What an interesting statement! How far do you really take this? Couldn't the same thing be said about ideals in themselves? I would argue that they're even less "real" than civilizations, cultures and nations. At least cultural groups are composed of patterns of behavior and belief that have a demonstrable reality. There's no way you can demonstrate the reality of a human right. Even the concept of 'welfare' is an extremely amorphous idea.
I do think that ideals are at best meaningless and at worst an active impediment to morality if they cannot be cashed out in concrete terms. The notion of "human rights" that you mention is a good example. There's no such thing as a "right" if we take that to mean a thing in itself. However, the language of "rights" gains its meaning and its moral force from the fact that it is really verbal shorthand for obligations: to say that you have a right to something is to say that other people have an obligation to give it to you or not to prevent you from having it. And these general obligations themselves must ultimately come down to particular obligations to do or refrain from doing particular actions. Personally I think that any ideal that is worthwhile at all must ultimately be about improving people's lives or preventing them from getting worse, because I think that some kind of act consequentialism is the only kind of morality that can really be rationally defended in a satisfactory way. And so I think that ideals that can't be cashed out in such a way are indeed misguided.
On a more mundane level, do you think supporting a football team, feeling a kinship with your family or having a sense of belonging to a particular circle of friends are forms of idolotry? If not, why are football teams or families a friendship groups any less real than other kinds of cultural identity?
What are "supporting", "feeling kinship", and "a sense of belonging", though? At least in the case of one's personal relations to immediate families or friends there is personal contact, shared experience, and similar concrete things. Talk of "kinship" or "belonging" are just rather abstract ways of referring to these particular experiences, histories, or feelings. Perhaps something similar could be said for supporting a football team, to the extent that one has some actual connection to that team, although it's not a notion I really comprehend at the best of times. What I would regard as idolatrous in the broad sense I indicated above are forms of "identity" that break free from personal connection and appeal instead to vaguer supposed links, such as tribal or national affiliations. Those are cases where there isn't really any
real connection between members of the supposed group, but the group is nevertheless treated as if it is a real thing, and in extreme cases is regarded as something of moral worth in its own right - perhaps of even greater moral worth than actual people. When the group in question is a nation, that's what we call fascism, and I don't see treating other groups in the same way as morally distinct from that.
Is our own personhood even 'real'? To have a coherent sense of self we need to create a narrative and believe in ourselves as continuous entities stretching from birth to death, even though virtually all the physical molecules which compose us will be different, our personalities will have utterly changed and our memories are unreliable and prone to reinvention.
That's a very different issue. We do not arbitrarily think that somebody today is the same person they were yesterday or ten years ago despite all the changes you mention; as long as there are substantial and psychological continuities to some degree we non-arbitrarily treat them as the same individual. Philosophers have spilled much ink over trying to establish precisely what criteria we do use. But this isn't really to the point: there's no denying that a given individual
is an individual (in some sense at least). An individual person is not an abstract entity in the same way that a club or a nation is.
Besides, I'm not sure how your example is supposed to counter what I'm saying. It sounds to me like you're agreeing with me that things we often talk about as if they were real are not actually real after all. In which case I have no argument with you.
Personally I don't think humans can even conceive of each other or anything worthwhile without valuing abstractions. We can't make sense of the world without abstractions.
Your second sentence doesn't support your first. It is no doubt true that the way we perceive and conceive of the world and its contents relies heavily upon abstraction. That's been a non-controversial philosophical tenet at least since Aristotle. But it doesn't follow that we are obliged to
value those abstractions in a moral way. It may be, for example, that for me to recognise the difference between a bald man and a hirsute man, I must at some mental level create and use abstract concepts such as "baldness" or "hirsuteness". Perhaps I have to create mental objects such as "bald men in general" or "hirsute men in general". But even if all that is true, it wouldn't follow that I must think the
groups "all bald men" or "all hirsute men" have moral value. I wouldn't have to start thinking that bald men are superior to hirsute men or vice versa. I wouldn't even have to think that these groups have any existence outside my mind's categorising activities. To
use an abstraction is not to suppose that it has objective existence, any more than dreaming up stories about dragons is to suppose that they exist. Once you start thinking that these mental conveniences and playthings have existence in their own right, not only have you become deluded about the way the world is put together, but you are halfway down the road to giving these things moral weight - and that's when people start to lose any sense of right and wrong.
) lost relevance because it is no longer unique, lost that uniqueness through its own success in converting others. But even that is wrong, because there never was one "western civilization".
