Flat Earth China and the China Intellectual Superiority Thesis of So-called White Nationalists, By Brian Simpson
Some so-called White nationalists and their blogs, have taken the line that East Asians are intellectually superior to Whites. This seems based upon IQ data, even though some studies show the opposite, but, hey liberals, we are not White supremacists! As well there is a thesis in some articles that China was intellectually advanced of the West, only with the West, by some historical accident, moving ahead in the industrial revolution. Dr Ricardo Duchesne has been hammering away at this thesis for some time, although not explicitly mentioning these people.
In a recent post he observes that the Chinese held to a flat earth position until Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century proved to them that the Earth was spherical. The spherical Earth theory was well accepted by Greek philosophers some 2,500 years ago. Eratosthenes determined (around 200 BC) the circumference of Earth with remarkable accuracy even by today's standards, something the Chinese did not do.
The "Chinese culture is superior" thesis is once more shown to be lacking.
"This one fact alone — that the West believed in a spherical earth since ancient times whereas the Chinese believed in a flat earth until Jesuit missionaries gave them a lesson in astronomy in the 17th century — reveals a dramatic contrast in the intellectual development of the West and the Rest.
China has been the second most advanced civilization in history next to the West. It is true that the Islamic world enjoyed a "golden age" between 9th and 13th centuries, thanks to its absorption of Aristotelian philosophy, but this was a short lived phenomenon, with the Islamic world stagnating culturally thereafter. The other civilizations of the world (Persia, India, and the Levant) enjoyed a partial breakthrough in cognition during the Axial Age, 600 BC to 200 AD (creation of universalist religions, overcoming of tribalism and creation of centralized states with some degree of historical consciousness —– but they failed to discover the Logos of the world the way the Presocratics did and never cultivated a theoretical science, logic, and further creativity in the Arts, Literature, Architecture, and Politics.
The Axial Age, however, was just the beginning of European creativity. But to get back to the Flat Earth view of China. Eratosthenes actually determined (around 200 BC) the circumference of Earth with remarkable accuracy. Western academics have tried to find a spherical conception in China, but to no avail. As C. Cullen argues:
Chinese thought on the form of the earth remained unchanged from early times until the first contacts with modern science through the medium of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century […] The lack of instances of arguments for a spherical earth is, of course, compounded by the lack of instances of any counter-argument at all; the flat earth remained unquestioned. This situation persisted until well into the seventeenth century.
Now, if the Chinese argued that the earth was flat in ancient times BC, and continued to do so two thousand years later ——– how much extra time do you think they needed to know it was spherical? We know that Africans would have never known that it was spherical, and there are no indications in the civilization of the Americas, Indonesia, India that they would have known this, unless the idea came from the West. There is reason to believe, therefore, that humans would have known very little about anything unless Europeans had offered the world a thorough education."
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