203. Should I Agree totally with Professor Niall Ferguson?

Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, was nominated by Time Magazine in 2004 as "one of the world's hundred most influential people.” He made a speech titled “Power, Money and American National Security, Today and Tomorrow” in Philadelphia where he was awarded the sixth annual Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award by the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia.

He remarked in his speech that the West ascended through technological and science innovation. For him, this is the only factor that made the West more powerful. I don’t totally agree upon his opinion; based on my examination of United States founding fathers’ efforts to draw nourishments from Chinese civilization to build a new nation in North America, I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why the United States jumped from a tiny nation to a world superpower is that the founding fathers opened the door for Americans to adopt positive elements from other cultures, including those of Chinese civilization.