The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 129 "Americans choose full enlightenment"

In the last two days before Zhu Jianxuan's coronation ceremony, Zhu Jianxuan looked through the documents presented by the Minister of Etiquette and familiarized himself with the details of the upcoming ceremony process.

After watching it for a while, I couldn't help but discuss it with Peng Yuanrui, who was in charge of the etiquette system.

"Mr. Peng, why do you think the European people in various states don't like the East-West integration plan we considered?"

Before Zhu Jianxuan came to the United States, he had always been thinking about the institutional construction of the United States.

As a modern person, it is natural to think of combining the East and the West, drawing on the advantages of Eastern and Western etiquette systems, and establishing a brand new country.

Zhu Jianxuan also had this idea when the ceremony was being planned and organized.

For example, if you wear a Tongtian suit, the Tongtian crown is quite similar to a Western crown, and you can slightly modify it to make it more like a Western crown.

Then let the officials from the Ming Dynasty wear Ming-style formal wear, and let the European nobles wear European formal wear.

The reason may be the impact of Western culture in the previous life.

However, after discussing with the Free State representatives who attended the ceremony, Peng Yuanrui found that most of these European immigrants supported the use of a purely Eastern-style ceremony.

Of course, the officials of the Ministry of Rites of the Ming Dynasty also felt that the purely Eastern method would be easier to handle.

Although the Ming Dynasty implemented the feudal system in recent years and many systems and etiquette of the kingdoms below began to become chaotic, the overall routine and direction were the same.

All of them were selected based on the original Shenzhou etiquette system of the Ming Dynasty.

It is equivalent to a mature and familiar database, and the elements available to the monarch depend on his level.

Peng Yuanrui and other officials of the Ministry of Rites were all well-informed.

Even if the king wants to personalize it, as long as it is within this framework, it can be arranged quickly.

In order to combine Eastern and Western cultures in a way that is not awkward and reasonable, and at the same time avoid being criticized by future generations as much as possible, we must first study European etiquette in depth.

This caused headaches for all the officials in the Ministry of Rites.

Therefore, Ming officials also supported pure Ming-style etiquette.

Peng Yuanrui did not directly say that the etiquette of the Shenzhou Ming Dynasty must be better, but he actually did some investigation and analysis:

“Your Majesty, when preparing for the ceremony, my colleagues and I studied European history and etiquette.

“The unanimous assessment is chaos.

“Since the fall of Rome, European etiquette has become increasingly fragmented and, more importantly, less systematic.

“No one can represent absolute orthodoxy and demand that other European countries believe in and follow the standards they set.

“Any country that wants to learn cannot find the absolutely correct direction or object.

“After in-depth research, we have discovered that all European countries regard the teachings of Jesus Christ as orthodox, but the vast majority of monarchs and nobles do not like the Catholic Church, which has a transcendent status.

“Before the establishment of the countries, they were all barbarians in the north, and they did not know how to establish a national system.

“The word monarch in European countries originally meant the head of a clan.

“They occupied the land left behind after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but did not know how to manage the rich territories of the Roman Empire.

"We had to rely on church personnel left in Rome to govern.

“The Roman Church took advantage of the barbarity and ignorance of the patriarchs of various countries and seized power over the monarchs of various countries.

“The Roman Pontiff went from being the head of a local church appointed by the Roman monarch to being the pope.

“When a king ascends the throne, he must first kneel before the Pope or bishop and let the religious leader put the crown representing power on him.

“The Roman Church, like the churches in Shenzhou, has seized a large amount of land and assets through various means, and has spent decades or even hundreds of years continuously building giant temples.

"It can be said that it is extremely costly and laborious, even worse than the Buddhist temples in Shenzhou.

"European scholars and elites, as well as wise monarchs and nobles, were committed to breaking away from the influence of the church and establishing another set of state system.

“They’ve been working toward this ever since the Reformation and the Renaissance to the modern day.

“But they don’t know where to start.

“They have no institutional foundation of their own and can only patch things up within the church’s system.

“Now the Ming Dynasty has brought in a mature and complete system of the Shenzhou Sheji system, which completely excludes the church from the Sheji system from the very beginning.

“So these European elites are willing to throw away their traditions.

“Their existing system and culture were originally pieced together on the basis of Roman heritage, and were not traditions created by themselves at all.

"It's no problem to change to a more complete direction of study now."

Zhu Jianxuan felt that Peng Yuanrui's analysis made some sense, and after listening to the end he even had a glimmer of enlightenment.

The European Middle Ages were no different from India!
The church is the Brahmins, the monarchs and nobles are the Kshatriyas, and ordinary serfs are the untouchables.

It was the Kshatriyas who fought in the war, and the knights were the regular army. The peasants were just there to make up the numbers on the battlefield and had no fighting power at all.

The process of the formation of this kind of society was that the barbarians from the north entered the country and defeated the rulers of the original civilized society.

The barbarians are powerful in military force, but they do not know how to manage the land and population.

They had to build their country with the help of various systems left behind by their defeated opponents.

India was left with Hinduism, Rome with Roman Catholicism.

A similar thing happened in the land of Shenzhou, where the Confucian social system was left behind after the collapse of the native dynasty.

The barbarians who successfully invaded also had to learn and use it.

But after the invaders gained culture and began to think for themselves, they began to doubt and resist these things, and began to use these systems and cultures in a limited way.

According to this analysis, the Eastern dynasty that is most similar to these European countries should be the Qing Dynasty in history.

They had to make use of the imperial examination system and Confucian system left by previous civilizations, while at the same time trying to maintain and build their own traditions and suppress the learned cultural system.

After understanding this, Zhu Jianxuan was a little confused for a moment.

Are the cultures and systems of these European countries as a whole so disjointed and chaotic and without any redeeming qualities?

After thinking about it carefully, Zhu Jianxuan felt that this was probably true.

Due to the influence of geographical environment and social reality, the natural science system of the Shenzhou Empire is not perfect, but its institutional construction has reached the limit of the classical era.

China's mature civil service system and centralized imperial system can be regarded as absolute artifacts in this era.

Something that European monarchs dreamed of.

For countries that have already reached sufficient scale, top-level institutional design is more attractive than practical technology.

Because the larger the country or organization, the smaller the impact of detailed technological improvements on the entire country, and the greater the impact of institutional-level reforms on national power.

Before the Second Industrial Revolution, most of the inventions and creations in the classical era could basically be considered to be of an accumulation and improvement nature.

The direct changes in revenue resulting from a specific technological improvement are usually not very obvious.

If the management efficiency of a huge empire continues to decline, administrative expenses will completely offset the benefits of this technological innovation and it will not be visible in financial reports at all.

During the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty's GDP should still have been the highest in the world based on the overall data.

But when it comes to unit production efficiency, it is waste.

Therefore, the monarchs of great empires paid more attention to institutional construction rather than specific technical details.

There is no point in paying attention. Even if Daoguang learned how to build a steam engine, the entire country would still be a waste.

So for a great empire, "strange and tricky techniques" are really just "strange and tricky techniques".

People who shout about tricks and gimmicks all know that they have a bigger problem, but they cannot solve it themselves.

If you don't do a good job in system construction, you won't be able to put the skills you have learned to good use.

From the Westernization Movement to the golden decade of the Republic of China, the repeated attempts to save the country and the repeated failures just proved this point.

No tricks or clever tricks can save a sinking empire.

In the end, it was a new generation of organization that rebuilt a comprehensive and leading system and was able to save the Shenzhou land from the abyss under absolute disadvantages.

On the other hand, in a small country with a small population, slight technological improvements and slight increases in profits may have an overall impact.

Even if there is really no profit, as long as there are some special features, the lord can show off and exhibit it in the aristocratic circle, so that the lord can gain a sense of accomplishment and continue to invest.

At the same time, a small country with a small population is easy to manage. As long as the monarch has a relatively normal brain, he can make it prosperous by doing everything himself.

Therefore, monarchs of small countries pay more attention to technical details and pay less attention to institutional construction.

This social reality led to huge differences in the decision-making ideas of the monarchs and feudal lords of the Shenzhou Empire.

The choices between "technological innovation" and "institutional construction" are diametrically opposed.

It was also due to this realistic reason that the territories of European lords continued to expand, and after reaching a typical critical point, they had to turn around and pursue institutional construction.

Typical representatives include the centralization of power under Louis XIV and the strategy of the King of England requiring all feudal lords to be loyal to the king.

The size of America clearly exceeds this critical point.

After the founding fathers of the United States carefully studied the top-level system of the Ming Dynasty, they found that the top-level system design of European countries at that time was just a makeshift team.

All the complex problems that could not be solved in European society had long been dealt with in the Ming Dynasty.

Originally, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a wave of divine culture arose in Europe, and the Enlightenment thinkers were more or less influenced by it.

But most of the time they are like blind men groping in the dark, and no one teaches them systematically.

Now Daming himself comes to teach them.

The founding fathers of the United States were not fools. At least they were social elites and were able to think and learn for themselves.

Of course, once you discover something good, you must study it well.

Therefore, the more they understood and learned about the history, culture, and system of Shenzhou, the more they tended to abandon the remnants of Roman culture that had been distorted by the church.

For generations they have been committed to eliminating the influence of the church, but they have never been able to do it cleanly and thoroughly.

Because they have been exploring and reforming within the institutional framework established by the church, and no matter how they try, they cannot break away from the church's framework.

There is no reference point if we want to abandon this system.

Now they have discovered that there is no place for the church in Shenzhou’s political system. The key is that the management capabilities and efficiency ceilings are very high.

So they decided to fully enlighten!
Zhu Jianxuan, a time traveler, observed the ideas and practices of the indigenous people, and after comparing them with them from their perspective, he established cultural and institutional confidence.

As for the question of why Shenzhou's traditional system did not give rise to modern science, Zhu Jianxuan had already thought deeply about it.

This is the kind of question that everyone who understands it will understand. Once you understand it, you will feel that this is not a problem at all.

If you don’t understand something, you can’t understand it even if you explain it to others, so naturally there is no way to solve this problem.

Because it wasn't a problem in the first place.

(End of this chapter)