Yeah no..A vaccine working in one guy and failing in ten people is not a successful vaccine.
Study of history is treated as science especially when you try to extract a rule/trend from it. In our case the rule in question is ‘nations with strong religious component do not thrive’. And in science, one instance to the contrary is enough to disprove the hypothesis. It’s a common practice among historians in their study.
Your vaccine analogy is inapplicable here. Vaccination is done with a certain result in mind i.e the health of patient. Whereas, religion is not ‘administered’ with the intention of creating a flourishing civilization.
I said it is near impossible for religious states to develop like western states or even south east asia has done. I was obviously talking about the present era while making the point. Talking about pre industrial age empires makes no sense because empires were decided based on who controlled the most men and who had the best archery, cavalry or batallions. Then industrial revolution happened and suddenly the world was never the same again. Man invented a small weapon that could level an entire city while that would take a gigantic army of soldiers to do that in the past.
Later we transitioned into the technological age, and countries which invested in science and technology the best, progressed the most. The great Mongolian empires came from Mongolia. The great Mughal empire came from Uzbekistan. Many of the great conquerors came from present day Afghanistan. Just think why these places where such great past empires existed, don't seem to have developed much while countries like Japan and South Korea are decades ahead in progress and development. It is a survival of the fittest and only those societies which invested in science and technology could survive and develop in the technological era when swords and arrows aren't effective anymore.
You need to differentiate between empires and civilizations. Number of men and effective archery-cavalry might have been enough for an empire but a lot more was required to create a civilization even in pre-industrial times. Mongols had an empire but could never create a thriving civilization.
Investment in science and education did not take place only after the industrial revolution. It was the hallmark of many great civilizations before as well. So limiting your study to the postindustrial era only is disingenuous.
It's like the past hockey teams of India and Pakistan which used to rule the hockey world, that is until the western countries started developing better teams based on better training facilities, improvement in sports science and nutrition while India and Pakistan hockey teams stagnated because their hockey became archaic and obsolete while modern hockey became a more physical and faster game. Saying it is possible to rule hockey with passion alone and giving examples of past Indian and Pakistani hockey teams won't cut it in the present era of advanced understanding of sports science.
Saudi Arabia (or any of the rich middle eastern states) is not really a good example. The Saudis hit the geographical jackpot when numerous oil fields were discovered in the mid 20th century. And so, it could become rich rapidly mid 20th century onwards as it had the most valuable resource pool - petroleum while Ukraine was suffering under the failed communist policies of the Soviet Union. When Americans and immigrants were building Saudi Arabia on petrodollars, the Ukrainians were suffering famines and droughts due to terrible policies of the Soviet Union.
As bad as Ukraine are, they still build military weapons, ships and tanks and export them, they send rockets to space on their own. I may be wrong but I'm not sure if Saudi Arabia exports any military hardware to other countries. Everything in Saudi Arabia is done by the immigrants, even the sports teams of these rich middle eastern states have immigrant black athletes winning medals for their countries. So Saudi Arabia getting rich by hitting the black gold jackpot is not really a great example.
Exactly. You are proving my point. There are many factors other than religion that determine the trajectory of nations. In Saudi’s case it was oil and for Ukraine it were the Soviets. But there are many nations with oil that could not prosper and then there are nations that are doing well despite their socialist past.
We head into similar conundrums whenever we try to attribute a single factor responsible for the rise and fall of nations. Even if you take other factors such as geography/environment, ethnicity, adversaries, leadership etc individually, you will fail to form a logical explanation. It’s a multivariable problem and Human beings are a sum of these multiplicities.
The only factor that is important is the reaction of individuals in face of a challenge. It is how the individuals respond to a challenge that determines the fate of nations.
