It had always intrigued me how ancient Greek culture, cradle of Western civilization, compared with ancient Chinese culture, because China has been for most of the last 2000 the most advanced nation on earth. Were revolutionary ideas, like that there should be a rational explanation behind every phenomenon, uniquely Greek, or did the Chinese independently come up with them too ? Geoffrey Lloyd is probably one of the very few, erudite enough on both cultures, to have written a relatively concise book in which he compares both cultures on a number of issues, such as human rights, logic, the existence of one absolute truth, the nature of scientific discovery etc...
It turns out that both cultures were very different (although the author stresses they were not incomensurable, whatever that means in this context), in particular the process of scientific and philosophical discovery. Greek philosophers acted as individuals, defending their theories against colleagues with purely rational arguments on the stage in front of their audience in search of the more convincing truth, even if it was uncomfortable, in an environment where almost all opinions could be voiced (with notable exceptions, such as Socrates) and all (men) were in principle equal, and with the victor earning a larger following of students, much like Western academics do to this day (except at Harvard lately). On the other hand, Chinese philosophy stressed that there is a natural order, with the emperor at the top, with his subjects all interconnected and philosopher mandarins - they were employed servants rather than independent minds - needing to convince the emperor of specific policies beneficial to society as a whole. Although to a biased Westerner like me, the Chinese approach looks doomed to political interference and therefore failure, it did produce the goods : until some three centuries ago China was well ahead of Europe in science.
Reading this book also made me realize even more which monumental debt we owe in the West, in particular in science and academics, to ancient Greece. The standard model of science progressing by continuously being tested against new theories is a Greek one. It is also clear that freedom of opinion and speech was a necessary condition for Greeks to practice philosophy as they saw it, whereas this was not necessarily so in China.
The book is no beach reading material, but luckily it is relatively concise, save for the latter parts, where the author suddenly launches a scathing attack of several pages on the US, in particular its refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol, which puzzled me : what does this have to do with ancient Greece and China ? (Hence only 4 stars)
