Dr. Ricardo Duchesne (@DrRicardoDuchesne)

Among many of the arguments of my new book, Greatness and Ruin, is that the civilizations of the world can be ranked in terms of Jean Piaget's developmental stages of progression of cognitive abilities in individuals over time: (1) sensorimotor (birth to 2 years), (2) preoperational (2-7 years), (3) concrete operational (7-11 years), (4) formal operational (12+ years). The reasoning abilities of adults in nonwestern cultures did not rise beyond stage 3, that is, the apprehension of individuals was restricted to the perceptual level and bound up with the sensory appearances of the world, barely transcending appearances and context-bound experiences through the development of hypothetical reasoning. Europe was the first civilization to produce adolescents capable of reaching the final stage of Piagetian development. This was due to the discovery by European intellectuals, starting in ancient Greece, that humans have a mind separate from their bodily functions, a mind which is located in the physical cranium but is invisible and immaterial, and is the seat of thinking and thus of knowledge. This rise of a mind capable of making itself “a possible object of thought to itself,” as Aristotle said in his book, On the Soul, was the precondition for Aristotle’s clear ability to engage in formal operational thinking. The rise of stage 4 was not merely a result of a higher IQ. The Chinese had a high IQ but failed to engaged in logical-analytical reasoning. It was the result of a higher sense of self-awareness about one’s inner faculty of reasoning and how this faculty can self-impose upon itself proper rules for reasoning, which entailed a clear apprehension that there is a distinction between the thinking “I” and the external world, in contradistinction to the widespread belief among humans that the mental experiences in their heads constitute a oneness with nature or spirits or bodily functions.