Read Online What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza - Free Book Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
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these things since the eleventh century. Yet these inventions were closely held by the Chinese court, and they had a very limited impact on Chinese society. Printing, for example, was mainly used by the emperor to issue official documents. By contrast, once the West learned about these inventions they had a convulsive, transforming impact on European society. Gunpowder revolutionized Western warfare and gave European nations the means to impose their will on other peoples. Printing made possible the Gutenberg Bible and the Reformation. It allowed the spread of literacy and created the conditions for the rise of democracy. The compass helped the West develop navigational resources to venture forth to the far corners of the world, inaugurating the new age that we call modernity.
But if the West has shown itself willing and eager to learn from other cultures, this attitude has not been reciprocated until recent times by other cultures. In the Islamic empire, for instance, a prevailing view was that Muslims have nothing to learn from other people. This attitude may strike us as the provincialism of the lowly and the ignorant, but in fact it was shared by many of the most sophisticated minds of Islam. For instance, Ibn Khaldunâ
the preeminent Muslim historian of the Middle Agesâwrites a universal history called The Muqaddimah but shows absolutely no interest in what is going on outside Islamic civilization. âGod knows better what exists there.â 11 Even more striking is that, in subsequent centuries, when the leading figures of the Muslim world heard about the raging debates in Europe over democracy and popular sovereignty and human rights, they ignored them. Muslims had access to political and scientific works from the West, but they never bothered to translate them into Arabic. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution passed without notice in the Islamic world. This self-imposed isolation has had immense consequences both for Islam and for the West, consequences that we are living with today.
The Chinese were, if anything, even more ethnocentric than the Muslims. By all accounts China, not Europe, should have dominated the age of exploration. Early in the fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) inaugurated a series of voyages to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and the coast of Africa. The Chinese had the best astronomy, the best cartography, the best navigational skill, and the best built ships in the world. Even so, they made several voyages to other countries and then stopped. 12 Chinese exploration came to an abrupt end around 1433, more than half a century before Columbus took his epochal voyage to the Americas.
Why, then, did the Chinese quit? One clue is provided by a Chinese ship that arrived on the Indian shore in search of animals for the Chinese zoo. The expedition yielded a giraffe, which caused quite a sensation at the Chinese court. But no other Chinese ships came to India, presumably because the needs of the Chinese zoo were satisfied. In general, the Chinese went abroad
not to learn from other peopleâa prospect they found impossibleâbut rather to demonstrate their own greatness and to find people to pay tribute to their civilization and to their emperor. Once their vanity was appeased they decided to forgo the expense of foreign travel, and they called the whole thing to a halt. Zheng He has been called the Chinese Columbus, but he is more accurately termed âthe man who could have been Columbus.â Daniel Boorstin suggests that the exploits of Zheng He were anomalous; a more appropriate symbol of Chinese psychology is the Great Wall, built to keep the Chinese in and everyone else out. 13
I f ethnocentrism is not Western, what about colonialism? Well, colonialism is also not a unique characteristic of the West. My native country of India, for example, was ruled by the British for more than two centuries, and
But if the West has shown itself willing and eager to learn from other cultures, this attitude has not been reciprocated until recent times by other cultures. In the Islamic empire, for instance, a prevailing view was that Muslims have nothing to learn from other people. This attitude may strike us as the provincialism of the lowly and the ignorant, but in fact it was shared by many of the most sophisticated minds of Islam. For instance, Ibn Khaldunâ
the preeminent Muslim historian of the Middle Agesâwrites a universal history called The Muqaddimah but shows absolutely no interest in what is going on outside Islamic civilization. âGod knows better what exists there.â 11 Even more striking is that, in subsequent centuries, when the leading figures of the Muslim world heard about the raging debates in Europe over democracy and popular sovereignty and human rights, they ignored them. Muslims had access to political and scientific works from the West, but they never bothered to translate them into Arabic. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution passed without notice in the Islamic world. This self-imposed isolation has had immense consequences both for Islam and for the West, consequences that we are living with today.
The Chinese were, if anything, even more ethnocentric than the Muslims. By all accounts China, not Europe, should have dominated the age of exploration. Early in the fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) inaugurated a series of voyages to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and the coast of Africa. The Chinese had the best astronomy, the best cartography, the best navigational skill, and the best built ships in the world. Even so, they made several voyages to other countries and then stopped. 12 Chinese exploration came to an abrupt end around 1433, more than half a century before Columbus took his epochal voyage to the Americas.
Why, then, did the Chinese quit? One clue is provided by a Chinese ship that arrived on the Indian shore in search of animals for the Chinese zoo. The expedition yielded a giraffe, which caused quite a sensation at the Chinese court. But no other Chinese ships came to India, presumably because the needs of the Chinese zoo were satisfied. In general, the Chinese went abroad
not to learn from other peopleâa prospect they found impossibleâbut rather to demonstrate their own greatness and to find people to pay tribute to their civilization and to their emperor. Once their vanity was appeased they decided to forgo the expense of foreign travel, and they called the whole thing to a halt. Zheng He has been called the Chinese Columbus, but he is more accurately termed âthe man who could have been Columbus.â Daniel Boorstin suggests that the exploits of Zheng He were anomalous; a more appropriate symbol of Chinese psychology is the Great Wall, built to keep the Chinese in and everyone else out. 13
I f ethnocentrism is not Western, what about colonialism? Well, colonialism is also not a unique characteristic of the West. My native country of India, for example, was ruled by the British for more than two centuries, and
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