Posted by
Paul Paryski on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Civilizations-Complexity-and-Compassion-tp526068.html
A quick response from a former historian and ex UN guy: China and Japan are
examples of societies that have not collapsed but have gone through waves of
change. As Jared Diamond so eloquently wrote in his seminal book Collapse
what determines whether a civilization collapses or mostly collapse (no or few
societies have totally disappeared; most re-emerge in a different form) is
its ability to adopt adaptive management strategies to changing conditions.
Complexity can be used as a somewhat imperfect tool to rationally determine
what the best adaptive management strategies are.
There is a book, 1421, that describes China's great effort to explore and
map the world well before the Europeans and why their effort ultimately was
abandoned and partially lost, although the Venetians used the Chinese maps. The
Chinese actually explored the Americas and Africa and started trading in
these places. Basically the mandarins decided to isolate China from the rest of
the world to improve their own power base, a bad adaptive strategy. Perhaps
had they used the complexity tools devised by Confucius they would have not
so.
Paul
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