This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, June 10th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Open societies learn from other societies,

as Islam turned inward centuries ago it was in many ways left

behind culturally and technologically. Cato's Mustafa Akyol discusses some of the elements

of this shift in his new column in the New York Times. We spoke last

week. Who cares where the numbers we use come from? Why is this something that people are concerned about?

Well, in a sense you wouldn't care.

I mean, people borrow ideas from each other,

civilizations borrow ideas from each other.

But then people think, oh, it's only our civilization which has produced these

things. Then they started to take a position that I call civilization or nationalism. And to break that kind of bias, I think you need to sometimes look into the sources

of wisdom that has been transferred from one place to another in human history.

I see a lot of emphasis among Western Conservatives, in particular American Conservatives, on Judeo-Christian tradition and Judeo-Christian

values.

And of course it's important, I mean Judeo-Christian values, I mean biblical values, I mean

they certainly infused into Western civilization and they were abused sometimes, but they were also helpful for abolishing slavery or, like, for example, Martin Luther Kings, for example, interpretation, values like that.

But I wanted to say, well, the West had inputs from others as well, and those others especially

include the civilization that is seen as most at odds with the

West today which is Islam.

That's why they are called Arabic numerals and there's a history behind that.

Let's look into that history.

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