The Decline of the West - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Rise of Empire Your Favorite General. Thread starter Far Flight Start date Mar 28, JavaScript is disabled.

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For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Prev 1 … Go to page. First Prev 7 of 7 Go to page. SilasMarner Materialistically the British Empire may have been at around the height of its powers then. But intellectually and culturally? We are talking about a time when most of the British middle and upper classes whole-heartedly embraced Imperialism. The scramble to colonise Africa was at its height. I agree completely. And in this very thread I discussed corporate interests skimming wealth from The Decline of the West lower classes and distributing it among themselves, which is what vested interests have always done.

All civilizations of which we have any detailed knowledge have The Decline of the West characterized by high levels of wealth concentration — Sumer, the Akkadians, Babylon, ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Indus River Valley, Carthage, Greece, Rome, the Byzantine Empire, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Japanese Shogunate, the Spanish Empire, the French Empire, the British Empire, and the United States — have all shown the same general pattern of a rich elite and a subject working class sometimes existing near the edge of survival. To the best we are able to determine, in their terminal period these cultures have exhibited very extreme manifestations of wealth inequality — to the point where capital formation is undermined, the middle class is destroyed, and the poor increasingly do not survive. My views on the source of rising inequality, of which the U.

S is The Decline of the West the worst case among Western nations, I have discussed in my usual verbosity in this thread: The perception of rising meritocracy and worsening inequality? Ethical problems in the West have also been discussed a fair amount in this thread. At no point have I argued for some universal moral superiority of the West — only that the West is in decline and that there are reasons for it. In fact, in the book I just recently referenced, Samuel P. The implication in your sentence is that ethics is not an element of culture.

I suspect you are in a rather small minority in that assumption and would be hard pressed to defend it. If ethics are The Decline of the West fact a component of culture then you are unintentionally making my argument that the West is in decline. And for whatever it is worth in this thread I made a statement regarding Article source stipulation about anyone using another human being as a means to their ends is acting immorally — which generalizes both our dissatisfactions about exploitation of non-elites, again with U. SilasMarner And Britain ceased to be Teh dominant world power, not so much because its own power declined but because other states like Germany and America industrialised and caught up.

Thus, relatively speaking, Britain held a less dominant geo-political position. All social power is relative because there is no objective unit of measure for the constellation of elements that make up a civilization. So of course decline is relative. It could not be any other way.

But it is a historical fact those civilizations I referred to did decline and passed out of existence as an effective culture often with aggression toward neighbors being a significant contributing factor — although each left some elemental residue behind that other cultures absorbed — Greek philosophy, Roman law, a number Chinese elements including philosophy and irrigation systems among them. Last edited: Feb 2, SilasMarner As with the situation in the late s, we are not looking at a western decline now any more than we were looking at a British decline then. What we are seeing has more to do with the rise and improvement of countries like China and India.

Growth rates are always likely to be lower when you start from a high base. As I indicated earlier, I recognize that you will remain unconvinced about Western decline but I can assure you that Americans trapped in the ghettos have experienced a raw not relative decline in standard of living over the past two generations.

Even though on some level racial and sexist attitudes have improved, the fact remains that the inner cities of decades ago were far less bestial places than they are today - with less violence, lower death rates, and less hopelessness. And as I consider the populist turmoil that was seen on multiple continents before the U. SilasMarner But for countries like China and India, whose economies are in the middle of industrialisation and a technology revolution, you can naturally expect high growth rates as they catch up. That The Decline of the West not ultimately The Decline of the West bad thing, it's a good thing. That's progress, not decline. It might well be progress for their culture, but if you check the title of this thread you will see that the progress to which you referred is beside the point.]