[Mb-civic] Ignorance Is Bliss; Sometimes It's Policy - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Ignorance Is Bliss; Sometimes It's Policy

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, August 5, 2005; Page A15

The ranch at Crawford hardly compares with the Forbidden City, but 
George W. Bush has something in common with the Ming emperors of China: 
He seems determined to make his great nation less ambitious and more 
ignorant.

He wouldn't see it that way, of course, but the emperors didn't see it 
that way either. And I don't know how else to explain policies and 
pronouncements that make the quest for knowledge conditional on 
politics. That is a prescription for decline.

In the early 1400s the Ming emperor Zhu Di made China into the world's 
leading maritime nation, sending huge fleets on missions of trade and 
exploration as far as the Swahili coast of Africa. It should have been 
just a matter of a few years before Chinese sailors discovered the 
Americas. But Zhu Di's successors, influenced by court politics, called 
home the fleets and forbade them to sail again, forfeiting the riches of 
the New World -- and five centuries of global domination -- to an 
underdeveloped backwater called Europe.

I guess it's a general rule of political dynasties, in China as well as 
in Texas, that the blood thins with successive generations.

<>Examples? Well, there's the way Bush insists on hamstringing American 
scientists who are trying to explore the potential medical benefits of 
therapies involving embryonic stem cells.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080401824.html 

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