Cont...

An example, ask a young Chinese person what they think of the Taiwanese, the dismissive retort is often 'ABC' which I now know means American Born Chinese.

My proposition is that inexorably growing wealth inequity, political corruption, the Occupy movement, disillusionment resulting from the hardships forced by GFC blamed on the greed and games of the elite, the body count from overseas wars, are all contributing to disillusionment with the American narrative. Of course this might be reversed, the question is will it and can it be done without a nationalism stoking war?

As to the claimed stultifying effects of Muslim rule, I have heard the arguments before and always get the feeling there is some revisionism at work. For instance Norman Cantor in his excellent book 'The Sacred Chain – A History of the Jews' talks of the period for Jews under Muslim rule in Spain as “an era of economic, political and intellectual vitality not seen among the Jews anywhere since the downfall of Alexandrian Jewry in the second century AD”. Perhaps I need further reading.

I'm not denying the Ottoman Empire in the last third of its reign was 'the sick man of Europe', marvellously captured by Twain's pithy observations when he saw “Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious—and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood.” pass him in a carriage at the World Fair in Paris.

“weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; ... a man who sees his people robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to save them; ... is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and steamboats and telegraphs; ... a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality—and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!”

Yet claiming its entire period “ produced the great stagnation in science, technology and the arts.” is unsupported.

Just on csteele's point about Muslim Spain:

During the Dark Ages in Europe, Cordoba in Spain was the "largest and greatest city in Europe" - civilised and multicultural, where Muslims, Jews and Christians mixed at will. It was a centre for commerce and learning and was in contact with other major Islamic centres of trade and learning such as Baghdad. It was famous as a centre of learning. It's libraries served as repositories of much ancient knowledge as well as enabling the advancement of Islamic knowledge - all this while Europe was sunk in torpor.

http://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-history/cordoba-historical-overview/default_41.aspx

Csteele

Very few people within the Roman Empire were actually citizens. Most weren't

You wrote:

>>…Images such as those of Tienanmen Square still inform the notion that the people are terribly oppressed and can not wait to throw the yoke of government rule from their shoulders.>>

I don't know who in "the West" believes that. I don't believe it and I don't know anyone who does.

What I do know is that there are literally tens of thousands of riots and other incidents in China every year that need to be put down by force. There is also a significant plurality that do not want to overthrow "the yoke" but they do want the regime to liberalise.

On the other hand a rather virulent and dangerous brand of Chinese nationalism appears to be developing.

Poirot wrote:

>>During the Dark Ages in Europe, Cordoba in Spain was the "largest and greatest city in Europe" - civilised and multicultural, where Muslims, Jews and Christians mixed at will. It was a centre for commerce and learning and was in contact with other major Islamic centres of trade and learning such as Baghdad. It was famous as a centre of learning. It's libraries served as repositories of much ancient knowledge as well as enabling the advancement of Islamic knowledge - all this while Europe was sunk in torpor.>>

Cordoba was an outlier among Muslim cities. But that's not the point I want to make.

The "dark ages" is a myth.

--There was no "dark ages" in Europe. Some regions went backwards after the fall of the Western Empire but other parts of Europe were roaring ahead. As historians are learning, the so-called "dark ages" are dark only to historians who know so little about Europe in that period.

--Europe was never "sunk in torpor". That too is a fallacy. Great strides were being made in important technologies such as better ploughs, better ways of smelting iron and better wagon wheels that enabled trade without the need for hard-to-maintain Roman roads.

See "Barbarians to Angels" among other recent books.

http://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Angels-Dark-Ages-Reconsidered/dp/0393060756

Steven,

Yes,

(1) the expressions 'Dark Ages' and "The Lucky Country" are often taken at face value, and misinterpreted.

(2) Europe made considerable technical progress, even in the much maligned Medieval period and unlike Islamic civilisation, the process has been continuous and accelerating for the past 700 years.

csteele,

What were the scientific advances developed by the Ottomans during their Empire as distinct from the European technical innovations they adapted. The Ottomans were like all Islamic cultures through most of their history, essentially parasitic on others--apart from a brief "Golden Age" derivative from Greco-Roman and Sassanid culture.

Summary

The point I was making earlier is that there's nothing inevitable about the decline of the USA, the Romans declined and recovered many times in their history and, apart from some remarkably bad luck, might still be with us.

The continental USA is probably the best piece of real estate on earth and as Steven indicated, still has vast unexploited resources, particularly if Canada is included in the equation. I'm old enough to remember two former candidates that were forecast to supplant the USA, where are they these days? We're probably going to have to remove a few letters from the BRICS acronym as well.

As Dan Gardner writes in "Future Babble", the great majority of economic and financial forecasts are total drivel, so my money is still on the Yanks

Technical progress is one thing, and yes human ingenuity is never at a standstill. Yet it was the preservation of ideological and philosophical wisdom from the ancients and the collation of emerging knowledge that marks the significance of Islamic civilisation of the time. All those libraries weren't provided for nothing.

Dear Steven and mac,

When Steven wrote “Europe was never "sunk in torpor". That too is a fallacy. Great strides were being made in important technologies such as better ploughs, better ways of smelting iron and better wagon wheels that enabled trade without the need for hard-to-maintain Roman roads.” did you not see this in any way an own goal?

It is like saying good on us for developing a good off road vehicle because our roads are so shithouse, or more topically a better watercart because the aqueducts were left to fall into ruin.

Roman roads became hard to maintain because the knowledge and expertise had gone along with the infrastructure to upkeep them.

It isn't hard to concede that the instability surrounding the Ottoman Empire in its latter years caused the Mullahs to dramatically gain in influence. However both the first half of its reign and indeed in earlier Islamic cultures great scientific figures abounded such as Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) “who calculated the length of the year to within 5 decimal places. He found geometric solutions to all 13 forms of cubic equations.” and ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) who “studied the effects of light refraction, and suggested the mathematics of reflection and refraction needed to be consistent with the anatomy of the eye”. Or what about "Al-Battani (850–922) was an astronomer who accurately determined the length of the solar year. He contributed to numeric tables, such as the Tables of Toledo, used by astronomers to predict the movements of the sun, moon and planets across the sky. Some of Battani's astronomic tables were later used by Copernicus.” Wikipedia

Proving the point that most science is parasitic in nature.

Putting these up against a better plow and wagon wheel doesn't seem to cut it somehow.