The Golden Age of the Vikings

Johan norberg is a Swedish author and historian of ideas. He says that if a culture believes all its answers come from the past, then it no longer has an incentive to innovate. By way of extreme example, he points to ancient china from one thousand years ago. It was a wildly innovative society, far out ahead of europe on innovations and war,. navigation, science, communication. But as culture began to fracture, in part because of outside aggressors, its response was to turn backwards. So they began to throw out novelty. They abandoned international trade, and instead looked at the old books. And suddenly became more of a confusian orthodox state. That led to five