Alex, I give you about 1,000 respect points for your well-reasoned response to my thrashing. Honestly, up to now I've never thought of you as much but fun to watch when you and Ivan were bitch-slapping one another during the World Cup tourney last year (and to your credit, to this day I can't understand why that c*cksucker was not banned permanently for the shit he kept starting then.)
OK ... so the Greeks, the Chinese, the Roman, and the French cultures have all in the past contributed greatly to the development of civilisation. But you are missing a key point there: all of these civilisations had centuries and in the case of Greece millenia to grind out what they did. Additionally, modern Rome, Beijing, Athens and Paris have little if anything to do with the work of Marcus Aurelius, Cao Cao, Socrates or Voltaire. There have been great men in all times and likely in all nations; they do not however neccessarily make their respective nations great.
Turn to America. There was a man who was an inspiration and guide to the American founding fathers, a Brit no less. That man was John Locke. Locke's works resonate deeply in the Declaration of Independence and the original text to the Constitution, as most of our founding fathers were great admirers of his philosophies of liberty.
And look to these men, who came a generation later. Thomas Jefferson. George Washington. James Madison. Benjamin Franklin. Looking at the life histories of these men, and what they accomplished both seperately and collectively, it makes me wonder if America would have ever happened were it not for the incredibly unlikely coincidence that these brave and brilliant men had all lived in the same time, and the same place.
The difference between, say, Thomas Jefferson and Marcus Aurelius, is that the latter was born to be king; the former was just plain born. Cao Cao was also driven by dreams of conquest, and he accomplished a tremendous thing in reuniting China in the second century AD (a drama replayed in the 16th century in Japan, by Oda Nobunaga, who studied Cao's methods in forming his plan to take over the Empire after the fall of the Ashikaga sultanate.)
These men accomplished some great things which led to interesting cultures to be sure, but I am put of a mind of the words of another great American, Daniel Webster:
"In every generation, there are those who want to rule well - but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters - but they mean to be masters."
These men wanted to be rulers, and passion, intelligence and courage led them to be just that. Fortunately for the ruled they turned out to be for the most part good rulers. But they meant to rule.
By contrast, the founding fathers of America had no desire whatsoever to rule over anything but their own affairs. The first American coin, the Continental, said on it "Mind Your Business" in about the place where our modern currency reads "In God we Trust." The Continental was designed by Benjamin Franklin and it's slogan pretty well sums up the desires of these men who created what was one of the first truly free republics in the history of mankind.
Unfortunately, much of the true greatness that was in the beginnings of America are for the most part footnotes in a history book nowadays, but to say that in the modern world the fact that many great thinkers were French means France contributes more to the world at large than the US, is somewhat specious. I am a big fan of several French writers, but none of them have drawn a breath in a long, long time -- Zola, de la Boetie (all time favourite) Voltaire, Hugo and to a somewhat lesser extent Sartre. But from my own experiences in France these great men's works are less than the footnote our great principles of liberty are here.
Phaedrus
