[outis]

Violence, poverty and deprivation are the state of nature. The way all the evils of the world are laid at the feet of the West has no rational basis. The counterfactual against which West influence is compared is always a blissful utopia that never existed and never could have existed.

If you want to blame the refugees on what the West did, how about the fact that most of these people (most of whom are economic migrants, by the way) would literally not have existed without Western science and technology? Check out the population graphs, look at how many people the land could support before modern medicine, the green revolution etc.

[woodruffw]

> Violence, poverty and deprivation are the state of nature.

According to Hobbes. Rousseau had some nicer things to say about the state of nature.

In either case, we're not in the state of nature: we live in prosperous societies, and we both can and ought to provide humane treatment to those who seek it from us.

> If you want to blame the refugees on what the West did, how about the fact that most of these people (most of whom are economic migrants, by the way) would literally not have existed without Western science and technology?

What, like algebra[1] and basin irrigation[2]? "Western science and technology" is built on hundreds of years of near-Eastern and Eastern work. Neither region has any right to claim full responsibility for its fruits.

Even if they did, you would need to be wilfully ignorant to minimize our (Europe and the US's) actions in the Middle East. The fact that we had (and continue to have) a reciprocal exchange of knowledge with them does not excuse what we've done in the modern era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation#History

[linkmotif]

I’m so tired of hearing about Algebra in this context. The notion that Algebra was discovered uniquely in one place is absurd. There can be no doubt Algebra was discovered repeatedly all over the world, and if or when civilization collapses it’ll be discovered again in no time because: it’s Algebra. People are going to discover it and will create notations that make it easy to perform. People like Gauss and Newton arise from all civilizations. So please enough with Algebra. It’s also like almost a thousand years old at this point if you want to point out valuable contributions from the Middle East please refer to something more current and less cliched than Algebra it really just devalues your point.

[pimmen]

The point of bringing up algebra is not to somehow suggest that the Middle East today produces just as much good science and math as Europe or the US does today, or saying that it could only have been discovered in the Middle East, it's to educate people that the most dominant culture has shifted all the time throughout history and to somehow claim that Western culture is the apex of human history and that it could only have been the product of Europeans is extremely ignorant. The 250 years of rapid industrialization in the West is about 2.5% of the time from when humanity started the Agricultural revolution (which started in the Middle East).

What determines which culture will be the most dominant one is not one single factor, and some of them look completely random. For example, China invented movable type printing before Europe but Europe had an alphabet of discrete symbols that were optimized for stone engravings while China's alphabet was optimized for writing by hand quickly and with room for expression. That was one of the factors of why Europe could start the printing press revolution to democratize science and information.

I'm lucky to be living in Sweden in 2017, I would however want to move if this would've been 6th century Sweden.

[woodruffw]

I think you flipped the point on its end.

Of course al-Khwarizmi wasn't the first or only person to "discover" algebra - he was building off of 2000 years of Greek, Persian, Arab, and Indian work.

The point wasn't that he's another great man[1], but that it's simply incorrect to talk about "Western science and technology" as if they're either isolated or monolithic -- they're neither.

If al-Khwarizmi hadn't have been Latinized and become the reference for Western mathematics until the Renaissance, then someone else would have. But that someone else would have come from the "Eastern" world, simply by virtue of where the relevant research and academic tradition was at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

[Santosh83]

You forget that the remarkable growth enjoyed by Western countries fuelled by science is mostly only possible because they have historically given themselves access to the entire world's natural resources, sometimes with the cooperation of non-West people, sometimes in spite of them. Nobody on this planet stands alone. We all depend on the Sun ultimately. Let's stop this game of "I'm better" and "You're better", and recognise that for better or worse, science and connectivity have made this one planet, one humanity and a whole lot of common problems we need to address. Erecting more walls may delay the inevitable but won't last forever, IMO. Human growth and science have a way of breaking all barriers given time.

[empath75]

To criticize certain countries and how they handle refugees is not to lay the blame for all the evils of the world at the feet of ‘the west’

And how would modern medicine and western science have faired without Arabic math and the Arabic preservation of Greek medical texts?

World history is complicated, and human misery has many fathers.

[baud147258]

The Greek texts were preserved by the Roman empire. And those in Constantinople went West when the city was taken by the Persian Empire. Some of the texts in the Western part of the Roman Empire were preserved in monasteries, that's the reason the reimplementation of Roman Law innovations was spearheaded by the Church.

[linkmotif]

> And how would modern medicine and western science have faired without Arabic math and the Arabic preservation of Greek medical texts?

Probably just fine. I’ve read my share of Aristotle and let me tell you, it doesn’t seem to have been a boon to Europe that people kept reading that crap. I mean the guy advocated for slavery as a good/natural thing. And was literally anti-empricical. His philosophy of science boiled down into a sentence was basically “if you think it, it must be true.” God knows how long his work kept the Scientific Method from the mainstream. Galileo was persecuted because the church coopted Aristotelian thinking as dogma. It’s great the Arabs saved all that stuff, but imo it’s great for historical reasons. Very little of it was actually useful legit stuff in the way we think of things today.

[woodruffw]

> His philosophy of science boiled down into a sentence was basically “if you think it, it must be true.”

Aristotle didn't have a "theory of science," because he didn't have just one science: he had the practical, rhetorical, and formal sciences, each with its own first principles.

> Very little of it was actually useful legit stuff in the way we think of things today.

Besides classical logic, universals, and virtue ethics, right?

[linkmotif]

> Aristotle didn't have a "theory of science”

Well yeah, so I should have said natural science.

> Besides classical logic, universals, and virtue ethics, right?

I don’t know: I went into the Classics expecting to encounter some great stuff—what with like 1000 years of hype and all—only to be pretty underwhelmed. My takeaway was that The Church put these Greek guys on a pedestal around 1200 and everyone in Europe didn’t know better until the Renaissance. Sure they played a role in history, but I never encountered anything particularly uniquely or irreplaceable or exciting in the Greeks that you can’t find elsewhere.

[woodruffw]

Yeah, Aristotle's impact on natural science is a mixed bag. On the other hand, that's not where his influence lies these days.

Just out of curiosity, what context did you read him in? Aristotle's influence is still very much felt across philosophy: virtue ethics is one of the three major schools of contemporary ethical thought, and deductive reasoning/classical logic are what every logic class begins with.

Aristotle has definitely been put on a pedestal over the years, particularly by powers looking to associate themselves with some sense of classical Greek "greatness". However, that doesn't diminish his real contributions to philosophical (and mathematical) thought.

[ionised]

> Very little of it was actually useful legit stuff in the way we think of things today.

The way YOU think of things today. You don't speak for the rest of us.