, admiring the beauty of it. To get a better view of itself, China takes some steps back and, while admiring itself, may end up trampling nearby neighbors.
Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept.
This is far from what the historical sources reveal. Many of the dynastic histories of China recount conquest of neighboring territories, and no one who has read those in the original literary Chinese (as I have, in excerpts) can doubt that there has been an imperialistic, expansionist drive in Chinese history that made China an expanding empire at least as much as in Rome or in Persia.
There is no evidence that traditional Chinese medicine, and especially nonscientific concepts like 氣 qi, have anything to say to improve medical practice in any country. More references about that can be found at the Science-Based Medicine group blog.
Responding also to the blog post kindly submitted here as well as to the comment above, let me disagree in part with the statement "China led the world in political organization as well. No other ruler's writ ran a third as far or has even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even temporarily stymie Chingis Khan's Mongols, before his descendants took to fighting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and developed under the Sung."
No, China didn't really lead the world in political organization, because China's theory of human nature and thus its theory of politics didn't take enough account of the reality of human greed. China's political philosophy (which I have read extensively in the original writings of Confucius and Mencius that were the state ideology for a long time) is based on finding a virtuous ruler, and (as the blog post correctly points out) giving that ruler unchallenged power. China had an ideal of rule by men rather than rule by laws, but the Roman ideal of rule by laws rather than by men (so that in principle anyone, even the ruler, is subject to law) has proven to be a more durable principle for prevention of corruption and abuse of power. Medieval Europe, even in that harsh era, had more day-by-day personal freedom than China at its height, and that laid the foundation for technological and scientific and economic innovation in the West that helped the West thrive while China stagnated.
>Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men
You are referring to Confucius and also perhaps the highly hierarchical nature of the Chinese community party. Chinese philosophy in general is a mix of Taoism, Buddhism and Confuciusm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters) with conflicting tenets that respectively focuses on individual conduct, moral values and social harmony. In general, Western media focuses on the governance of the Communist party; that’s analogous to reduce Western philosophy down to Locke and Mills and ignoring Heidegger, Nietzsche and Rousseau that is concerned more with the individual development than the social contract/utility. Note that a lot of Westerners also attempt to find spiritual alternative in Zen Buddhism which is of Chinese origin.
>While Europe was worse off early on, it allowed the region to discover math and science and make use of it.
I’d argue that the reason for the lack of a Chinese industrial revolution is not because any inherent “thought” deficit but due to the Empire’s decision to employ a Closed Door Policy and Sea Ban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin). Compare China during the Sea Ban and Japan’s Meiji Restoration at the time or even more recent economic development of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (all of which are very Confucian) as an argument against any culture having an monopoly on innovation. Unfortunately, at the time the traditional Chinese culture is very inward looking and arrogant toward foreign thought because we thought we were the best. But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will inevitably decline. Thankfully, we’ve learned this lesson in the 20th century.
>China had a big fleet, but cancelled the project … China invented gun powder, but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage.
Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept. Note that China at one time had the most population and military power and built a great wall at the Northern boundary; because China is more interested in governing from the within. Even with Sinosphere neighbors at the time that were heavily influenced by Chinese culture, Emperors were happier to have tributary states than conquering the neighboring countries.
>Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it.
That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of Chinese medicine. Again note the Western movement to seek out holistic medicine and more importantly, major Western pharmaceutical companies push for personal genomics treatment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_genomics) which takes into account the patient’s individual genetic variation. This is not an attempt to conflate Chinese medicine with 23andme, but rather the perspective that modern medicine is constantly evolving - from the discrete scientific method of breaking down chemicals to their individual interactions to a systematic view of complex metabolic pathways and cascade signaling networks, which echoes the Chinese medicine’s idea of feedback cycle of Qi.