This week, my Guru opined that he was unaware of any dominant society that lasted very long that was not willing to adopt and adapt ideas from many other societies with which they came in contact. Not only did the dominant societies with staying power adapt ideas, they were also officially very welcoming of the people who brought these ideas to the country.\u00a0 The country made the immigrants feel like the immigrants wanted to adopt the dominant country as their home.\u00a0 (Of course everything is comparative.\u00a0 No place is completely one way or the other. Not all people in a country exude the official policy of the country.)<\/p>\n
I come to the following ideas in contemplating what my Guru said to me.<\/p>\n
The power of intolerant societies does not last long.\u00a0 If our enemies are doomed by their intolerance, why would we want to join them in their doom by being intolerant back?<\/p>\n
The ultimate payback for their unwillingness to be able to accept ideas from everyone is our continued ascendancy because we are willing to consider and adopt ideas from anyone.<\/p>\n
In some historic periods Islam was more tolerant than European societies.\u00a0 The Islamic based countries dominated at that time.\u00a0 It is not clear what is cause and what is effect, but over time the Islamic societies lost both their dominance and their tolerance.<\/p>\n
As we become more fundamentalist and less tolerant we risk following in the path of decline that the Muslim countries have followed in the last few centuries.\u00a0 Is this something we should be proud of letting the intolerant push us into?<\/p>\n
If China, India, and other up and coming societies learn the lessons that this country did in our early days, and if we forget those lessons, it should be pretty obvious who might be the dominant force in the upcoming years.<\/p>\n
In case you don’t get my sense of humor, let me explain.\u00a0 When I thought about writing this piece about what Shankerappa (known to many as Hank) said, I thought the term Guru might be an appropriate term given that Hank comes from India. He told me that several of his friends suggested he give up engineering for the more lucrative field of Guru. I am glad he stuck to engineering as a profession and only chose Guru as an avocation. Otherwise, I might not have met him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week, my Guru opined that he was unaware of any dominant society that lasted very long that was not willing to adopt and adapt ideas from many other societies with which they came in contact. Not only did the dominant societies with staying power adapt ideas, they were also officially very welcoming of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4467"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4475,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4467\/revisions\/4475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}