Esox said:
Indeed, but interesting to discuss. I vote for the Greeks, who came up with democracy and the decisive battle. Both of those things have stayed around for a long time.
I agree that the concept of the decisive battle was very important. It enabled military scholarship (as in Thucidides), and philosophical understanding of war ("War is the father of everything").
Although few other city-states focused as much on war as Sparta, the general culture hailed military training as a virtue. Also the fact that the people of the ancient era in Greece were used to going to war (possible it was rare that one would spend all of his life without being once in war) meant that they had a more immediate understanding of it.
Having an immediate understanding of lethal danger might have led to them minimising its idealistic understanding, something which is ussual in societies that did not go to war, or in modern society where the vast majority of the citizents of the west will not see war up close (which is positive though ofcourse in other respects).
Definately being close to war meant that they would have had formed more vivid views about it than we have.
A parallel, perhaps, of the theorising of war (or hostility, battle) between those civs that were accustomed to it, and those who werent, can be seen even today in the mass psychology of children who are accustomed to getting in fights in school, and those who try to stay out of them at all cost. The latter ussually form intricate views about fighting, but what is paramount in them is the fear of actually being in a fight; the fact that there is no empirical impression of it enables more idealistic ones. It is rare to see a child that is used to fighting to have such an idealistic notion about it, and one should guesss that this is also because it is identifying its empirical knowledge of it with the very phenomenon of fighting itself- which may not be "correct" but it is definately different than focusing on an idealism of it.
One could also mention Nietzsche's view, in "the Genealogy of Ethics" about the Jewish culture and its plan to "exist at all costs". Although a general view, it is claimed in it that due to the relative weakness of the jewish nation at all times, it wanted to avoid combat with its enemies and so developed a more retired understanding of combat and danger, which formed its religion and tradition.
On the contrary in the ancient greek world there was a decision to fight against the far more numerous persians, and this should signify the difference in culture.
Imo both general positions are productive, in their own ways. In the modern West we most likely will never see war in our countries, but this possibly means that its idealistic understanding will be kept in our minds, and be influencing our culture in the future as well.
