China & America
China thinks it's the center of the world and America thinks it's the center of history.
To be fair, for 1000 years, China was the center of the world. Confucian philosophy is the cultural backbone of its neighbors, until 1500 it was the dominant power in any arena it wished to be, and even when conquered it absorbs the invaders, renaming the Mongolian Empire the Yuan Dynasty and the Manchu the Qing Dynasty. This is one of the reasons the USSR and China failed as allies; Stalin thought Russia should lead the Communist world because it became communist first, while Mao thought China should lead simply because it was China. And they were both paranoid egomaniacs.
The United States sees itself as the center or focus of history. I have to qualify that because if you are a sufficiently religious Christian, you may believe that we are in the End Times, which means America is the last great Christian Empire before God blows His Whistle and everyone adds up their purity scores.
If you read American history books from an economic stand point, the history of economics has been the march of money from Venice to Amsterdam to London to New York. Unfortunately, that money keeps moving West thanks to New York investors looking for cheap labor and low regulations, turning China into the new economic powerhouse where smog is just a part of daily life. But with any luck, American ingenuity will invent the AI and robots that put us all out of work and we can all retire, making our nation the crucial turning point in history. Unless the Japanese do it first; they have more advanced robotics than we do due to labor shortages.
If you read American history books from a philosophical perspective, the point of philosophy from Plato on is the education of our Founding Fathers and the creation of the Constitution. With a few minor exceptions like those trouble makers Marx and Neitzsche, philosophy, from an American perspective, dead ends with the Transcendentalist attempt to refashion philosophy for a Christian democracy. I know it doesn't really, but I'm talking about world views, not real history.
To be fair, for 1000 years, China was the center of the world. Confucian philosophy is the cultural backbone of its neighbors, until 1500 it was the dominant power in any arena it wished to be, and even when conquered it absorbs the invaders, renaming the Mongolian Empire the Yuan Dynasty and the Manchu the Qing Dynasty. This is one of the reasons the USSR and China failed as allies; Stalin thought Russia should lead the Communist world because it became communist first, while Mao thought China should lead simply because it was China. And they were both paranoid egomaniacs.
The United States sees itself as the center or focus of history. I have to qualify that because if you are a sufficiently religious Christian, you may believe that we are in the End Times, which means America is the last great Christian Empire before God blows His Whistle and everyone adds up their purity scores.
If you read American history books from an economic stand point, the history of economics has been the march of money from Venice to Amsterdam to London to New York. Unfortunately, that money keeps moving West thanks to New York investors looking for cheap labor and low regulations, turning China into the new economic powerhouse where smog is just a part of daily life. But with any luck, American ingenuity will invent the AI and robots that put us all out of work and we can all retire, making our nation the crucial turning point in history. Unless the Japanese do it first; they have more advanced robotics than we do due to labor shortages.
If you read American history books from a philosophical perspective, the point of philosophy from Plato on is the education of our Founding Fathers and the creation of the Constitution. With a few minor exceptions like those trouble makers Marx and Neitzsche, philosophy, from an American perspective, dead ends with the Transcendentalist attempt to refashion philosophy for a Christian democracy. I know it doesn't really, but I'm talking about world views, not real history.