tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post6003387015381212313..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Why do people think the Romans were boring and cruel?Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-37432435160903267692011-10-16T19:30:25.671+01:002011-10-16T19:30:25.671+01:00Anon- what you say is true enough - but even so, a...Anon- what you say is true enough - but even so, a secular perspective still misses probably the core feature of these past Western civilizations: that which would have been most obvious to the people of the time. <br /><br />I think it is increasingly obvious that there never would have been these secular achievements without serious religiousness, which was necessary but not sufficient to major human accomplishment. <br /><br />Secular achievements are not at the centre of human life - they are a by-product of certain types of devout religiousity; not an end in themselves. <br /><br />As soon as they became an end in themselves, secular achievements (peace, prosperity, comfort and in general the ability to shape the world to humans wishes) began to disappear and become replaced by ever-more-dishonest pretence of achievements.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-13132845207501168242011-10-16T18:29:22.421+01:002011-10-16T18:29:22.421+01:00When one's only tool is a hammer then every pr...When one's only tool is a hammer then every problem or issue begins to look like a nail.<br /><br />What you write here may have some validity in so far as the modern world is adamantly anti-religious. But if you step back, you might find that denigrating the Romans is only part of a larger project to denigrate the West as a whole and to minimize its (spectacular) contributions to the world.<br /><br />Several books have been published in recent years to loud acclaim that develop the thesis that there was nothing special about the West. Absolutely nothing. Ever. They explain any advance made by the West as sheer luck, or, as in the case of the ancient Greeks, that they borrowed all of their ideas.<br /><br />The books by those who refute this denigrate-the-West school are quickly shunted off to the margins of obscurity. A recent book that takes on these “revisionists” is by Ricardo Duchesne; his book is entitled <a href="http://amzn.to/qKVP2Q" rel="nofollow">The Uniqueness of Western Civilization </a><br /><br />I provide here two excerpts from fairly early on in his book that lists some (but not all) of the main culprits of the denigrate-the-West school:<br /><br />Defenders of Armesto will surely argue that he does give the West its <br />due when it enters onto the world stage in the 16th century – in such <br />section headings as “The Renaissance ‘Discovery of the World’”(621),“The Rise of Western Science”(625), “The West’s Productivity Leap”(690), “The Enlightenment in Europe”(747), “Western Dominance in the Nineteenth Century”(842),and “Western Science Ascendant”(918). But even in these sections Armesto’s singular goal is to instill the idea that the West was a perennially backward civilization that only emerged in the 19th century thanks to the benevolent influences of Asia. <br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Armesto’s text was released fresh in the hills of a string of works published after the mid-1990s all dedicated to the dismantling of the <br />“Eurocentric” consensus on the “rise of the West.” The most influential <br />of these works included Jack Goody’s The East in the West(1996); Bin Wong’s China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997); A. G. Frank’s Re-Orient: Economy in the Asian Age (1998), James Blaut’s Eight Eurocentric Historians(2000); Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the <br />Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), John Hobson’s The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (2004), and Jack Goldstone’s extended essay, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution”(2002). These works were exclusively directed against the idea that Europe possessed any cultural attributes that could be contrasted to the world’s cultures. In the next three chapters I will evaluate the merits of this new orthodoxy and the relevance of the old Eurocentric model.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-55070778372302938302011-10-16T15:07:50.070+01:002011-10-16T15:07:50.070+01:00It's racism - the Romans had too many dull, wh...It's racism - the Romans had too many dull, white characteristics: practical stuff e.g aquaducts, roads, hot baths, domes, law code, et bloody cetera.deariemenoreply@blogger.com