MUST read op-ed – go read the whole thing. It’s brilliant!
Ignorance Is Bliss; Sometimes It’s Policy
The ranch at Crawford hardly compares with the Forbidden City, but George W. Bush has something in common with the Ming emperors of China: He seems determined to make his great nation less ambitious and more ignorant.
He wouldn’t see it that way, of course, but the emperors didn’t see it that way either. And I don’t know how else to explain policies and pronouncements that make the quest for knowledge conditional on politics. That is a prescription for decline.
In the early 1400s the Ming emperor Zhu Di made China into the world’s leading maritime nation, sending huge fleets on missions of trade and exploration as far as the Swahili coast of Africa. It should have been just a matter of a few years before Chinese sailors discovered the Americas. But Zhu Di’s successors, influenced by court politics, called home the fleets and forbade them to sail again, forfeiting the riches of the New World — and five centuries of global domination — to an underdeveloped backwater called Europe.
I guess it’s a general rule of political dynasties, in China as well as in Texas, that the blood thins with successive generations.
Examples? Well, there’s the way Bush insists on hamstringing American scientists who are trying to explore the potential medical benefits of therapies involving embryonic stem cells.
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By all rights, we ought to remember the Ming dynasty for discovering America; instead, we think of gorgeous pottery but not much else. China’s current leaders seem determined not to make the same mistake.
I just recently purchased Gavin Menzie’s 1421: The Year China Discovered America and have barely started to read it (reading too many blogs to get to my much-loved books lately…) I’m heading out on a road trip to Tucson though, so will probably take it along. Here’s the blurb:
On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was “to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas” and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.
When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China’s long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted in America and other countries the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.
Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, 1421 rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this landmark work of historical investigation.
Anyway, go read the op-ed – and get the book, too – it’s great! Ah, for more time…
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