4 ms·

Hiding in Plain Sight

achrono 4y ago
The key message, in my reading, is that at the heart of Western civilization is a sort of schizophrenia. Because we (or at least the True & Decent Inheritors of it) like to believe that the West is this singular civilizing force -- i.e. we believe out of the kindness of our hearts that everyone has the same moral worth but also that the Other needs to be taught the way -- the way exemplified by this unique realm of ours that affords protection & compassion to all and demonstrates the right way to live. I'm actually quite in support of the idea that the modern West represents the ideal state so far as we know to date -- but let's not proselytize the sh*t out of it.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  No. What is liberally democratic in "Western" democracy was copied wholesale from American examples eloquently explained by their representatives, and demonstrated in numerous urban centers there. Graeber's and Wengrow's book "The Dawn of Everything" goes into this in much greater depth. Graeber's tragic early death should not overshadow Wengrow's continuing work on the subject. We should demand proper and complete translations of the original Tlaxcalan sources today only available to English speakers in paraphrase, and scholarly acknowledgement of the literary tradition.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Wouldn't the obvious place to look for democratic influences on Europe be ancient Rome/ancient Greece? Obviously European science and religion were massively influenced by the ancients. (Of course, both Rome and Greece had republican forms of government at various points in their history -- they didn't get it from the Amerindians!) Wikipedia says the Magna Carta dates to 1215, well before the discovery of the new world, and the English parliament also dates to that time. I'm fairly sure that various Italian city-states like Venice and Florence had periods of republicanism before 1492 as well. Could've spread beyond Italy through the cultural influence of the Renaissance? I find it plausible that the New World influence on European governance is underrated, but the "copied wholesale" claim strikes me as putting activism above history...
    - Psychlist 4y ago
      Why? We get much maths and a lot of history from Arabia and India, for example. Core food crops from from america-south-of-the-USA, why not core government ideas too? I've lived in two countries and the differences in how people think of their country and government are significantly influenced by how they started. Australia literally can't sign a treaty with their first nations because that's now how things are done here. Law is imposed by force from outside, that's just how it is. Whereas Aotearoa is the result of diplomacy, negotiation and sales competition. People think getting together to talk things out and come up with something that works is the obvious answer. This isn't "history, the definitive guide" it's more of a cultural overview. Telling a kiwi "the treaty is a historical irrelevance" is like telling a US citizen "founding fathers, bah, they're long dead". Technically true, but ignoring them isn't culturally possible. So to me the idea that tribal government systems influenced how your founders put their government together is no less likely than other ideas coming from the Prophet Muhammad (Jefferson and Adams both had copies of the Koran and almost certainly read them. And FWIW the Koran describes in laborious detail how a country should be run circa 600AD).
      - ShredKazoo 4y ago
        I don't think we disagree, not sure you read my comment
    - specialist 4y ago
      > ...ancient Rome/ancient Greece? What I gleaned (and can now recall) is the Iroquois introduced the Old World to the novel concept of "freedom". In the Old World, democracy was an elite decision making process. All the peoples still belonged to their king, country, state, whomever. Everyone's lives remained tightly constrained and most people had few options. People had duties and obligations. To the Iroquois, IIRC, people were autonomous, group decision making was participatory, and no one was excluded from the process. I roughly equate this relationship between people and the state to our concept of anarchism (left-libertarianism). Maybe one illuminating contrast is Old World government was top-down and the Iroquois was bottom-up.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    I've read their book, and I'm very sympathetic to the idea that American examples profoundly influenced European enlightenment thinkers. But "copied wholesale" seems unnecessarily strong wording. Clearly there's an influence, particularly in the 17-19 centuries. But there are other influences, and modern democracies have many features not present in urban centers of 18 century America. I don't see what the point is of disregarding the construction of parliamentary democracies based on voting, institutions, a free press etc, as an "implementation detail".
nine_k 4y ago
Democracy is not the unique product of the Western civilization. The unique product is a trifecta of ideas: - Human self-determination: humans (after all sexual, racial. xenophobic, etc biases) have the right to determine their own fate. Ideas of personal freedom, equality, and democracy follow from it, among other things, like free enterprise and markets. - Science, in a broad sense: the desire to study how the word works, for fun and profit, through the reality itself, thus doubting any preconceptions, traditions, etc. This of course had and still has many culture-induced limitations, but generally it's considered a worthy thing to do and to share. - Universalism: all humans are worthy enough (again, after all sexual, racial. xenophobic, etc biases), so the two ideas above are not limited to one blessed tribe that should not care about anyone else; the ideas should be spread. Any two without a third don't seem to be enough to put a civilization onto an upwards spiral of accumulation and spreading of knowledge and material wealth. (The scary thought of many a sci-fi writer is that the first idea is not actually required, or can be extinguished later.) Other civilizations, which did not concentrate on accumulating of material wealth or written knowledge as much as the West, achieved serious heights in other areas, often quite higher than what the West was able to achieve by that time. But they could not withstand the clash, and were often destroyed, or, in a slightly more fortunate turn of events, assimilated.
- Psychlist 4y ago
  To paraphrase Ghandi's famous quote: get back to me in 10,000 years and I'll have an opinion on whether western civilisation works. I live in a country where recorded history goes back 15,000+ years and there's evidence for continuous culture for 30,000 years or more. "caring for country" is just wildly incompatible with even "ancient greek*" ideals but only one of them can say it's worked for 10,000 years. * you know when a four year old kid says "you're really old". That's us looking at Ancient Greece
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Depends what "worked" means. Is your country that much richer, e.g., higher GDP per head than most countries? By some other measures? Different societies might chose different objective functions and then comparing what works is tricky. Especially, if being around in a certain cultural form isn't a strong part of the objective.
jesprenj 4y ago
403
SyzygistSix 4y ago
Not sure where this take is coming from. I learned about the Iroquois Nation in elementary school. And its influence on US democracy was mentioned in multiple classes later on.

The key message, in my reading, is that at the heart of Western civilization is a sort of schizophrenia. Because we (or at least the True & Decent Inheritors of it) like to believe that the West is this singular civilizing force -- i.e. we believe out of the kindness of our hearts that everyone has the same moral worth but also that the Other needs to be taught the way -- the way exemplified by this unique realm of ours that affords protection & compassion to all and demonstrates the right way to live. I'm actually quite in support of the idea that the modern West represents the ideal state so far as we know to date -- but let's not proselytize the sh*t out of it.

moloch-hai 4y ago
No. What is liberally democratic in "Western" democracy was copied wholesale from American examples eloquently explained by their representatives, and demonstrated in numerous urban centers there. Graeber's and Wengrow's book "The Dawn of Everything" goes into this in much greater depth. Graeber's tragic early death should not overshadow Wengrow's continuing work on the subject. We should demand proper and complete translations of the original Tlaxcalan sources today only available to English speakers in paraphrase, and scholarly acknowledgement of the literary tradition.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Wouldn't the obvious place to look for democratic influences on Europe be ancient Rome/ancient Greece? Obviously European science and religion were massively influenced by the ancients. (Of course, both Rome and Greece had republican forms of government at various points in their history -- they didn't get it from the Amerindians!) Wikipedia says the Magna Carta dates to 1215, well before the discovery of the new world, and the English parliament also dates to that time. I'm fairly sure that various Italian city-states like Venice and Florence had periods of republicanism before 1492 as well. Could've spread beyond Italy through the cultural influence of the Renaissance? I find it plausible that the New World influence on European governance is underrated, but the "copied wholesale" claim strikes me as putting activism above history...
  - Psychlist 4y ago
    Why? We get much maths and a lot of history from Arabia and India, for example. Core food crops from from america-south-of-the-USA, why not core government ideas too? I've lived in two countries and the differences in how people think of their country and government are significantly influenced by how they started. Australia literally can't sign a treaty with their first nations because that's now how things are done here. Law is imposed by force from outside, that's just how it is. Whereas Aotearoa is the result of diplomacy, negotiation and sales competition. People think getting together to talk things out and come up with something that works is the obvious answer. This isn't "history, the definitive guide" it's more of a cultural overview. Telling a kiwi "the treaty is a historical irrelevance" is like telling a US citizen "founding fathers, bah, they're long dead". Technically true, but ignoring them isn't culturally possible. So to me the idea that tribal government systems influenced how your founders put their government together is no less likely than other ideas coming from the Prophet Muhammad (Jefferson and Adams both had copies of the Koran and almost certainly read them. And FWIW the Koran describes in laborious detail how a country should be run circa 600AD).
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      I don't think we disagree, not sure you read my comment
  - specialist 4y ago
    > ...ancient Rome/ancient Greece? What I gleaned (and can now recall) is the Iroquois introduced the Old World to the novel concept of "freedom". In the Old World, democracy was an elite decision making process. All the peoples still belonged to their king, country, state, whomever. Everyone's lives remained tightly constrained and most people had few options. People had duties and obligations. To the Iroquois, IIRC, people were autonomous, group decision making was participatory, and no one was excluded from the process. I roughly equate this relationship between people and the state to our concept of anarchism (left-libertarianism). Maybe one illuminating contrast is Old World government was top-down and the Iroquois was bottom-up.
- geysersam 4y ago
  I've read their book, and I'm very sympathetic to the idea that American examples profoundly influenced European enlightenment thinkers. But "copied wholesale" seems unnecessarily strong wording. Clearly there's an influence, particularly in the 17-19 centuries. But there are other influences, and modern democracies have many features not present in urban centers of 18 century America. I don't see what the point is of disregarding the construction of parliamentary democracies based on voting, institutions, a free press etc, as an "implementation detail".

nine_k 4y ago

Democracy is not the unique product of the Western civilization. The unique product is a trifecta of ideas: - Human self-determination: humans (after all sexual, racial. xenophobic, etc biases) have the right to determine their own fate. Ideas of personal freedom, equality, and democracy follow from it, among other things, like free enterprise and markets. - Science, in a broad sense: the desire to study how the word works, for fun and profit, through the reality itself, thus doubting any preconceptions, traditions, etc. This of course had and still has many culture-induced limitations, but generally it's considered a worthy thing to do and to share. - Universalism: all humans are worthy enough (again, after all sexual, racial. xenophobic, etc biases), so the two ideas above are not limited to one blessed tribe that should not care about anyone else; the ideas should be spread. Any two without a third don't seem to be enough to put a civilization onto an upwards spiral of accumulation and spreading of knowledge and material wealth. (The scary thought of many a sci-fi writer is that the first idea is not actually required, or can be extinguished later.) Other civilizations, which did not concentrate on accumulating of material wealth or written knowledge as much as the West, achieved serious heights in other areas, often quite higher than what the West was able to achieve by that time. But they could not withstand the clash, and were often destroyed, or, in a slightly more fortunate turn of events, assimilated.

Psychlist 4y ago
To paraphrase Ghandi's famous quote: get back to me in 10,000 years and I'll have an opinion on whether western civilisation works. I live in a country where recorded history goes back 15,000+ years and there's evidence for continuous culture for 30,000 years or more. "caring for country" is just wildly incompatible with even "ancient greek*" ideals but only one of them can say it's worked for 10,000 years. * you know when a four year old kid says "you're really old". That's us looking at Ancient Greece
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Depends what "worked" means. Is your country that much richer, e.g., higher GDP per head than most countries? By some other measures? Different societies might chose different objective functions and then comparing what works is tricky. Especially, if being around in a certain cultural form isn't a strong part of the objective.

jesprenj 4y ago

403

SyzygistSix 4y ago

Not sure where this take is coming from. I learned about the Iroquois Nation in elementary school. And its influence on US democracy was mentioned in multiple classes later on.