People in Roman where educated and knowledge of human body and science. After was middle ages where the church was norm and major player. And lost knowledge a lack of interest in science,invention and technology. It was not to the renaissance that people got interest in science,invention and technology.
The roman empire was lot more advance than middle ages having running water, sewage system,large drinking fountains.
And emphases on being clean. All that was lost.
Just look at some of the inventions.
Roman inventions
-Aqueducts
-Concrete
-Newspapers
-Welfare
-Bound Books
-Roads
-Roman Arches
-The Julian Calendar
-The Twelve Tables and the Corpus Juris Civilis
-Battlefield Surgery
And Romans had tools, painkillers,surgeons,catheters, scalpels and forceps, and hospitals.
Well I don’t think North America and Europe today are going to lose knowledge they just declining to point soon most new knowledge, new science,new technology and new inventions will come out of Asia than North America and Europe.
You are equating engineering skill with education (and general education at that…I’d hazard a guess that Kobal2 is as well aware of Romes engineering abilities as anyone in this thread, and that’s not what the point was). Also, your assertion that all, most or even a good percentage of scientific breakthroughs are coming out of ‘Asia’ a.k.a. China (which is what you are implying) is just ridiculous. I’d ask for a cite to back up what you are asserting, but really what would be the point? You’ve shown in this thread that you really don’t know much about the subject and are impervious to people trying to educate you on the various aspects of the ‘debate’.
The US and Europe aren’t going to fall like Rome, we aren’t falling behind, and it’s not a zero sum game. That pretty much summarizes things.
If China never had dynastic and open its borders up, and not being so isolated in the world China would be ahead of US and UK by now than 2050 time line.
Isolationism a.) has been exaggerated for China relative to the overall scope of its history and b.) was probably not intrinsic to its relative collapse in the 19th century.
Severe imbalance of trade ( very largely driven by opium, which was not a domestic crop when the trade started ), ossification of a formally vigorous civil administration, a population explosion that placed huge strains on said administration, unequal and ill-structured attempts at modernization and the massive civil strife that stemmed in part from the above issues all served to cripple China at a critical juncture in world history.
A certain degree of political isolationism on behalf of the late ( but not really early ) Ming and late ( but not really early ) Qing certainly may have exacerbated some problems. But it probably was not the ultimate source of most of China’s structural issues.
Um, no. Like, hell no. Only (some) aristocrats did, and only because they had copious free time to fuck around thanks to all of the work and agriculture being done by a solid mass of slaves. But the mob of Rome was just as uneducated and illiterate as that of the Middle Ages.
It’s, for example, in the Renaissance that people started asserting that the Earth was flat and the center of the Universe - scholars of the Middle Ages, much like the Greek math wizes before them, knew full well it was sort of round-ish. The witch burnings, the condemnation of science and scientists, the forbidding of anatomical dissections… all of that is from the Renaissance or later - it only got attributed to the Middle Ages because people from the 17th century, who saw the Church having become very influential and very repressive (in large part due to the happenings of the Protestant Reformation), and megalomaniacally seeing themselves as the only social force opposing it, assumed things were even *worse *in the year 1000. Without bothering to, yanno, check.
It’s a fundamental misreading of history, and historical fact. Or, if you prefer, bullshit.
Again, WRONG. The *Renaissance *was dirty as hell, thanks to a spreading notion that it was cleanliness that caused the big epidemics of plague, typhus and cholera that happened around the 15th. The body, absent a protective of grime and shit, was ill-equipped against ill humours and noxious gases you see.
Ancient and Medieval Frankish culture on the other hand was very much into bathing and cleanliness, as were the Vikings. Nor were the Romans particularly focused on hygiene - they just loved their hot baths, because… well, have you ever taken a hot bath ? It’s niiiice :).
As for Roman sewage, yeah, maybe, kind of. In (some) major cities. But a) that’s not everywhere in the Roman Empire and b) the early Middle Ages saw the devolution of cities for a variety of factors. No huge cities, no need for complex sewage systems.
Romans didn’t have newspapers or bound books, arches were well understood (and in fact improved upon) in the Middle Ages, metallurgy improved, agricultural techniques improved, boats improved… There was *some *technological lossage in the wake of the fall of Rome, but the Middle Ages were not static in that regards, not by a long shot.
And once you move south or east of the Mediterranean into the Muslim world, oh boy. Did they ever leave the Romans in the dust.
Hospitals are for the most part a medieval invention, copied from the Muslim *bimaristans *during the early Crusades, and were religious charity projects of the church you seem to loathe so. That’s why they’re all called “Hospital Saint Something” or “Hospital of the Sacred Whatever”.
As far as Roman ones go, their construction spread somewhat after the Council of Nicaea in 325. The first major one is mentioned in the Justinian Code… in 529. So, *still after *the Christian shift, still linked to religion, and closer to the so-called Fall of the Roman Empire than to its roots. And they weren’t really hospitals anyway - more like public safety quarantine zones, to lock up lepers and other contagious folks to die.
Also, perhaps . . . it was crippled by just not wanting industrial progress all that much, because the Chinese liked what they had and saw no need for change. From Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of China (1922):
Let’s also remember that the US has little in the way of ethnic tensions. At least in terms of people who are virtually identical fighting each other. There are no Catholics fighting Protestants here. A black-white race war is innnncredibly unlikely. There will continue to be incidents where Muslims are targeted, but there will not be out and out riots as seen in France
…I THINK. I grant that the chance a mob of non-Muslims looking for Muslims to beat and pull out of their temples is non-zero. But frankly the kind of thing seen in an X-Men comic* seems very unlikely to me and would be incredibly condemned afterwards. The Government would break its back bending over trying to bring to justice those perps.
Earlier example, Merovingian cathedrals. Note arches, domes, spires… It’s not like Roman and Gallo-Roman architects all suddenly imploded :), and Vitruvius’ treaty was like a Bible to these guys (much like De Re Militari would be the general’s primer all the way to the contemporary ere).
Different culture. The Japanese have always had a national genius for borrowing things from foreign cultures and, in the process, changing them and making them distinctly Japanese. They learned writing from the Chinese, and they simplified the characters. They learned deep-frying from the Portuguese, and they invented tempura. But the Chinese historically believed, and maintained as official state doctrine for centuries, that they had nothing of value to learn from barbarians. And for most of their history it was largely true – all their neighbors were primitive by comparison, or else civilized in slavish imitation of China. It became false when the Europeans arrived.
I don’t disagree but the lesson there is that every culture responds differently. Trying to make parallels between the US and Rome and then extrapolate a common conclusion is so tenuous as to be pointless.
Beyond that, this is just a variant of the old inferiorist “Country X works harder/invents more/saves more/has school on Saturdays/has more tanks/has more missiles/has better missiles, etc…” contention that I’ve been hearing since sometime in the early 1980s. It’s a cousin to the “Europeans are SOOO civilized and we’re SOOO barbaric” statements that every knuckleheaded college kid comes back after a summer in Europe with.
First it was the Soviet menace and how their military was as well equipped as ours, and was SO much larger, that we were doomed. Simultaneously it was the Japanese and their manufacturing prowess being poised to crush ours.
In reality, neither the Soviets nor Japanese amounted to squat.
Now it’s the Chinese on the economic, military and innovation fronts… and the argument is as equally flawed for them as it is was for the Soviets and Japanese.
If I had to guess, it’ll be that the Chinese military is never a real threat, and that the real innovative stuff will come from elsewhere, while the Chinese will end up following the same exact path that other countries have- they’ll eventually develop a middle class who’ll demand worker protections and higher pay, and they’ll quit being so competitive, and they’ll have a few sectors they’ll dominate due to some sort of competitive advantage, while the less sophisticated manufacturing will move somewhere that requires cheap labor more than expertise.