The theory and the applications are associated mainly to the European cultural
space. Europe is a cultural environment where the extensive development of
civilization was achieved based on symbolic models, associated or not to image
models.
Except geometry (created in a space in close communication with the European
cultural space), Europeans have created the great fundamental models. We are
talking here about Christianity, open sea navigation, the heliocentric model
of the Universe, polyphonic music, Newton's Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics and
Relativity theory.
Let's evaluate the European spirit based on some of these models.
The Roman Empire has been created through conquest, but wherever the Romans
got, they created efficient organisation structures, which have been in favour
of the conquered people too. Thus, Romans have been both conquerors and
civilisators. This characteristic in the way of thinking is a permanent
feature of Europeans up to our time. Thus, the large colonial empires did not
bring colonisation of Europe with slaves. Independent of the injustice to the
colonies, when leaving them, they were left in a good or very good general
shape, e.g. Hong Kong. Nowadays, the European Union spends a lot of money
earned by European work, to civilise Eastern Europe.
Europeans created Christianity for Europeans. This is why the Christian
religion is tolerant and has reduced tendencies towards fanatism.
A significant number of facts show that Europeans have an adventurous spirit
(Marco Polo, Columbus, Magellan etc.) The spirit of adventure is associated
closely with the desire of knowledge, the search for new ways of evolution,
and the need to analyze everything, and never accept an invariant situation.
An example exists connected with the heliocentric model of the Universe. From
Antiquity, everybody knew that Earth is the center of the Universe.
This was proved by direct everyday experience and, at least, implicitly, by
the Holy Bible. The scholars of Antiquity have left us precise methods of
calculation for eclipses of the Sun and the Moon, and data on the ecliptic,
and as a consequence on the position of the Equator and the Tropics. Then, why
after year 1500, some Europeans did consider that something was fishy about
the geocentric model of the Universe?
There was a small problem; from the billions of stars, seven had an apparently
chaotic movement. The Ancient Greeks have called them rambling stars or
planets. The European spirit could not accept this. Nikolaus Copernicus
published in the last year of his life the heliocentric theory of the
Universe. It was for the first time when the European spirit and Christian
religion clashed. Giordano Bruno, a great European, has payed with his death
the sustaining of the idea of the Earth not being the center of the Universe,
and Galileo Galilei had to be humiliated to survive.
But, surprise! Kepler verified Copernicus' theory and discovered that it is
wrong (the positions calculated for the planets did not correspond to the
experimental data). Kepler was not discouraged and he discovered that, if the
orbits were to be ellyptical, and not circular as said by Copernicus, then,
the calculations could be compatible with the experimental data. Later, Newton
was able to find the explanation of this situation.
The problem was solved beyond any doubt in the favour of the European spirit.
After many centuries, the Christian Church admitted officially the situation
and rehabilitated Galileo Galilei, but not Giordano Bruno.
The above considerations suggest the essence of the European spirit:
liberalism and tolerance, the desire for knowledge and the tendency to
adventure.
We will say a few words about a new issue. It appears now, that a European
Constitution is to be written. The problem is associated with the protests of
the Christian Church generated by the non-inclusion in the Constitution draft
of a phrase on the Christian origin of the European civilisation. As we have
seen above, Europeans have created Christianity for Europeans. In spite of
this, in many cases the European spirit clashed violently with the Christian
spirit. The main reason is connected to the dynamism associated with the
European spirit, which cannot accept an invariant model (religion).
The European spirit always was victorious, but the Christian Church did not
succeed to evolve fast enough to sustain always the European spirit. The
Church doesn't seem to have learned anything along the centuries, if, even
nowadays, it opposes the European spirit in problems like the same-sex
marriages, abortion or accepting women as priests. Thus, there is, up to a
point, a justification to the decision not to include in the European
Constitution the reference to Christianity.
We need to note that accepting same-sex marriages is not, in principle, a good
thing, and I believe that many Europeans have this point of view. However, the
European liberal and tolerant spirit states that, passing over any pros and
cons, there should not exist, in principle, any authority to oppose to the
wish of the people to search and experiment new ways of life together.
European homosexuals are Europeans, and have the right to live their life as
they consider it right.
Note: The fact that the Christian Church, created by Europeans for Europeans,
has come at times into violent conflict with the European spirit, does not
mean at all that it is a non-European Church. During the 2000 years of
Christianity, the Christian Church had a very positive role in keeping the
stability of the world, and gave hope to a lot of people. Leaving faith
behind, created monsters (e.g. Communism). This section wants only to show to
the Church, that it should be more flexible and, independent of its great
merits, avoid to get into conflict with the European spirit. The European
spirit has always been victorious and will always win any battle with the
Christian spirit.
Let's follow however some facts. The first fundamental symbolic model is
Euclid's geometry. It was created about the year 300 BC and is unmodified up
to our days. The scolars of the period left us a huge amount of scientific
data kept in large libraries of the Antiquity. At 415 AD, the Christian
leaders destroyed the great library of Alexandria, because the books have been
considered contrary to the Christian religion.
The result was that scientific knowledge has been completely destroyed for a
very long time (the European civilization entered in the Dark Ages), so that
the next fundamental symbolic model (Newton) appeared over 2000 years after
Euclid! It is clear that the Christian Church had an active role in this
unacceptable big delay, by the destruction of the books and blocking
freethinking. However, it is not clear that this delay was caused by the
emergence of the monotheist Christian religion or it is associated with a
characteristic of the development of the brain. I mean, any monotheist
religion wants the control of the thinking system of the people. The main
problem is if the people accept this, or not. The Christian Church used to
keep up to fifty years ago a list of forbidden books and ideas, but very few
people take it in consideration. The general problem is still open.
The evolution towards symbolic models reduces more and more the influence of
religion on society, and this can be seen in the increase in the number of
those who ignore religion.
Many people, who deny the existence of God, are consideres 'atheist'. However,
this term has another meaning, closer to its initial meaning, given by the
ancient Greek, i.e. a person who can live without the help of God. We denote
this term by "atheist-2" and we associate this definition to it: a person who
can live without the help of God, without any other specifications. An
atheist-2 could e.g. not deny the existence of God, but he doesn't need Him to
live normally in a European-type society. This also means that an atheist-2
can enter any religious site (Christian or not) and respect the site, faith
and the believers. This has been mostly the European spirit of all times.
One of the tendencies of Europeans, in accordance with the European spirit,
has been to be atheist-2 (an effect of the liberalism and tolerance), but only
lately, as an effect of the increase of the power of symbolic models, this
shows, including in the statistical data. This tendency will grow and it will
depend only on the Christian Church to change, and accept the atheist-2 as
they are.
Europe has another problem: it started the most destructive wars of the 20th
century and created horrible ideologies: Nazism and Communism. The wars,
Nazism and Communism can be associated to the adventurous spirit specific to
Europeans, but contradict liberalism and tolerance. The Europeans wars
appeared when the relative importance of the 4 factors has been distorted.
Thus, those who started the wars, those who applied the Nazi and Communist
principles have departed from the European spirit. There will always be a high
risk for Europe, when this spirit is distorted.
Let's see, for evaluation purpose, Europe's relationship with its main
'competitor', USA. The Europeans, who have formed mainly the population of
USA, have been the Europeans with a strong tendency to action (they have been
building easily ZAMs and AZM and they have been eager to activate them).
This explains the power and efficiency of the American society, but also the
weaknesses of the USA (does not 'produce' top personalities and needs to
'import' them). This also explains the very high level of XS1-type
schizophrenia in the American society.
As we know, in a stable and efficient society, the tendency exists to build
suitable models to each problem. The Americans consider generally that there
is only one optimal way to solve a problem. The specialists will find this
optimal solution and will impose it to everybody. Thus the population reacts
suitably to any problem.
However the price for efficiency is XS1-type schizophrenia; if the situation
is changed, the people have no suitable solutions anymore, and they are
blocked as they are not prepared to build on their own new models in front of
a new changing reality (this problem has been presented in several other
ETAs). From here emerge the differences between the two cultural environments,
the European and the American ones.
Example: In any country, included USA, there is a white line in front of any
traffic light. If the traffic light changes to red and somebody stops after
passing the line by 10-cm e.g., this is illegal in the USA and the driver is
called in court. In Europe this 'illegality' produces at most smiles.
Europeans will never accept 'perfection'.
The American success is given by perfection, and perfection is in
contradiction with creativity and the European spirit. The European spirit is
knowledge oriented, while the American perfectionist spirit is goal-oriented.
Let's see some examples of the competition between Europe and USA.
In Civil Aviation, the Europeans came to sell more planes than the Americans
do. This shows that the European spirit is efficient in the more and more
symbolic world we live in.
In Nuclear Physics, Europeans have discovered two subnuclear particles, "W"
and "Z" (Nobel Prize), when the Americans had the needed equipment (high-
energy particle accelerators), but did not do the necessary experiment. The
Europeans continue to be creative and efficient.
Let's see the reverse as well. The Europeans wanted to build a fighter-plane,
to compete the US ones. Then they discovered that they haven't got the
technology to make it 'invisible', haven't got enough money to build it and
haven't got the background infrastructure to support this weapon system. Even
the navigation system (GPS) is American. This is an example of the European
adventurous spirit. This spirit can be seen in the building of the A380 (the
biggest airliner in the world). We will see in a few years the result of the
competition between the American perfectionism and the European spirit.
We have situations when perfectionism is in conflict with the European
tolerance (the Americans are less tolerant than Europeans). The result is that
in a few crucial problems of the long-range evolution of the society, the
Europeans have a slightly reduced capacity of understanding what is going on.
E.g. in the Irakian problem, the European tolerant spirit produced a different
reaction than the USA. I think that many Europeans are convinced that
terrorism cannot be fought by dialogue, but their tolerant spirit made them
sustain that. Here the Europeans have problems, which will grow along with the
evolution of the society. The Europeans have no principial solution, as,
actually, the Americans haven't either.
Let's summarize the European spirit.
The tolerant spirit, characteristic to Europeans too, has to be preserved as
absolutely necessary in a symbolic society, but it can turn against the
society in fundamental problems.
The liberalism, spirit of adventure and desire of knowledge are basic
components of the European spirituality, and they cannot be given-up, as long
as Europe will exist.
Europe will be in great danger anytime when it will distort the European
spirit, as it had been defined above.
This evaluation discussion should be ended here, but unfortunately all I have
stated up to now is not really correct in a scientific approach. As we know, a
scientific approach is based on the existence of a declared local model. This
local model has to generate the definitions of the terms used. Let's start
building a local model, and then we can return to read the above statements.
Let's begin with the 4 terms: liberalism, tolerance, spirit of adventure and
desire of knowledge.
Liberalism is associated with the technical capacity of a brain to build
several long-range models, associated to the same external reality. Moreover,
that brain has to compensate for the design deficiency XD3 (with A and B
variants, see MDT).
As several models exist, associated to the same external reality, the
possibility exists to activate any of them or several at one time; these
models can change dynamically. The liberalism and the spirit of tolerance are
closely connected. Liberalism admits several ways of action, and tolerance
makes possible the choice of several ways, alternatively or simultaneously.
Liberalism and tolerance are characteristic to an evolved and high quality
brain. It is very important to note that tolerance implies the knowledge of
several models associated to the same external reality.
When the brain cannot build anymore several models associated with the same
external reality, it will restrain itself to a single model, and intolerance
appears.
The perfectionists (e.g. the Americans) can have a serious problem here.
Perfectionism means rejecting basically all the models, except one created by
specialists. Thus, the tendency to induced schizophrenia (XS1B) increases for
the perfectionists.
Example: The prompter is used in some TV broadcasts. The persons reading the
news are totally de-personalised and practically recite, sometimes without
understanding what they are saying, even when they are the authors of the
texts. When news is presented, both speakers and listeners have two problems:
to read/listen to the message and to understand its meaning. When the
perfectionism of transmission of the message is exagerated, people will
allocate less energy to understanding its meaning. Using the prompter is
against the tolerance and the spirit of adventure characteristic to Europeans.
Let's analyze now the spirit of adventure and the desire of knowledge.
In front of a complex external reality, we need to build more and more complex
ZM models. Without them, ZAMs can be built only approximately. This situation
is practically very frequent, and the reaction to imperfect ZMs will
characterize the spirit of adventure and the desire of knowledge.
It is clear that if we have no good quality ZMs, we cannot build good quality
ZAMs, and this will block even more our possibility to build good quality ZMs.
A solution is to develop the ZMs and ZAMs (by simulation on suitable test
models) up to the moment when we have enough guarantees that an action on the
external reality will evolve as predicted. This is how perfectionists act. A
second solution is to act based on the imperfect available models, evaluating
the risk in a more or less precise way. The action in these circumstances
characterizes the spirit of adventure.
The spirit of adventure is strongly related to the desire of knowledge. In
fact, we can say that the desire of knowledge (to have better and better ZMs)
is driven by the spirit of adventure (to activate ZAMs that we know to be
imperfect).
Perfectionists are more goal-oriented, and not knowledge-oriented.
Example (effects of perfectionism): The Americans have imposed the operating
systems for computers and many programs associated with them. Perfectionists
have created them. Their scope is to attain a goal and not directly knowledge.
This spirit is incompatible with the European spirit and many Europeans feel
it. Forced to evolve in a perfectionist type environment, the computer user
becomes slowly but surely an accessory to the computer.
Another example can be given associated with the negative effects of
perfectionism. After the 9/11 events, the perfectionist American solution was
the introduction of draconic customs and border rules and other homeland
security rules, which are not efficient in any real situation. The
perfectionists have no other available method. In Europe, the spirit of
adventure and desire for knowledge is manifest, which means that the Europeans
do not act according to 'rules' as perfectionists do, but use their
independent capacity of learning and acting in a new unknown environment.
We will see on long-term the efficiency of the European methods in a world in
which, according to MDT, the dispersion of the human brain development level
is increasing dangerously.