tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post106407084675099757..comments2024-03-29T10:24:20.171+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: The deep satisfactions in life - Charles Murray, again!Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-56936833595476854502010-07-17T14:49:07.121+01:002010-07-17T14:49:07.121+01:00Fair point - but Western Civilization needs large ...Fair point - but Western Civilization needs large numbers of second-rate creative minds as well as the handful of first-raters - and the US culture has been pretty good at generating them in the past couple of hundred years. <br /><br />I would certainly favour US exceptionalism over the European model; but the US model doesn't actually make sense either. <br /><br />Essentially, modernity relies on many and frequent sci-tech breakthroughs to generate economic growth to fund ever-escalating levels of bribery/ distraction; until bureacratic parasitism and sclerosis kills the whole thing.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-81583359208852520642010-07-17T11:04:21.008+01:002010-07-17T11:04:21.008+01:00It's all very well hymning American Exceptiona...It's all very well hymning American Exceptionalism, but the USA and its preceding colonies have never contributed a single top-drawer creative mind to Western Civilisation. I mean of the level of Newton, Darwin, Shakespeare, Hume, Smith, Clerk Maxwell, Gauss, Einstein, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Mozart, Descartes, and so on. It might make one pause on the wonders of that way of life if, even if only at the very highest level, it's essentially a parasite. Mark you, you could level the same criticism at Europe post Einstein. And, it must be admitted, that Europe also produced an odious list of great frauds and horrors - Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Freud, Napoleon, ...deariemenoreply@blogger.com