best buckle in my guys because i have some OPINIONS and some FREE TIME and that is a combination that strikes dread into the heart of all godly men.
But what about the rennaisance and the enlightenment? Isn't this the birthplace of modern liberal democratic systems? And isn't their focus to a high degree the ancient world? And ancient Greece had the most developed societies in their time when it comes to egalitarianism (democracy). And probably philosophy although the Chinese had philosophers too.
Personally, I believe that the story of democracy developed in Europe, after a break in the middle ages, after its inception in ancient Greece. And there is thus a continuity. And believing in theses "steps" is all you need to see the connection and how it is inherited.
You can't have a "break" and still call it continuity. By definition, a break represents
discontinuity. You might argue for periods in which certain institutions or practices were sidelined, or pushed below the surface, the way that languages like Basque or Gaelic disappear from the literary world and then reappear at a later time, but this rests on assumption of continuity somewhere just out of view of official or elite histories. It's hard to draw such a line between any modern parliament and any ancient Greek assembly; certainly not in Greece, let alone in Poland, Spain or Russia.
Further, you would have to demonstrate that modern democratic institutions represent continuity with ancient Greek institutions, either direct institutional continuity, or continuity of practice. This is going to be very difficult, given that most of them have very clear Medieval origins: the British parliament is very directly inherited from the "Great Council" of the Norman and Plantagenet periods and plausibly from the Witenagemot of the Anglo-Saxon period. Local government emerges out of urban self-government, from the special autonomies and exemptions extended to certain important towns in the Medieval period. In all of these cases, "democracy" emerged as a practical way of balancing local and regional interests, not from any Classical references.
This evidence in the lack of any clear analogy between classical and modern democratic systems. The American system of township, county, state and federation is a direct carry-over from the old colonial structure of parish, county, province and empire. In contrast, Classical democracy was always built around a specific city and its hinterland; Athens and Rome did not have these sorts of established sub-divisions, nor would it have occurred to them to divide layer and the sovereign body of the polis in this way. American enthusiasm for Classical trappings hasn't change that.
Whatever analogies do exist between Classical and early Modern European democratic systems aren't proof of any unique inheritance between the Classical world and modern Europe, but are better interpreted as indication that a more basic principles of municipal self-government is a common recurring aspect of human social organisation, not bound to any specific elite philosophical tradition. Villages have been organised themselves on rough-and-ready democratic lines since people first decided to keep hanging out in one place for a whole season, because that's what happens, what
has to happen, when you put a bunch of people in one place and given them a decision to make without giving any one person in that group the ability to impose their will upon others. The 10th century settlers of Iceland certainly didn't have a lot of Classical texts to draw on, but managed to build something roughly approximating a democratic republic on the basis of practicality and local tradition.
Dunno, look at the language, religion and architecture ? You know, the things which are both fundamental and obvious and require a lot of desire to reinvent history to miss ?
Notice that the lands conquered by the Arabs ended up speaking Arab and Islamic, with new arts and architectures, while the land occupied by germanic invaders had some minor influence on language and stayed Christians, with lots of chieftain and soldiers converting to Christianity, and saw only an organic change in art and the way buildings were made ?
Consider that "minor influence" on language, here, includes Britain, the Western and Southern banks of the Rhine, the Carpathian basin and the Western Balkans; that is not by any reasonable measure a "minor" linguistic shift, all the less so when you consider that this include several of the most powerful Christian kingdoms of the Medieval era. The Capetian court, despite their propaganda, were not the be-all and end-all of Medieval Europe. If the English can remain tied to Rome because they substituted Anglic for Latin and Brythonic, why is Syria irreversibly severed from Constantinople because they substituted Arabic for Greek and Aramaic. Because parts of those populations also adopted Arabic as a liturgical language? But many Europeans adopted Church Slavic as a liturgical language, bypassing Latin and Greek altogether, and many of those who retained a non-Arabic liturgical language used pre-Roman languages like Aramaic or Hebrew. Where is their place in all this? Moreover, if you consider that large parts of the "West" remained entirely outside of the fast-retreating borders of this Latin spachsbrund, this supposed linguistic continuity becomes even less tenable. If Swedes never even bothering to learn Latin does not threaten their place in the glorious tradition of Rome, why does Berbers similarly declining to learn Latin fatally exclude theirs? What languages do and do not permit continuity with Rome seems to seem to have very little to do with the languages themselves have any particular relationship to Rome, but whether the majority of modern-day speakers are, not to put too fine a point on it, white.
I grant that there is something distinct about the spread of Arabic, but as I said, it is not self-evident that this represent any wholesale replacement of existing Occidental culture with a new and alien Oriental culture. What would the mechanism of such a substitution be? How do conquering nomads convince a local population which outnumbers them a hundred to one simply assimilate directly into the conquering-culture? And moreover, how did they manage to do so without managing to change something as fundamental to late Antique and early Medieval life as their religion, given that large and mostly Arabic-speaking Christian and Jewish populations persisted in the former Eastern Empire into the modern era? It seems altogether more reasonable to interpret this like any other elite-initiated language change, as proceeding from a combination of prestige, institutional practices and shifting literary and administrative conventions.
Now consider "new arts and architecture". I don't have as much to say about this, because I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about. Classical Arabic architecture does not look like Roman architecture, that's true. But neither does Gothic architecture. Even "Romanesque" architecture doesn't look all that Classical past a shared suspicion towards non-semicircular arches. And "Classical architecture" is itself pretty heterogeneous; it wouldn't be remotely obvious to a naive observer that the Hagia Sofia was supposed to represent a single, unified artistic tradition with the Parthenon of Athens and Note Dame de Paris, but bears no relation at all to the Dome of the Rock. And indeed, that would be absurd. Yet is what you appear to be claiming. How do you go about justifying something like this?
Other arts similarly lack any "pure" continuity in the West or total break in the East. The early Islamic world moved away from realistic figurative art, which the Romans and Greeks prized, towards abstract design, in carving, mosaic and calligraphy- but so did North-Western Europe, which saw a flourishing of metalwork and manuscript production, but nothing very much in the way of portraiture or sculpture. In both cases, existing Classical traditions of abstract art are evident. Islamic institutions continued to produce complex mosaics, while in Western Europe mosaics are mostly abandoned in favour of tapestry and fresco painting. Some contrasts don't break down on clearly religious lines; the Eastern Empire had bouts of iconoclasm, much like Islam, during which abstract art was favoured over figurative; the Scandinavians developed distinct religious architecture based on indigenous wooden construction, while the Russians accent similar techniques with domes that owe more to Persia than Byzantium. Some innovations were totally new: the Islamic and Christian worlds developed a stained glass that had not existed in the Classical world. This contrast you want to draw between an "organic" development from Classical styles in the West and a wholly radical overturning of artistic in the East is simply not tenable. Bluntly, it's nonsense.
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And here is the thing: all of this is kind of besides the point, because it doesn't challenge my core argument, that continuity of identity by definition requires
continuity. As in the above quoted post, you can't break something off and then resume it without identifying that break as discontinuity. that's just
semantics. And ethnic identities are entirely about continuity, about a generation-to-generation handover of identity: not only the culture and practices which the identity refers to, but the identity which groups all of this together into a coherent package that constitutes an "us". It doesn't require statis, it doesn't require generation 1 to be able to identify themselves readily with generation 1,000, only that generation 1 identifies with generation 2, who identify with generation 3, and so on, and so on.
A modern secular Ashkenazi American Jew has very little in common with an Israelite living in the era of the Second Temple, certainly not enough that they would readily identify themselves as members of the same group, but the stable handover of identify for three thousand years us to talk about the modern and ancient persons as members of the same people, in at least a very loose way, enough so that if a modern Jew refers to the people of the Second Temple as "us" it does not seem absurd, as it absolutely
would seem absurd if a Swede referred to the people of ancient Greece as "us".
This sort of continuity simply not exist between ancient Rome or Greece and the modern "West". Perhaps in a few Mediterranean coastal areas, but not for the greater sweep of Western Europe. So on what level does this claim of inheritance, let alone of sole inheritance, finds its basis?
Again, I've this feeling that you just want to rewrite history because you have some chip on your shoulder about something.
Cultures change with time, people change, language change. Even a defined country that never disappear will be noticeably different several centuries on. What makes a society an "inheritor" of another ? It's about the amount of cultural traits, thoughts, influence of the latter on the former, combined with geographical proximity (which means that you basically live in the ruins of the ancients, a pretty compelling argument of being inheritors) and, yes, the actual willingness of taking the mantle.
Very obviously, if a people doesn't feel a connection with some ancient society, doesn't especially care about their culture outside scholarly pursuit, they aren't inheritors. Obvious enough ?
Large influence from the ancient culture is necessary for a large amount of the population to feel like they are their inheritor (Captain Obvious), and a large amount of the population feeling like they are the inheritors is needed for a claim to be inheritor to be worth something (hence the claims of inheritance who led to nothing).
I still don't understand what this has to do with "political correctness". You attribute to me some sort of revionistic agenda: what is my agenda?
You seem to think that this Classicism was just a fabrication, maybe you should instead wonder why it happened and how it ended up working on such scale, because it's there that the answer lie.
Okay, then. Why did it happen, and how did it end up working on such a scale?
As a Chinese person, I regard myself as the descendant culturally of the Yan and Huang Emperors. My ancestors (as far as I know) were never were ruling class, but the glories of the Warring States, Three Kingdoms, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, and Ming/Qing are things I can pride myself in. [...] It is true that Western society's biggest fans of Greco-Roman culture has always been the elite, because the only educated people in the Dark Ages were clergy, whose entire institution derives its legitimacy from being the sole inheritor of the Roman Empire (regardless of Catholic or Orthodox). Thus, despite not wanting democracy or even public literacy, the Church understood that its prestige was inseparable from Latin or the classical past.
I'm not going to intervene in the discussion of the authenticity of a classical Chinese inheritance, but I do want to highlight and contrast these two points.
In the first case, there is a continuity of identity from at least the Han period to the present; certainly at an elite level, and it appears at a popular level through at least the second millenium. This hasn't always been equivalent to a modern Chinese nationality identity, local and provincial identities have historically been very strong, and of course all sorts of other identities have existed and continue to exist among non-Han people, but you can draw the sort of generation-to-generation inheritance of identity I describe above.
I don't think this exists in Europe. The Church certainly acknowledged its Classical inheritance, but it doesn't follow that they regarded themselves
as Romans in an ethnic or cultural sense, less still that their flock did. The significance of the Classical inheritance wasn't one of cultural or ethnic identification, but was bound up in ecclesiastical institutions and theological dialogue. It's significant that the "Romans" who constituted the early Church were a pretty heterogenous bunch: the founding generation were Hellenised Jews, Jerome was a Romanised Illyrian, Augustine was a Romanised Berber. "Roman" identity for these people was tied up in participation in imperial institutions; this was not sustained in the Medieval church as "Romans" in any ethnic sense but identification of the ethnically heterogeneous priesthood with the institutions of the Church. To the already-loose extent by which Romans in the imperial era regarded themselves as an ethnic group, Christians were by their own history perfectly positioned to detach Roman-ness from any sort of ethnic or cultural identity distinct from the institutions and practices of the Church.
Analogies to this absolutely exist in China, as well. It wasn't uncommon from non-Han rulers to appropriate imperial institutions without identifying themselves directly with the Han, to assert themselves as . Many minor kingdoms attempted this with varying degrees of success and endurance; the Yuan and Qing maintained this while extending their authority over the entire territories of their predecessor-dynasties. The "Mandate of Heaven" even provides a superficial analogy to the divine sponsorship of the church, by establishing the ultimate source of this continuity somewhere up in the heavens, above and beyond human affairs, and thus not directly determined by language or dress or any other aspect of human culture, beyond the extent to which certain practices were seen to serve as universal displays of elegance or piety. (The fact that elite culture in both Rome and China tended towards a particular sort of universalising chauvinism complicates all this further.)
Similarly, Asia gives many examples of Sinicising elites that did not assume a direct identification with the ancient Chinese: in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, elites adopting the institutions and trappings of Chinese imperial power, both for their practical benefit and for purposes of prestige, but outside of a few semi-mythical appeals to distant Chinese ancestors, did not confuse themselves for a descendent-people of the Han. To the extent this ever did occur, it was only ever in regions which came under the sustained rule of Chinese imperial authority, which involved both the settling of Han elites in those areas and the integration of native elites into Han elite culture. Given that these borrowings were often much more direct than those of European rulers outside the borders of the either the former Roman or the Latin-speaking world, involving diplomatic relations with the imperial throne and the invitation of Chinese experts into their own courts, it seems bizarre on the face of it that we could somehow maintain that the Swedes, Poles or Irish somehow "became" Romans, but the Koreas never became Chinese. Possibly this is because China is still around to contradict any such claims, while Rome is dead and gone, so its legacy is open to appropriation. It's hard to imagine that a Roman of the second century would lend Akka's claim to be a trueborn son of Romulus much credit.
