Take the twelfth century as an example of how close the world once came to turning its back on the catallaxy. In one fifty-year period, between 1100 and 1150, three great nations shut down innovation, enterprise and freedom all at once. In Baghdad, the religious teacher Al-Ghazali almost single-handedly destroyed the tradition of rational enquiry in the Arab world and led a return to mysticism intolerant of new thinking. In Peking, Su-Sung’s astronomical clock, the ‘cosmic engine’, probably the most sophisticated mechanical device ever built at that date, was destroyed by a politician
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