The historian's confusion, is the object of their study, before the story has been written on the outcome of the end of the story, for people living in the moment, it is difficult to say what the real meaning; and the outcome after the episode, with the deduction of historians have found "may", and it is not reassuring. The real meaning of historical research may be only in its interest, knowing the story, looking at the front, feeling that there is nothing new under the sun, but there are so many destine doomed to be rewritten in the human world. Everything seems to understand everything, there may be unexpected.
Ian Maurice's "the measure of civilization", I'm afraid there's nothing to be interesting about. The author seems to have written a more famous book called "how long the West will dominate" for the "Western centrism". Then this "measure of civilization" is a supplement to the former. The author in the works will compare quantitative achievements of civilization, so as to realize the "Guan Gong and Qin Qiong" type checking.
I find that to understand the real world, one is to do horizontal comparison, and then to understand it through international comparative study of economics. The other is to do a longitudinal comparison, that is to say, look at the development from a long time perspective. This book is absolutely a good book. Energy acquisition is used as an indicator to measure civilization. From this point of view of China, the highest peak of the development of ancient Chinese civilization was in the Song Dynasty, but it still did not reach the peak of the development of ancient Western civilization - Rome. It should be said that the cultural superiority of China in the past 1 million years is based on the retrogression of civilization in Europe. While the European civilization backward, it is made of fossil fuel There's no making without breaking., has become the main source of energy, so as to realize the leap of civilization. China and the decline of modern civilization, is not fading, is still in steady growth, but the growth rate is much slower than in the west, that is to say to human, animal, hydraulic energy based access has been the end of the development, the technology has been a generation later than western countries, no matter how hard than the others. This is a reason for the failure of NOKIA, not a bad mobile phone, but a bad time.
The ultimate feeling is the same. The most important measure of civilization is the use and use of energy. Because from a number of aspects of food, social organization and military capacity per capita, the ultimate underlying cause is energy. The diversity of food, the intake of protein, and the per capita calorie intake are closely related to the large-scale use of energy. Because the energy consumed to produce 1 kilograms of protein is 10 times the energy of 1 kg of plant food. Intensive energy use is also essential in meeting the consumption of large populations. In the capacity of war, the ability of modern warfare is actually compared to the energy release density of the effective area of the enemy units. In terms of social organizational capacity, in fact, it represents the size of the total amount of disposable energy. Information capabilities, which seem to have nothing to do with energy, have improved the efficiency of energy use as a whole. So, from the future, energy is the first of all things, absolutely not.
With the advent of the industrial revolution, the European Revolution had a direct impact on the whole western civilization. The ancient ancient countries of the east also enjoyed the benefit of heaven and son in the feudal dynasty. It can not be said that the Chinese are too rigid and rigid. But the Oriental civilization is implicit and reserved, let the Oriental civilization, take the gentle route, inferior to the western "wild animal school" creativity. Geographical reasons, the Oriental civilization is always lying on the big bed of natural resources, enjoying the unique material resources. Compared with the western industrial revolution, the economic impetus caused by the western industry, the eastern civilization is not cold, and disdain such revolutionary innovation. Therefore, China's economy is compared to the western economy, which has been stagnated for about 400 years. As the core of the eastern civilization, China and Japan, the development line of the two countries has also been divided. After the Edo era, Japanese civilization has been quite different from that of Japan. Compared with China, out of the feudal society, domestic and foreign wars have scrubbed the spirit of the eastern lions, and the eastern lions became Oriental pandas. Has been to the new stage of socialism, China intent to narrow the Western civilization gap, you can see, the eastern and Western civilization, is no longer one-sided factors brought by the industrial revolution, but the historical change, who will play a more important role, who will dominate the progress of social civilization.
Taking history as a mirror, one can know. Through the comparison of the social development index between the East and the west, we can find that the eastern and Western civilizations are in fact a process of extinction. For readers who care about the evolution of Chinese civilization, social progress and national development, Maurice has shown a new perspective and convincing explanation, so that we can have confidence in the future of our country and our nation.