Stock Market Fundamentals and Religious Fundamentalism

The NASDAQ index has been going down so fast in the last few weeks that it seems like the dial on a time machine stuck in reverse.  Just two weeks ago we noted that departure when it zipped by 2000 and slid to around 1900.  That got us musing on the past American Century and what seems to be the coming Asian Century.  Although we have been warning about the phony rally since last year and the upcoming troubles, the precipitous drop in stocks has even caught us by surprise.  This week, we were going to tap this device, let's call it the NASDAQ Index/Date-Time-Continuum, as it approached 1776. Our idea was to riff on that enormous English blunder that triggered the American War of Independence and how it forever doomed the British Empire's chances of forging an unassailable economic hegemony.

In this vain, we had intended to speculate on England's "stubborn" King George III who got himself into an easily avoidable war --there was plenty of room for negotiation-- and how, had he not, we might have seen today the united economic power of Australia, Canada, the US and Great Britain all being directed, through, perhaps, a representative governing body,  centered in London.

  But alas, as many a craftier tactician has been forced to say: "we were overtaken by events"...in this case a market that just keeps retreating.  And given that we can't be sure the NASDAQ index will get back over 1776 any time soon, we thought maybe we'd preemptively  leap back to the 1200's, where surely we will be safe from even the worst of market moves for some time to come.

The 13th century was pivotal: Europe was slowly working its way out of what came to be called the Dark Ages.  In Italy, it was still common to paint religious figures with sallow skins, sporting gold dishes around their heads, against a flattened world. Further north gangs of macabre St Vitus dancers were keeping people in the villages and hamlets from having a good night's sleep and the only subject you could study at the newly founded Sorbonne was taught by priests for future priests.  You were either in the Church, landowner, raider or serf likely to be recruited in religious wars that were called Crusades.  It would take several hundred years for Italians like Cellini and DaVinci to learn how to cast a bronze statue the size of the rediscovered equestrian of Marcus Aurelius (now residing in the Capitoline Hill Museum).

Embryonic Stem Cells and the Time Machine

Meanwhile 500 miles to the South in Palermo, (al-Madina), there was a great center of learning under the rule of the Normans but still primarily Arabic speaking. In Moorish dominated al-Andalusia in the South of Spain mathematicians and cartographers gathered around a number of important centers of learning.  To the East in places like Baghdad and Damascus the great libraries of the world and attending academicians gathered to discuss the latest scientific findings.  It is no coincidence that the numbering system we use today, particularly the concept of 0, algebra, the sextant, and numerous astronomical discoveries were developed and refined in this flourishing Arab cultural world.

In the late 10th century, nearly 700 years before Galileo, a huge observatory was built near Tehran, Iran by the astronomer al-Khujandi. He built a large sextant inside the observatory, and was the first astronomer to be capable of measuring to an accuracy of arcseconds. He observed a series of meridian transits of the Sun, which allowed him to calculate the obliquity of the ecliptic, also known as the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the Sun. As we know today, the Earth's tilt is approximately 23o34', and al-Khujandi measured it as being 23o32'19". Using this information, he also compiled a list of latitudes and longitudes of major cities.

Most technical, scientific and, particularly medical information, only became available to Europe when Latin translations of Arabic texts began to appear.  Up to that time, Arabic, whether or not spoken at home by the Jewish and Muslim intelligentsia of the epoch, was the scientific lingua franca.

To find out how the Arabic civilization got from there to here, at this critical turning point, we would have to take a lot of things into account but there is no doubt that the rise and later dominance of religious fundamentalism played a decisive role.  As the suppression of Copernicus, the burning of Bruno and the excommunication of Galileo played out in a Europe that was moving inexorably toward Newton and Einstein, the Arab world was being engulfed into a religious dominated torpor.

This is perhaps why, here in Dymaxia, we have set our eyes on the ongoing political fight for embryonic stem cell research.  Stem cell research, combined with our recently obtained knowledge of genetics and the genome seems extremely promising, perhaps, magnitudes more promising than the last century's developments in drug research and development.  And yet it is being stymied by the same kind of religious forces that worked to shut down the Muslim world, but were slowly defeated in Europe.  Could these forces be making their last stand in the mountains of Pakistan as we like to think or perhaps here in the US of A?

 

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