[FRIAM] Civilizations, Complexity and Compassion

[PPARYSKI at aol.com]

A quick response from a former historian and ex UN guy:  China and  Japan are 
examples of societies that have not collapsed but have gone through  waves of 
change.  As Jared Diamond so eloquently wrote in his seminal book  Collapse 
what determines whether a civilization collapses or mostly  collapse (no or few 
societies have totally disappeared; most re-emerge in a  different form) is 
its ability to adopt adaptive management strategies to  changing conditions.  
Complexity can be used as a somewhat  imperfect tool to rationally determine 
what the best adaptive management  strategies are. 
 
There is a book, 1421, that describes China's  great effort to explore and 
map the world well before the Europeans and why  their effort ultimately was 
abandoned and partially lost, although the  Venetians used the Chinese maps. The 
Chinese actually explored the Americas  and Africa and started trading in 
these places.  Basically the mandarins  decided to isolate China from the rest of 
the world to improve their own power  base, a bad adaptive strategy.  Perhaps 
had they used the complexity  tools devised by Confucius they would have not 
so.  
 
Paul



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