Ignorance Is Bliss; Sometimes It's Policy

[kliljedahl]

The ranch at Crawford hardly compares with the Forbidden City, but George W. Bush has something in common with the Ming emperors of China: He seems determined to make his great nation less ambitious and more ignorant.

He wouldn't see it that way, of course, but the emperors didn't see it that way either. And I don't know how else to explain policies and pronouncements that make the quest for knowledge conditional on politics. That is a prescription for decline.


In the early 1400s the Ming emperor Zhu Di made China into the world's leading maritime nation, sending huge fleets on missions of trade and exploration as far as the Swahili coast of Africa. It should have been just a matter of a few years before Chinese sailors discovered the Americas. But Zhu Di's successors, influenced by court politics, called home the fleets and forbade them to sail again, forfeiting the riches of the New World -- and five centuries of global domination -- to an underdeveloped backwater called Europe.

I guess it's a general rule of political dynasties, in China as well as in Texas, that the blood thins with successive generations.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080401824.html


Keith’s Barbeque Central

[charlyvi]

1. And the brain shrinks.

Along with the heart. God help us!

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Great article. Thanks for posting. Funniest explanation of *'s view

on global warming ever..."Maybe we'll line up all our obsolete SUVs along the coast to try to hold back the rising sea."