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Dec. 17, 2006 The US now the only super power, is now unavoidably placed in the position of arbiter of world affairs. In the west the position has been the purview of Greece, then Rome, then Spain, then Holland and then France and finally Great Britain. A power to be viable must have an under laying belief system or culture. Greek culture set the stage for the establishment of advanced communities which spread all across the Mediterranean world. Roman law further spread this knowledge creating an empire the envy of the world. With the collapse of this empire the world reverted to its old ways, to be rescued by the Christian church's resurrection of the ancient knowledge. Spain’s Charles V oversaw an empire 20 times the size of that of Rome .The usurpation of the Catholic power by the protestant Dutch rebels within her empire witnessed a further spreading of this knowledge, now divororced from it Greco Roman roots .A great empire was again eclipsed, this time by Bourbon and then revolutionary France, it’s swinish multitude nearly engulfing the western world. Great Britain by borrowing heavily in order to finance the Europeans ,and with her own navy, adverted this catastrophe leaving a world based upon mercantilism. Each civilization had an underlying cultural mosaic; Greece was heavily indebted to Homer and his works, namely the Odyssey and the Iliad. Republican Rome was fortified by the works of Cato emphasizing the no nonsense pastoral pursuits. With the implementation of the Imperial period Augustus felt in necessary to have a more appropriate foundation commissioning Virgil to come up with a founding ethos, the Aenid.The Europeans during the renaissance built a great cultural heritage based upon these works which inspired them to further spread the old knowledge. All of the above cultures have now been superseded by that of the US. What is the overall world mission of the US and what is its dominating philosophy? In a word the spreading of universal suffrage, i.e. a world where each man gets a single vote, this collection of votes setting the world policy. A very noble experiment: and very dangerous. First it would need an educated world population and even then would you really get a result beneficial to the majority (or even a minority come to that)? And who is to decide what an educated population is? Look at the present generation of graduates. Would they be classified as educated by say the professors of ancient Rome or Greece? Who sets the standards? Do all given the chance to partake in a democracy really wind up better off? The Zimbabweans didn’t. (If given a chance of going back to colonial times how many would choose this course? After all the majority of the non western world under colonialism lived, in the main, as they had for thousands of years. I myself can’t spot a truly unique American cultural contribution to the world. The US has some pretty good writers, better than current crop in European for sure, but not really of the category that could be classified as starting a new spiritual course .I can't think of a truly great American composer either who has had the truly earth shattering impact of say Beethoven or Bach. Modern music, which is essentially an American creation, seems to me to be rather sad and confused. A crying out for some type of order seems to be the common purpose of most modern writers of music. It may seem that a majority of the worlds population are opting for American culture, in some cases adapting their own to it, but I would say that they are not bono fide converts. More they are humouring the great giant in order to reap as much benefit as they can before the inevitable decline, to then go on unconcernedly with their own culture. After all they reason, with the ingrained knowledge of thousands of years, how can a civilization built upon such a shaky cultural foundation endure? How can any civilization survive such a degree of daily violence and lawlessness?
Could the influx of refugees, especially those from
Latin America, be a way of connecting with Greco
Roman roots. Has the protestant cultural model gone as
far as it can go to be to be replaced by the original
thing .Is the Catholic religion, as in times past,
the conduit connecting the present to the past. We
may sneeringly deride religion as being the product of
an uneducated mind, but then how many truly educated
minds do we have among the atheists of today, who seem
to be more prone to mysticism than were the ancient
Babylonians.
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