Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12hr ago
But your original claim was that “family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.”. You then brought up Greece and Rome as central examples of “Western civilization.” But both Greece and Rome did have family as the bedrock of their civilization for a very very long time! It still occupied a massively important part of their society long after the point when they had collectively achieved elements of social and technological development that you identify in this post as preconditions for civilization: art, philosophy, and industry.
Were they “civilized” but not “Western civilization” at that point? When, chronologically or otherwise, did they officially become Western?™️ (Surely “Western” in this peculiar usage must not have any consistent relationship with geography, as you believe that the Greeks (and somehow the Hebrews, presumably) are more “Western” than the Celtic and Germanic tribes who were physically situated farther to the geographic west.
I’m open to conceding that there is some combination of societal and technological development at which a polity can be said to be (lowercase c) “civilized”: some identifiable factors might be the ability to coordinate large-scale public works, pooling of resources, economies of scale, the ability of the centralized power structure to reliably feed its constituents, the facilitation of leisure activities, etc.
However, under that understanding, the Third Reich was extremely “civilized”. It was wealthy, highly politically centralized, had a thriving artistic and philosophical life, and was in every way a peer competitor to the other rich European powers. Whatever Chesterton seems to mean by “civilized”, it has only a tenuous connection to those elements.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15hr ago
This is exactly the thing I predicted you would do, though! You acknowledge, apparently, that during the period in which the various Aryan peoples speciated into their various proto-nations (a period which lasted at least a thousand years) they were highly clannish, with each family having pervasive control over the legal and religious life of its members; you just don’t think they counted as “a civilization” (let alone as “Western civilization”) until they began moving away from that paradigm by introducing a political superstructure on top of it. This means that even though the Hellenic peoples spent a much larger period of time without such a superstructure than they did with it, all the before stuff doesn’t factor into your analysis.
You get to pick and choose the precise moment when you think a multi-thousand-year-old societal evolution began to count as a civilization, which means you conveniently discard the preconditions that led to it as long as they don’t satisfy the parameters you want a civilization to look like. In my opinion this reveals the fundamentally constructed and aspirational nature of “Western Civilization” discourse. Do you acknowledge it as such?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17hr ago
The family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.
I’m currently reading Fustel De Coulanges’ The Ancient City, which goes into extreme, meticulously-researched detail about just how profoundly family-centric were all of the ancient legal and religious institutions of Rome, Greece, India, and all of the other major Aryan-derived civilizations. It is simply not remotely tenable to claim otherwise, given a cursory survey of the available information. The extended family — the gens in ancient Rome — exercised totalizing control over the lives, property, inheritance, and legal standing of individuals. Said individuals’ level of kinship was meticulously catalogued and determined their legal standing toward each other, their religious obligations, etc.
You can claim that those civilizations only began to count as “Western Civilization™️” once they began to introduce reforms to mitigate/complicate this paradigm; my observation is that boosters of the “Western Civilization” framing are fairly shameless in the way they selectively pick the parts of ancient history that they want current society to recapitulate now, and fully ignore/misrepresent every counter-example or inconvenient element which would cast their narrative into doubt.
Under what rubric are you claiming that the Odyssey is “bedrock literature” but Antigone — which is not only centrally about family obligations, but also primarily about a woman — isn’t? If anything, shouldn’t Antigone be a more example of what constitutes “Greek civilization”, as it was written when Greece was at a considerably higher level of technological and artistic development than it had been when the Odyssey was composed?
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