Some cultures really are inferior
Posted by Richard on February 27, 2006
Check out Friday’s winning entries from the Watcher’s Council (nominees here). The two top vote-getters provide sort of a Democrat theme. The winning council entry does so explicitly, as Right Wing Nuthouse’s The "Happy Warrior" Is Weeping In His Grave is a paen to Hubert Humphrey. I don’t share Rick’s deep admiration for Humphrey (I remember the 1964 speech he found so captivating, and I think it was grating and tiresome), but he’s right about the Democratic Party (and especially the DFL in Minnesota) having gone downhill since the Humphrey days. It would be difficult to find a high-ranking Democrat who’d say this today:
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used, and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
— Sen. Hubert Humphrey
The winning non-council entry evokes Democrats simply by being at Dinocrat.com, which is "dedicated to DINO’s" (Democrats in name only). Interesting blog — I’ll keep an eye on it. The winning post has the unwieldy title How Does the Modern World Look When You Have Done Nothing To Help Create It, and Innovation Is a Threat To Cherished Beliefs? In it, Jack points out how fundamentally the Islamic and Western cultures differ:
… We take it for granted that people are fiddling around in their garages inventing oscilloscopes or wonder drugs or extreme sports. But what would it be like to live in a land where people invented nothing, where technology came to you as though from Mars? More than this: what if that constant progress and tinkering represented a threat to the sufficiency of the founding documents of your culture and religion? …
According to Jack, the entire Islamic world (over a billion people) has recorded fewer patents in its entire history than the residents of Utah (2.4 million) recorded last year. A follow-up post provided an interesting graph of the top 25 patent-producing countries (per capita, adjusted for GDP). The U.S. is, of course, far out in front. The next five are Japan, India, China, Germany, and Korea.
This list demonstrates that the superiority of Western Civilization has nothing to do with the European genetic heritage or some geographic advantage. Twenty years ago, China didn’t even have a patent law or a concept of intellectual property, and in that short time period, it’s vaulted into 4th place. The Asian countries that adopted Western values rank near the top, while predominantly Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia rank near the bottom.
No, you don’t have to be of European ancestry to create wealth, progress, and modernity, but you do have to embrace Western values — reason, science, free thinking, and at least a minimal level of property rights and economic liberty to reward innovation and entrepreneurship. And you have to forcefully reject the madmen who want to stone or behead anyone who doesn’t conform to their 7th-century values and beliefs.
Unless you prefer poverty, squalor, death, disease, and misery.
VRB said
Do you include the Moors?