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>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman R

by geowwy 8y ago

>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity. Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector of the Eastern church.

bilbo0s 8y ago
Good point. I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.
mcv 8y ago
They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe. There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures. And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium. Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.
- simonh 8y ago
  This reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with one of my daughters about species, specifically Homo Sapiens, but generally as well. She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. The way they would have categorised hominid species would depend on the populations they saw at that time. It’s the same with civilisations. How we categorise them is temporally dependent and is in fact an artefact of language. Reality doesn’t care if our linguistic categorizations make sense, or how they are limited.
  - reader5000 8y ago
    Continuity existing between separate categories doesn't mean categories are arbitrary nor artifacts of language. For example adults and children really are separate categories for many important purposes yet there is never a single day when a child becomes an adult.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Categorizations can be useful definitely, but we need to bear in mind they’re not definitive or absolute. The underlying reality is primary, not the categorization, but it’s easy to get it the wrong way round.
    - JackFr 8y ago
      That's an excellent analogy. How a society differentiates adults and children, is often more a reflection of societal norms than it is an objective biological distinction. Similarly, analyses like these cannot help but be a reflection of the society that produced them. This article features a callout in the middle with weirdly axis-ed charts about climate change, inequality and environmental degradation, it's difficult not smirk knowing that within the context of our current society, there was no way it could be otherwise. One wonders 50 or 150 years ago what the cultural bugbears were and what the callout in the middle of the page would have featured. Overpopulation? Nuclear war? Out-of-wedlock births?
      - mcv 8y ago
        It's a decent analogy, but not a great one. Most people grow up in a fairly similar way. Every civilisation develops differently. Also, it's clear where one person ends and the next person begins. With civilisations, that's not so clear.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. There is no such person. Speciation isn't some quick and dramatic happening, it's a generally slow evolution (though a lot faster for things like bacteria). "Species" is just how biologists categorize things, but organisms are continually evolving to some extent, so if you grab some random humans from 1M years ago, and compare them to random humans today, you'll find some pretty significant differences most likely, even if it is possible for them all to interbreed. If you go back even farther, the differences will be greater, you might not be able to interbreed, but there's no clear delineation if you look at humans and their ancestors over the course of the last ~5M years, just a slow progression. Our modern biologists/anthropologists make up names for the beings from various select points in time, since they do differ markedly from beings at other far-removed points in time, but we don't have a clear picture anyway because all we have is fossils which don't show a clear picture, they're just select points in time where we got lucky and were able to find an artifact.
- LuciferAdvocate 8y ago
  Sure, but then the western roman empire only begins in the 3rd century with the partition of the unified roman empire (and collapsed in the 5th). Even if you just want to look at who controls rome (understandable if we're talking about calling something the roman empire), after the reconquest by Justinian, it belonged to the eastern empire about the same amount of time as the west.
goto11 8y ago
This quickly gets into a "Ship of Theseus" discussion. Arguable modern Turkey is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, but would you say that modern Turkey is the same political entity as the Roman Republic? The is no objective answer to such questions - it gets down to who gets to write history and what they are trying to achieve. Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy derived legitimacy by considering themselves the true successor of Rome. So did the Catholic church to some extent. Therefore western historiography have traditionally sidelined the Eastern Roman Empire. Even the name "Byzantine Empire" is part of this framing.

by geowwy 8y ago

bilbo0s 8y ago

Good point. I was so taken by the fact that they were conflating "political entity" with "civilization" that I didn't even realize that they were even breaking up political entities and calling them different "civilization"s.

mcv 8y ago

They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe. There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Empire, and these are all related but clearly different cultures. And then there's the vikings which were clearly a different culture, arguably a different civilisation, but infused themselves in every corner of Europe, from England to Russia to Sicily and Byzantium. Civilisations do not have clear boundaries, both geographically and temporally, and you certainly can't equate them with empires. I think civilisations rarely truly collapse (except under the impact of invasion or colonialism maybe), but they do change, and sometimes dramatically. The collapse of empires is sometimes dramatic, as in the case of the Western Roman Empire, and sometimes barely noticeable, as in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.

simonh 8y ago
This reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with one of my daughters about species, specifically Homo Sapiens, but generally as well. She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. The way they would have categorised hominid species would depend on the populations they saw at that time. It’s the same with civilisations. How we categorise them is temporally dependent and is in fact an artefact of language. Reality doesn’t care if our linguistic categorizations make sense, or how they are limited.
- reader5000 8y ago
  Continuity existing between separate categories doesn't mean categories are arbitrary nor artifacts of language. For example adults and children really are separate categories for many important purposes yet there is never a single day when a child becomes an adult.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Categorizations can be useful definitely, but we need to bear in mind they’re not definitive or absolute. The underlying reality is primary, not the categorization, but it’s easy to get it the wrong way round.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    That's an excellent analogy. How a society differentiates adults and children, is often more a reflection of societal norms than it is an objective biological distinction. Similarly, analyses like these cannot help but be a reflection of the society that produced them. This article features a callout in the middle with weirdly axis-ed charts about climate change, inequality and environmental degradation, it's difficult not smirk knowing that within the context of our current society, there was no way it could be otherwise. One wonders 50 or 150 years ago what the cultural bugbears were and what the callout in the middle of the page would have featured. Overpopulation? Nuclear war? Out-of-wedlock births?
    - mcv 8y ago
      It's a decent analogy, but not a great one. Most people grow up in a fairly similar way. Every civilisation develops differently. Also, it's clear where one person ends and the next person begins. With civilisations, that's not so clear.
- magduf 8y ago
  >She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. There is no such person. Speciation isn't some quick and dramatic happening, it's a generally slow evolution (though a lot faster for things like bacteria). "Species" is just how biologists categorize things, but organisms are continually evolving to some extent, so if you grab some random humans from 1M years ago, and compare them to random humans today, you'll find some pretty significant differences most likely, even if it is possible for them all to interbreed. If you go back even farther, the differences will be greater, you might not be able to interbreed, but there's no clear delineation if you look at humans and their ancestors over the course of the last ~5M years, just a slow progression. Our modern biologists/anthropologists make up names for the beings from various select points in time, since they do differ markedly from beings at other far-removed points in time, but we don't have a clear picture anyway because all we have is fossils which don't show a clear picture, they're just select points in time where we got lucky and were able to find an artifact.
LuciferAdvocate 8y ago
Sure, but then the western roman empire only begins in the 3rd century with the partition of the unified roman empire (and collapsed in the 5th). Even if you just want to look at who controls rome (understandable if we're talking about calling something the roman empire), after the reconquest by Justinian, it belonged to the eastern empire about the same amount of time as the west.

goto11 8y ago

This quickly gets into a "Ship of Theseus" discussion. Arguable modern Turkey is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, but would you say that modern Turkey is the same political entity as the Roman Republic? The is no objective answer to such questions - it gets down to who gets to write history and what they are trying to achieve. Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy derived legitimacy by considering themselves the true successor of Rome. So did the Catholic church to some extent. Therefore western historiography have traditionally sidelined the Eastern Roman Empire. Even the name "Byzantine Empire" is part of this framing.