How Did EUROPE Become So SUPERIOR?

MGRA: Make Great Reason Again!

Europe is an emerging phenomenon, now towering over the entire planet, from her possessions, colonies (Africa, Americas, Oceania, much of Eurasia), culture and mental grip (world culture, United Nations, etc.) Hey, don’t flaunt European colonization of the entire planet too loud, that’s not PC! Instead watch with glee the Islamists being crushed in Iraq and Syria by European proxies…

Europe was initially named from a Phoenician princess. (That, per se, is revealing: Europe came from the Middle Earth!) Europe, as a cultural phenomenon articulated by progress, is thousands of years old.

The Romans had long been technology dependent upon the Celts for metallic military equipment (a domination which was to last 3,000 years). When Caesar invaded “Long Haired Gaul”, and reached the Atlantic, he was stunned by the thousands of tall, ocean-going warships that the combined Celtic Navy had mustered (Roman ingenuity devised a specific device, the Corvus to turn the superiority of Celtic tall ships into a way to defeat them). 

Circus Maximus, 20 centuries ago. Still the World’s Largest Stadium, More than 600 meters long. On the left side, the Imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (significantly larger than all the palaces of all present Western leaders combined!)

Contrarily to the usual myth, European superiority did not start with English superiority in the 1700s (that was mostly the fruit of English and Dutch conspiracies which turned out well, while the female Prime Minister of France overturned all the alliances, insuring French defeat in a seven-year world war!)

But Europe did not emerge by accident, but from culturally inherited moods, thus epigenetics, more than 100,000 years old. Yes, the climate, and the geography played a role, lighted the fire, and keep re-lighting it, from Enlightenment to Enlightenment. The fire of progress.

Unsurprisingly, regressive potentates put into question “Occidental values”, suggesting they are yesterday’s intrinsic evil. Sergey Lavrov, the powerful, long-standing Russian foreign minister declared in February 2017, that the time had come for a “post-Occidental world order”. According to Lavrov, one should wipe up all international institutions and replace them, Trump-like, by negotiations, state to state (as Russia is by far the world’s largest state, with the largest nuclear force, one can see how it would profit from it! The same holds for the USA.) This cannot end well. Russia is fundamentally a European colony (as the USA is). It should not forget how Europe got so rich. It happened through the universalization of advanced values.

Ah yes, because Europe is rich: In territory, Europe, through its (“ex”) colonies, owns much of the world: the Americas, Oceania, and all of North Eurasia are European colonies. Civilizationally, legislatively, Europe owns the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, and the irritant of a few (partly) Muslim Fundamentalist states.

Let me rephrase this, lest it gets misunderstood: the United Nations Charter is basically an improved rewriting of the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. In turn, the French Revolution basic constitution was a writing of practiced established by the Franks, a full millennium earlier (including the outlawing of slavery, mandatory education, and the subservience of religion to state).

How did this happen? How did Europe achieve supremacy?

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Did the “Protestant Ethics” Make Europe Rich?

This is an opinion Anglo-Saxon supremacists love to claim. It’s mostly BS. First, the “Protestants” introduced only a minority of the inventions which made Europe strong and innovative.

Second, the presence of the easiest to exploit, richest coal beds in the world surfacing in England and North West Germany have nothing to do with “Protestant ethics”, but everything to do with steam-powered industrialization.

Third, one would have to define “Protestant”. Hint: it’s a French word. The “Protestant” movement started shortly after the fascist Christian church tried an encore with the First Crusade (after having nearly collapsed civilization in the Fourth Century already). Thus, the Protestant attitude and ethics is very old, and a reaction to Roman and Christian fascism… but not at all what Anglo-Saxon superiority maniacs have in mind.

The Greco-Romans were number one in trade and work ethics. 10,000 cargo ships plied the waves of the Mediterranean, every day. Later Italian and Alpine republics under the protective umbrella of the Frankish Roman empire invented most of the present “capitalist” set-up, complete with state bonds to finance Florentine armies, etc.  

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Did Colonialism and Slavery Made Civilization Rich As The Haters Of Progress Claim?

The traditional Politically Correct, Europhobic, European hating point of view is that slavery and colonialism made Europe rich: This is, erroneous, even ridiculous, on the face of it: the region of the world, Europe,  which outlawed slavery within, 13 centuries ago, would have been made rich from slavery.

However, in energy usage, per capita, Europe was the richest in the world, by 1000 CE. Actually some of the richest parts of Europe had no contact whatsoever with slavery and colonialism, for example, Switzerland (and many parts of France, Germany, italy).

The truth is much simpler, much more human: the exponential of understanding in Europe, and its subsequent mastery of nature, was the engine of European wealth. Europe succeeded better, because it was the part of the world where the essence of humanity, understanding and mastering nature, was able to express itself better.

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EUROPE BECAME RICHER IN THE LAST MILLENNIUM, BECAUSE EUROPE WAS SMARTER. Institutionally. Spiritually. Thus, Epigenetically:

It started with smarter laws, and the mentality of respecting them (“Dura Lex, Sed Lex” said the Romans; Law Hard, But [it’s the] Law). So institutions and moods were in place for European supremacy, 25 centuries ago. Those characters were the direct cause of the astonishing ascent of the Roman Republic.  

Rome got blocked in its eastward expansion by the Greco-Persian empire in the Iranian plateau. Factors in Rome’s failure to conquer Persia: Caesar was killed, the Republic caged (by Augustus and the plutocracy he headed). More importantly, Persia was part of the West, in the deepest sense. Babylonian kings (Hammurabi!) had imposed the notion of universal (republican) law, a full millennium before Roma became a village. Also Mesopotamia had invented and used much of the fundamental alphabet, science and mathematics, which spread westward.  

Rome itself was a baby fed, and educated by colonialists: the Etruscans, who had last come from present-day Syria, and the Greeks, who had colonized south Italy, including Naples (a deformation of the term New Town in Greek: Neo-Polis).

Not that all of the inventive mentality of the Occident started only around the Mediterranean, its Fertile Crescent and Egypt: the Indo-European colonizations started from Central Asia, targeting both Europe and India. The Amazons, a most anti-sexist civilization, was part of it, way back (more than 4,000 years ago), and we inherited some of this anti-sexist mentality (which may well have influenced anti-sexist Crete, as Crete was in trade with the Northern Black Sea region, where the Amazons thrived.

India played the crucial role in inventing the modern numeration system. Meanwhile, in the West, the drive to ever more powerful technology had ruled for at least 100,000 years: Neanderthals and Denisovans could only survive in north Eurasia through extensive technology. So they invented pants, dogs, and the usage of fossil fuels (already 80,000 years ago).

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European Progress Mentality Is At Least 100,000 Years Old:

Cro Magnon men lived in present day France, then a tundra which was fully surrounded by enormous glaciers, and the icy sea. Cro Magnons survived in the same way Neanderthals and Denisovans did before: using the maximal high-tech they could develop. They may have inherited few Neanderthal genes, but they inherited in full the mentality of the Neanderthals.

This is an important point: mentalities, even culture, can pass down the generations, even when genes do not. In particular, the importance given to culture, progress, understanding can live in a landscape, partly from the landscape itself.

The mentality of progress, with the advent of agriculture, became ever more crucial, as the ecologies got ruined, and new ones had to be manufactured.

It is the gigantic scale of severe, yet profligate Eurasia, a demanding, yet technologically rewarding environment, which made the evolution of superlative ideas possible, more than anywhere else, by constant interbreeding of exotic facts and logics.   

It is western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle Earth (all the way to India) which provided the best, largest incubator. Therein the Occident, but it is nothing without the mood of progress at nearly any cost.

That mood barely survived Christian fascism. Yet, the Franks were able to found civilization again, on a better basis, within two centuries of the Roman collapse, using superior ideas (no slavery, mandatory education, the church as a tool of the state, elections, etc.)

This was the first Enlightenment, post-Greco-Romans. That superior institutional set-up made the “West’ by the year 1,000 CE, not only richer than Rome, but richer in energy use by inhabitant, than any other place in the world. By then European technology and science was leading (even the invention of “black powder” was a complicated story, where Mongols and Europeans, not just the Chinese, played a role). As Europe became ever more technology dependent, the urge to understand things for sure (“science”) became ever more important.

A succession of “Enlightenments” went on… to this day. The acceleration after 1500 CE was just part of the singularity of understanding we all share into today. in many ways, it just repeated, and re-imposed, constitutional reforms which were made first in the Seventh and Eighth centuries, by the Imperium Francorum (soon to be relabelled “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”).

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PC Is The Perfect Con Against Humanity:

Right now the core of the machinery of what made civilization progress and be ever more superior is threatened. Friends have told me Trump threatened “reason”. Well, their reason (they tend to be in the 1% or serving the 1%, those “friends” of mine). There are many facts and possible logics to animate them, out there.

Consider Brexit logic: it is sheer madness, the madness of rage unbound. As in Trumphobia, Europhobia is motivated by a deep pain which arose from earlier events. (Clinton fanatics hate Trump because of the pain Clinton, Bill, Bush, and Obama, inflicted on them.)

An Arabic scholar wrote to me, saying there was no reason for progress (yes there is, just as on a bicycle). A Jewish (real) friend pointed out that many of the attacks against Europe also stealthily promoted the annihilation of Israel (correct).

The rabid, hateful, anti-European logics out there have doubled as outright attacks against honorable reason. Accusations of racism have been hurled, just to avoid debates (both Trump and your truly were subjected to this; many attacks against me were made snapchat way: erasing the fighting words full of hatred within minutes, after they were widely distributed, a method to practice defamation… without being able to prove it).

All we need to know is that never before in the history of the biosphere has the potential be greater for extreme catastrophe. Or extreme progress towards more mastery of nature by life. In any case, superior reason will adjudicate.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Europe, Progress, Reason