China vs. the West: How the Most Advanced Nation of the Middle Ages Fell So Far Behind

 As the third millennium progresses, much of the East is racing to see who can catch up with the West the fastest.  Since the Middle Ages, the West has steamrolled over the rest of the world, thanks to the prolific number of discoveries it has unearthed and its great number of inventions.  Automobiles, airplanes, weapons, computers- all of the modern world's most influential inventions have come from the West.  Yet China was the first civilization to discover the cornerstone behind many of them, such as gunpowder, paper, and the movable type.  The question is, if China was the first to invent the building blocks of our modern world, then why did it fall behind? 

The obvious answer might be that China's isolationism prevented it from becoming a major world power after the Middle Ages.  During that time, it arguably had the most advanced civilization in the world.  There were several Chinese explorers during the Age of Discovery, when a number of European explorers were colonizing foreign lands.  Europe's principal motivation for colonization was based on greed; there was plenty of gold to be found in the Americas, and shorter routes to India were desired for greater efficiency.  But China never colonized any of the lands it discovered because it didn't have the same motivations.  Not only was there a general disinterest in greed, but its unity and geography already gave it enough sustainability to keep exploration at bay.  India was practically at its back door, and traders along the Silk Road brought many valuable items from the west.  The Pacific Ocean was far too vast to reach the Americas by crossing, as opposed to Europe, which only had about a third of the distance to travel across the Atlantic.  Finally, its unification under a dynasty meant that trade within its states could burgeon, as opposed to Europe, which stood divided and had many nations competing for resources. 

Though these facts were critical to China's lack of development, something even more important prevented that civilization from keeping up with the West.  This was Gutenberg's printing press, which allowed knowledge to spread more rapidly than it ever had in Europe.  Education skyrocketed as the religious haze of the Middle Ages came to an end, and the Reformation sparked a chain of events that lead to the Enlightenment.  Yet ironically it wasn't Gutenberg who first invented the printing press, as we in the west are often lead to believe, but a Chinese man named Bi Sheng.  In 1040 AD, the first movable type was created by him, a system of movable elements that used letters or pictograms to copy written texts. 

The problem was the size of its alphabet; there are over 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, and each of them are visually distinct from the others.  Western alphabets have anywhere from 20-30 letters, making them much more efficient than languages based on pictograms.  While it may require less time to write something in Chinese than English, our alphabet has allowed us more efficiency for the usage of a printing press.  China's lack of a minimalist alphabet prevented it from spreading scientific knowledge as efficiently as Europe did, despite the fact that it had created the movable type about 400 years earlier. 

Now China uses a phonetic alphabet called pinyin to decompose their language into simpler forms.  A keyboard of 50,000 characters wouldn't be useful, and pinyin's minimalist alphabet has made printing a revolutionary step in modernizing China.  This has literally been the way in which China has caught up with the West- by using pinyin to translate Chinese pronunciations into the Latin alphabet.  Pinyin has also made translating easier, as the decline of isolationism yields to global trade.  We might be writing a different story if they'd had a smaller alphabet when the movable type was invented.  If pinyin had been around in 1040 AD, it might have been the West trying to catch up with the East instead of the other way around. 

Does Religion Cause Violence?

 Religion has faced a harsh accusation from atheists for years.  A lot of them claim that religion causes violence and war because it teaches people to kill in the name of their God, whichever one it may be.  What they don't realize is that morality transcends religion and every other institution.  If you are a naturally violent person, you will do violent things, with or without a social institution like religion.  If a child does all the things a preacher tells them to, then their conscience (or lack thereof) should be put in question and not the preacher himself. 

Other institutions that are said to cause violence are television and video games, but these claims are unsound for the same reason.  The atheists that only accuse religion of causing violence don't usually want it compared with these because it's only religion they want to bring down.  If it sounds silly to them that a medium such as television could cause violence, then they might want to consider that others see their postulate the same way. 

The parallel with guns is true as well.  They aren't things that cause people to shoot others- people with the intent to harm others are.  For example: as a child I loved playing Duke Nukem, but you never saw me launching grenades and missiles at people I didn't like.  My brother and my friends liked to play shooter games as well, but none of them ever committed extreme violence.  That's because we had valuable things called consciences- what those who hurt others seem to be lacking. 

You could say that nothing influences morality more than religion does, but it seems to me that a child's parents would have the largest influence on their ethics and not a source outside the family.  Children often imitate the actions of their parents, even when they believe the action isn't good.  For example: religion might tell you that stealing is wrong, but if a child sees a parent doing it out of hypocrisy, the child is more likely to ignore the religious teaching and mimic the parent. 

Not only that, but it could be said that most of the people using violence in the name of God have either misinterpreted their religious doctrine or listened to somebody else who did (depending on the religion).  Let's face it, the Bible can be interpreted any way you like.  If you choose to interpret it as a manifesto of war, then it's more of a product of your nature and not the tenets of the Bible itself. 

What tends to get ignored by people claiming that religion causes war is that it teaches far more valuable lessons in morality than bad ones.  It seems suspicious that someone would accuse religion of causing violence while ignoring all the beneficial things it would do for society if they truly believed its words had such a powerful influence.  Things such as compassion, forgiveness, and charity are usually preached in the major religions, so why have they been ignored by these people?  If the words of religion were strong enough to cause a war, you'd have no choice but to accept that it also generates the more divine intentions of its literature as well.  From a logical standpoint there isn't any way around this, and atheists are usually logical people.  So they think. 

Herzog, Saul Bellow

Herzog dearly reminded me of Birdman, the washed-up movie star who desired to make a return to stardom as a playwright in a film of the same name. Early on you notice that his head isn't entirely together. His thoughts are a bit jumbled and he may have trouble differentiating between what's real and what's not. Interesting ideas about the world and the evolution of society are cleverly grinded into shards of intellectual oddities through Saul Bellow's decision to use stream-of-consciousness in a quasi-epistolary form. Herzog not only writes letters to his family and friends, but to historical figures and philosophers, such as Eisenhower and Nietchze, which are randomly placed inside the body of the text. While this may cause some head-scratching torture for readers who prefer linear plots and less complicated subjects, it's worth a try for others who enjoy more challenging and experimental work. 

At its heart, Herzog is the character study of a deranged professor going through some unoriginal domestic issues, but what it lacks in originality it makes up for in its presentation of an unusual, yet brilliant mind. Some time ago Herzog lost his job, and just recently he'd gone through a vicious divorce with children involved. Faced with this double blow, he must find a way to climb out of the doldrums created by his overly analytical mind. He decides to vent his frustrations through the release of letter-writing, though he never actually sends them to people. If it weren't for the cultural richness that Saul blessed his character with, I'd be more inclined to call it a two-starred, 400-page bitch fest. 

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

In short, this is a book about life. All of us have things that hold us back. In the protagonist Philip’s case they are his clubbed-foot and the lack of guidance he had growing up. Born an orphan and raised by an uncle who never paid him much attention, the impressionable Philip must learn the hard facts of life on his own. 

Early on he drifts from study to study, including art and accounting, unbound to any particular discipline due to the fact that each sacrifice of freedom they require makes him uncomfortable. He finally settles on becoming a doctor in his late 20s, but by then he has grown helplessly infatuated with a wretched woman who uses his kindness to get what she wants. The paradox is that he unconsciously becomes bonded to something so hideous that it compromises his judgement after all the drifting he’d done. His attachment to Mildred, which marks the first time in his life when he gave up his progress for someone’s happiness, ultimately made him miserable in all the ways he’d feared. The decision to be constantly forgiving and benevolent to her in spite of all her scandalous ways, suggests that the bonds of the heart are stronger than those of the mind, at least in Philip’s case. When this happens reason takes a back seat to obsession, and for that he is doomed to figure out why his philosophy has crumbled just beyond reaching adulthood. 

As a grown man Philip yearns to travel, but once he meets another woman, one who treats him in all the ways Mildred should have, the broken bones of his childhood are finally able to heal. The losses that had caused him to drift from place to place in uncertainty slowly become mended, and he begins to find true meaning in a happiness caused by his decision to finally love a deserving person. It could be said that his bondage with Mildred was a lustful one, while the one with Sally was truly based on love, which I believe is what most of us are trying to find in life. 

Somerset Maugham took this simplest of human conditions and created a masterpiece in the genre of coming-of-age classics. Though written over a hundred years ago, it’s still an easy read by today’s standards. There are many tangents on art and philosophy, all of which I found enjoyable, but may be a hindrance to a lesser humanist. Philip’s troubles seemed to run parallel with a lot of the issues I had growing up, so that’s given it some extra sentimental value, as I’m sure it has to many other young men. Reading this at age 30, it’s comforting to know that he finally found things in life worth settling on. I can only hope the novel has the same effect on other readers.