Actually, Hannibal and his elephants invaded the Italian peninsula in the 2nd Punic War, as Rome was rising to power.

When the Barbarians actually did sack Rome, in 410 and 455, the (Western) Empire did not last much longer (476). The city itself gradually became depopulated, until it was rediscovered and renewed in the Renaissance (literally "rebirth").

My bad. Roman history isn't really my forte.

Actually, those values were more Greek in origin. Rome began as a republic, not a democracy, with a limited electorate. Roman values were more militaristic in nature - fortitude, order, etc.

Indeed, but the Romans certainly borrowed from the Greeks--they don't call it Greco-Roman for nothing. :)

That statement seems just a bit premature. . . .

You may be right. Still, my perceptions lead me to this conclusion, though I freely admit all of this is merely hypothesis at this point. It's all based on a number of things that I have put together to make a workable picture of reality as I see it. I'm the type that believes in a holistic reality, hence my tendency to look at things from the macro perspective. I think science, ethics, and the humanities all fit together like puzzle pieces, or at least, they should.

History is full of premature judgements. Ever hear of the War to End All Wars? And if so, which one?

Good point. However, I still lean toward my conclusion that empire-building is largely a thing of the past, at least in the old sense of conquering and usurping. For one thing, I think empires themselves are on the way out. It is almost universally accepted now that conquering other countries is wrong. I can foresee a day when even nations dissolve in favor of something more like the claves from "The Diamond Age," held together not by threat of force but by mutual values and the threat of economic reprisals.

Which brings me to my next point--in the growth of democracy across the globe, with people having more and more say in their own lives, the ability to build up armies for the purpose of conquering other lands seems increasingly unlikely.

You might be surprised to learn that many empires conquered their neighbors in order to "free" the oppressed people - and perhaps you will be even more surprised to learn that in a fair number of cases they actually accomplished this.

No, not really surprised, though my ignorance of this fact is astounding. Could you supply some examples?

Otherwise, your statements about Evolution sound almost like the Creationist idea of Evolution: that it is a process that leads to better and better results. (One reason some Christians hate the theory of evolution so much is that they believe it describes a movement towards perfection, which they do not believe is possible apart from God.) However, Evolution is better understood by the phrase, "Survivor, Survive!" - that is, the survivors pass on their genes - regardless of whether they survived by being so nice to all their neighbors that when hard times came all their neighbors returned the favor, or whether they survived by killing and eating their neighbors.

Ah, now I'm back on firmer ground. I think my statements on evolution might've been misunderstood, and that's my fault--I should be clearer as to what I mean. My only excuse is that I have so much ground I want to cover that I occasionally skim over important details, LOL.

I don't look at evolution as a process of perfecting. In fact, I believe that in the holistic sense, nature is already perfect, and you cannot perfect even more what is already perfect. It's only when you divide nature into components that you find imperfection, or rather, its only when you try to divide something as mutable and complex into components and ascribe individual logical properties to each of them that you find imperfection.

In other words, the whole is perfect and will never be anything else; however, dividing nature into components is a human conceit and thus subject to human failures. For example, it's hard for us to conceive of a volcano that destroys a whole village or a funny-looking mutated orange as part of a perfect whole, but I believe its exactly that.

But, I think there is a kind of plumb line of evolution, if you will, where the process finds stasis, and as I like to repeat, nature likes stasis. I'll give you a very real example--one of my favorite little natural wonders, the Volvox algae. The page I linked even goes so far as to say that the Volvox appears to be at an evolutionary dead end. Sharks are another example of a species that seems to be at an evolutionary dead end--it hasn't evolved much at all in millions of years because it has found stasis. There are virtually no threats to sharks' survival and they have no predators.

As for Volvox, the beauty of it is, it reproduces both sexually and asexually. When it reproduces asexually, it is cloning itself because it has found a strain that is ideal for its environment. But when threatened, it begins to reproduce sexually to produce as many strains as possible so as to find one resistant to the new threat. It has essentially perfected this process, so no need to evolve further. You see?

I think all aspects of nature are attempting to move in this direction; it doesn't seem that way from the limited perspective of the human categorization of nature, because few individual species (our category) actually get there, but on the whole, many species have evolved in such a way as to allow others to flourish, which in turn gives some otheraspect of nature one step toward the stasis. Look at nature as a giant Chinese puzzle box, where each component moved winds up moving another component in turn, which moves yet another, and so on and so on, with the end result being a perfect box.

Or, maybe a better metaphor would be a complicated chess game against itself, with not two opponents but billions, where some of the pieces of each opponent are sacrificed in order to assist another oponent, since all the opponents are really one entity anyway, that being nature. Nature playing a complicated game against itself, with the desired end result being stalemate--all teams in balance.

So, how do humans fit into this picture? Well, we are the queen on every team, the most powerful piece nature has. I believe we were evolved to assist nature in the process of seeking stasis, to sculpt it (and ourselves, since we're part of it) into the shape that it wants to be. Of course, that shape isn't fixed--it'll have a pattern, but its a moving pattern.

On the whole, nature is perfect. Terms like chaos and order are meaningless to nature. That's why I like to use the Tao in place of describing nature as chaotic or ordered. The Tao says it is both, and neither, which is true. Another word for Tao is perfection. Lao-Tzu said, "The Master views the parts with compassion, because he understands the whole." He meant that the parts, as imperfect as they seem, are part of perfection and are therefore perfect. The parts appear imperfect, but they really aren't. The parts really don't exist except in the human mind anyway.

When Lao-Tzu said, "Return is the movement of the Tao," he meant that things find their center, which is their place of balance. All objects have a center, and if you know where that center is you can balance the object on the finest of points, like those people who balance a plate on a stick. Nature itself moves things around until they are balanced--no human being need act on a ball to make it roll down a hill; it'll do it all on it's own.

Now, as "values" derive ultimately from "what is good for life", the process of evolution might be said to inherently select for good values, but such values are not necessarily what we would hope for.

Right, which is why our values are not in accord with truth. But once we humans learn to value truth as it is and not as we'd like it to be, then we'll find peace. We'll be in aligned with nature, which "desires" peace. Lao-Tzu says, "Let go of fixed plans and the world will govern itself." I believe he is absolutely right there. He doesn't mean that fixed plans are useless; he only means that you cannot govern with laws that run counter to nature--it's bad policy and will cause more problems than it solves.

As he goes on to say,

"The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people wil be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be."

Think about what he's saying--does it not all bear out? The less trust you place in people, the more they will be untrustworthy because that's expected of them. So, when you make laws to govern what they do with their own bodies, they are far more likely to flaunt those laws. Likewise, we have the most powerful weapons ever created--nuclear (or as Bush says, nucular) warheads. Do they make you feel more secure? Not me. The existence of nuclear weapons only reminds me of phrases like "mutually assured destruction," (the acronym of which is MAD, and the use of such weapons would be madness, no doubt.) And I don't think I need to convince you of the truth in Lao-Tzu's final sentence in that quote.

Is he saying that prohibitions, weapons and subsidies shouldn't exist? Nowhere in the Tao te Ching does he say that. What he's getting at, though, is that these things should be used logically and in accordance with reality. To make laws against crimes that cause no demonstrable harm to others is wrong; to store weapons that would assure the deaths of all life on the planet is also wrong; to give handouts to those who don't need them is wrong. That's what he's saying.

Fortunately, cooperation has proven to be an evolutionarily useful trait, so things work out after all - for the most part.

Precisely what I've been saying all along. Cooperation is not merely a useful evolutionary trait, though--it's THE useful evolutionary trait in terms of humans, because it will assure that we will maximize or potential and excel at the purpose we were evolved for, which is to assist the rest of nature at finding stasis, preserving species and helping them to reach their evolutionary potential, sculpting the planet and our environment into a balanced whole, and, ultimately, expanding out into the universe to do the same elsewhere.