Quote Originally Posted by Pindar
Democracy can be traced to the Fifth Century B.C.
Well, duh, it can traced because we have written records. And yet there is a huge gap in there where democracy was absent. It did not return until the shackles of the aristocracy and Church were thrown off over two millenia later. Might I remind you that Athen's democracy destoryed itself? The oligarchs won. And so VDH transferred attention to Rome, which was a republic. Carthage was also a sort of elected republic as memory serves... The Framers of the US Constitution actually feared Athen's form of govt. from what I've read.

More importantly we lack information to know how many other societies operated. It is a huge leap to assume that it did not exist elsewhere...considering that there were other elected forms of govt. existing at the same time that we do know of.

Science is a product of the Seventeenth Century. It has no prior correlate.
Recent scientific method is oversold. There were scientific communities well before the 17th Century in various fields. People tested various facets of the world arround them, proposed explanations, and recorded the information. Agriculture and animal husbandry have been with us for many thousands of years. You would be hard pressed to claim there was not scientific method involved throughout. The development of siege technology in Assyria and again later in Syracuse are further examples of science in action.

Why is modern science oversold? Because people fail to recognize that so many incremental advances in so many areas were needed to finally bring us to this point. We now have the interconnection and media to distribute the learnings, and not to forget them so easily. They are not lost by a single conquest or destruction of a nation or library or regime. Before the scientific communities were smaller, travel and communication were far more limited, literacy was far lower, and the media of recording, retaining, and distributing works was meager.

If you want an idea what happens when a community of the learned is too small, look at Tasmania. From what I understand the original Tasmanians had decent aboriginal technology when they walked across the land bridge. When this land bridge was covered by water their simple technologies to even things like fishing and clothing regressed. Without some interchange with a larger community, things were slowly lost.

Civil liberties date from the Eighteenth Century.
So you know for a fact that no other nations/groups had a system that protected individual rights before that time? There is no way of even knowing. Talk about drawing conclusions from incomplete sampling...

A cultural-parity approach seems only tenable for those who haven't spent time outside of the Western cultural loop.
You sound like VDH... I've spent time working in Asia and can appreciate differences of several Asian societies, and I reject VDH's drivel.

Singapore's model is interesting. I'm not sure that I fully understand it but I can recognize some things about it from my time there. China seems to be emulating it as a way to catch up. One might even argue that Singapore's approach is closer to a capitalism/market based govt than any Western govt. which tend to be more bound more by the contraints of individual liberty and property rights (I prefer our way, but theirs seems to work for them so it is worth trying to understand why.)