2 ms·

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 r

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.
wahern 4y ago
I don't think "Western culture" can have much meaning going back more than 2 or 3 millennia at the most. And I suspect that's true of every identifiable culture around the globe, at least the large and complex ones--smaller, isolated ones may be more stable. Go back to the first millennium BC and you can find the roots of Western culture in Northern India, Persia, the Middle East, North and even Central Africa, and elsewhere at least as much as they can be found in Europe. And vice-versa--Buddhist and Hindu religious sculpture, for example, was strongly influenced by Greek art. If you're looking across 10,000 years, the histories of much of Eurasia and Africa are intertwined in ways that make our modern categories useless. OTOH, an argument could be made that an expansive definition of "Western culture" could be inclusive of much of Eurasia and Africa, especially when you look at major religions. Though they often have wildly different answers, most of them are asking similar questions--e.g. the problem of evil. To find cultures (or clusters of cultures or what have you) which consistently ask fundamentally different questions you have to go further afield.

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.

wahern 4y ago

I don't think "Western culture" can have much meaning going back more than 2 or 3 millennia at the most. And I suspect that's true of every identifiable culture around the globe, at least the large and complex ones--smaller, isolated ones may be more stable. Go back to the first millennium BC and you can find the roots of Western culture in Northern India, Persia, the Middle East, North and even Central Africa, and elsewhere at least as much as they can be found in Europe. And vice-versa--Buddhist and Hindu religious sculpture, for example, was strongly influenced by Greek art. If you're looking across 10,000 years, the histories of much of Eurasia and Africa are intertwined in ways that make our modern categories useless. OTOH, an argument could be made that an expansive definition of "Western culture" could be inclusive of much of Eurasia and Africa, especially when you look at major religions. Though they often have wildly different answers, most of them are asking similar questions--e.g. the problem of evil. To find cultures (or clusters of cultures or what have you) which consistently ask fundamentally different questions you have to go further afield.