Steersman wrote:
I'll readily agree that they're values that should be considered as universal. But a bit of a leap from that to insisting that they are in fact universal - article of faith, methinks.
I think he meant that they're philosophically universal, in that they're demonstrable through evidence and reason, and for that reason will
eventually convince everyone.
Which I agree with. In the long view, that's the trajectory we've seen, barring hiccups here and there.
re. the China argument, I think the difference certainly does have something to do with liberal values, including property rights, but it's not so much the fact of property rights per se, but rather what adherence to property rights allows, i.e. capitalism, which leads to a situation where the products of technology in a price-based free market system are end-user tested on a vast scale.
Some clever chap might come up with a super-clever idea in ancient China, but it goes nowhere because there's no transmission belt for it to get to the masses and be beta tested by lots and lots of people, for the testing to be fed back to the makers via the price system, and for there to be incentive to improve the designs.
And that goes for scientific instruments too - hence, although the development of the scientific method in and of itself is part of the story too (the whole progress from Aristotle to Bacon, Royal Academy, etc.), equally important to the tipping point was the development of scientific instruments under market conditions. (This is counter the counter-argument one often hears from socialists, that, "it was science not capitalism, duh").
Chinese civilization was an amazing thing, and lasted a long time with basically the same general structure, but the big mistake they made (which was perfectly reasonable at the time, many other cultures did it) was to
scale up the model of a tribal leader/shaman. They did it better and more intelligently than many other ancient civilizations, which is why they lasted such a long time, through so many upheavals, but ultimately the "let the best all-round bloke in the village lead us" model just doesn't scale up, for the same reason the USSR failed:
central planners cannot plan centrally. (Well, not unless they're super advanced AIs like Iain Banks' Minds, with a feed from every individual's experience, and monitoring bots of their own; but we're still a long way away from that sort of thing.)
Whereas the Western "vibe" originated in scattered islands in the Mediterranean, which leads to more of an affinity for decentralized "parallel processing," for democracy, for markets, etc. (plus some of the other reasons Jared Diamond canvassed in his famous book).
It's not that the respective peoples were all that different (though of course there's a slight average IQ difference - although we don't know whether that held back in ancient times the way it does today), it's just that the circumstances subliminally suggested different solutions, and the Western one was accidentally better than the Chinese one. But that leads to better culture, overall (at least in terms of parameters like knowledge-gathering, economic prosperity, freedom, etc.).
Western civilization is the best all-round form of civilization human beings have yet developed, that doesn't mean white human beings are the best human beings, it just means they were canny
enough to seize on good ideas when they cropped up. The fact that any other ethnic group would have probably done the same is shown by how most
other ethnic groups take to Western civilization's memes like a duck to water when they see it exemplified (unless of course their native culture prevents them from doing so, either psychologically or by force).
However, that's not to say there isn't a cost: there are several costs to Western culture as it has developed so far - things like overcrowding (a downside of success - although this factor has been common to some of the other great cultures of the past too), occasional psychological difficulties for some, a bit of disconnect from nature, etc., etc. IOW, the "betterness" is a net value - it's shown by how people vote with their feet - but the downsides don't always immediately become apparent until the experiment has run for a bit.
Still, since adaptability is part of the virtues of it, there's no reason why things can't keep progressing, barring fingers slipping on certain buttons, etc.
