What Makes a Civilization Great?

What the Knicks and the Iberian Peninsula Teach About Greatness

As I watched the New York Knicks march toward a championship, I found myself thinking less about basketball and more about history.
Championships are often explained through the mythology of the superstar. We celebrate the dominant scorer, the transcendent athlete, the singular genius who carries everyone else to glory.
Yet the Knicks offered a different lesson.
Jalen Brunson was unquestionably their leader, but this was not a one-man team. Their success depended on relationships forged years earlier at Villanova. These were players who trusted one another instinctively, who understood where teammates would be before they arrived, and who were willing to sacrifice statistics, shots, and even money for a larger goal.
Brunson famously left substantial money on the table to help the organization assemble a deeper roster. In a professional sports world often defined by maximizing individual gain, he chose collective success.
The result was not merely a winning team. It was a cooperative enterprise. And history suggests that great civilizations are built the exact same way.

The Chemistry of Convivencia

During our recent trip through Spain and Portugal, I was struck by how often the story of Iberian greatness was actually a story of collaboration among very different peoples.
Long before the Inquisition, the Iberian Peninsula became the world’s vibrant center of learning. This didn’t happen because one culture triumphed over another, but because multiple cultures interacted in a unique ecosystem of coexistence, or Convivencia.

• Romans contributed law, infrastructure, and language.
• Muslim scholars brought radical advances in mathematics, navigation, and agriculture while preserving Greek philosophy.
• Christian kingdoms eventually provided the political framework that inherited this vast reservoir of knowledge.
  But it was the region’s Jewish scholars and statesmen who often served as the vital connective tissue—the ultimate “glue guys” of the Mediterranean world—functioning as the translators, diplomats, scientists, and financial administrators who made the system run.

Hasdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–970): The Ultimate Catalyst In the Golden Age of Córdoba, Ibn Shaprut served as a physician, translator, and foreign minister to the Caliph. He utilized his multi-linguistic mastery to translate the famous medical texts of Dioscorides into Arabic, establishing Iberia as Europe’s medical capital. As a diplomat, he negotiated complex alliances between Muslim rulers and Christian monarchs, proving that intellectual and political synthesis was the true engine of Iberian prosperity.

The Knowledge Enablers

When we look closer at the Golden Age of Spain and Portugal, the intellectual peaks were achieved not through isolation, but through an intentional exchange of ideas.
Consider Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), born in Córdoba. While globally revered as a towering rabbi and philosopher, Maimonides was also a brilliant physician who wrote extensively on hygiene, pharmacology, and psychology. His philosophical masterpiece, The Guide for the Perplexed, sought to harmonize Aristotelian science with divine revelation. His works were eagerly read not just by Jews, but by Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Muslim scholars alike, fueling the intellectual fire of the entire continent.
This collaboration yielded practical, world-changing technology. The famous translation schools of Toledo transformed Europe by turning ancient Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. Suddenly, Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy were available to a continent hungry for knowledge.
When it came to the Age of Exploration, Portugal’s maritime empire was literally guided by Jewish science:

[Jewish & Islamic Astronomical Data] 
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   [The Perpetual Almanac] (Abraham Zacuto)
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[Advanced Cartography & Astrolabes]
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  [Global Maritime Exploration]

The legendary astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto (1452–1515) revolutionized navigation. His life’s work, The Perpetual Almanac, alongside his improvements to the copper astrolabe, allowed sailors to determine their latitude at sea using the sun rather than the stars.
Without Zacuto’s calculations and personal consultations, there might have been no Vasco da Gama reaching India, no Pedro Álvares Cabral reaching Brazil, and no Portuguese trading empire stretching from Africa to Asia.
The remarkable achievements of Spain and Portugal were not products of isolation. They were products of connection.

The Cost of Exclusion

Yet history also reveals how fragile such success can be. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal gradually abandoned the very conditions that had fueled their rise.
The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 systematically removed the most educated, skilled, and commercially connected citizens from the peninsula. Abraham Zacuto himself was forced to flee to Lisbon, and later Tunis, taking his brilliant mind away from the Iberian sphere.
This purge of human capital soon stretched from the cities to the fields. In the 1520s, the Spanish Crown banned Islam entirely, forcing the remaining Moorish population to convert or flee. These Morisco communities comprised the foundational backbone of Spain’s agricultural sector. For generations, they had engineered and maintained highly sophisticated, intricate systems of irrigation, terracing, and water management that kept the arid landscapes of Valencia and Andalusia incredibly fertile.
When this specialized expertise was systematically uprooted and driven out, the consequences were immediate and devastating. The complex canal networks fell into disrepair, agricultural productivity plummeted, and once-abundant yields dropped dramatically. Spain quickly found that you cannot exile your primary food producers without paying a severe price; as the agricultural infrastructure collapsed, localized famines began to creep across the countryside.

[Forced Conversion/Exile of Moorish Peasantry (1520s)]
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      [Collapse of Sophisticated Irrigation Networks]
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           [Severe Drop in Agricultural Yields]
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             [Creeping Famine and Depopulation]

At the exact same time, enormous quantities of silver were flowing into Spain and Portugal from the Americas. Instead of stimulating innovation, this easy wealth reduced incentives to develop domestic industry or rebuild the shattered farming sector. The broad lesson remains: easy wealth can quickly become a substitute for creativity.
Meanwhile, nations such as the Netherlands and Great Britain adopted the exact playbook that had once made Iberia successful. They welcomed displaced Jewish merchants and skilled laborers, encouraged innovation, expanded scientific inquiry, and developed institutions that rewarded enterprise.
Leadership shifted. The world’s center of gravity moved northward.

The Contemporary Question

History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes.
Today, the United States remains the most innovative nation on earth. Our universities attract talented students from every continent. Our laboratories lead scientific discovery. Our entrepreneurs continue to create technologies that reshape the world.
But these strengths depend on openness.
Scientific progress thrives on collaboration. Medical breakthroughs emerge from international networks of researchers. Innovation accelerates when people with different experiences, perspectives, and skills work together toward common goals.
When nations become fearful of outsiders, suspicious of rigorous inquiry, or hostile to global intellectual exchange, they risk weakening the very forces that created their success.
The lesson of the Knicks is surprisingly similar to the lesson of pre-Inquisition Iberia. Greatness is rarely the product of a single star, or a single insular culture.
Whether in basketball, science, business, or civilization itself, success emerges from cooperation. The most successful teams are not always the ones with the highest raw talent; they are the ones that best combine talent, trust, shared purpose, and a willingness to sacrifice individual advantage for collective achievement.
Civilizations are no different.
The question facing every great nation is whether it will continue attracting talent, embracing knowledge, and building institutions that encourage cooperation—or whether it will retreat into exclusion and self-congratulation.
The Knicks answered that question on the basketball court. History answered it centuries ago.
The question now is whether we are paying attention.