Steve King doesn’t like it when you point out the the Republican convention seems to consist of a lot of angry white people.
“This whole ‘white people’ business, though, does get a little tired, Charlie [Pierce]. I mean, I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other sub-group of people contribute to civilization?”
If you, like me, found it hard to believe anyone would say something so stupid and wrong, it’s on video.
Hey, at least King is being open and honest in confirming that the GOP is the party of cranky white bigots.
where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people?
Hm, I wonder why many English words have ARABIC roots…?
* Alcove
* Algebra
* Algorithm
* Alkaline
* Alchemy (and Chemistry)
* Arsenal
* Azimuth
* Average
* Coffee
* Giraffe
* Sugar
* Zenith
* Zero
Not for nothing that I call them the WORMS party – White Old Rich Male Straight party. If you are missing even ONE of those 5 characteristics, that party is a bad news for you. Missing more than one, that party is literally HOUNDING you. I don’t understand why non-WORMS hang out there at all.
The deepest irony is that, by any definition, “civilization” was pretty much up and running for thousands of years before people this Steve King would recognise as “white” got in on the act. Sumer? Babylon? Egypt? Nubia? Assyria? Xia China? The Indus Valley?
Heck, even if he only deigns to go back to Classical Greece he’d find the people there significantly browner than he imagines and unwilling to lay claim to being of the same racial group he is.
Ha ha, I sent you the entire tweet moments ago (there’s some additional verbiage about Christianity leaving its footprints). His opponent, Kim Weaver, says it’s already creating an uptick in her fundraising.
I thought zero was from india?
Why doesn’t someone ask him what Jesus contributed? He was surely from what would be considered a “sub-group.” Oh, wait, I forgot about the pictures I saw in Sunday School those many years ago.
The word is arabic in origin. The concept of digital notation with a digit representing zero is Indian, although the concept (and difficulties) of zero being a number is one all cultures have realized.
Steve KIng is wildly wrong.
The basics of our civilization were created starting 10,000 years ago in the middle east by peoples that would not be considered white. Mesopotamia and Egypt.
That is agriculture, metal working, and writing. Try running a civilization without those.
Our number system is Arabic with the zero from India. The Chinese invented paper and gun powder.
Yeah, apparently he missed the whole “Cradle of CIVILIZATION” thing in history.
Not white guys there, buddy.
@8 Raven — wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute here. Foreigners may have invented paper, and those squiggly lines on it that mean something, but gun powder comes from the Good Ole U.S.A.
My first thought was Washington Carver, and of course MLK. Of course, I’m sure that King would never acknowledge the contributions of black men.
White people invented woad and tartan and freeeeedom.
(saw it in a movie)
Everybody with fibrous plants paper.
Hey, it was hard working white men who built the White House! Or, at least, hard working white slave overseers who made sure the slaves did a good job. Which totally counts as a white contribution.
I thought I saw a headline for a similar article about King’s disgusting verbalization, that included American History in the title.
While still totally wrong, I could see where he could be totally dismissing contribution of groups other than angry white dudes to capital C Civilization (America being the only example thereof donchano).
But that misreading gives him too much leeway to rewrite his words to make him sound more accurate.
..
I’ll bet Duckster really classed-up the joint.
..
I hope City Sanitation is keeping the shitflow away from the Rock&Roll H.O.F. (the only thing worthwhile in that shithole on Lake Erie)
The ignorance and lies of this guy are astonishing.
The xians sometimes claim that xianity had a huge influence on Western civilization. Totally false.
1. The deep roots are the middle east where agriculture, metal working, and writing were invented.
2. Then Pagan Greece and Rome.
3. Xianity shows up about the time the Roman empire falls, a huge disaster. Ironically the Germanics who knocked it over were…xians too.
4. The time when xianity had power was known as the Dark Ages.
5. Things got going with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.
6. Our modern civilization and US influence is based heavily on…science. Modern medicine, long average lifespans, and all the powered stuff that surrounds us including the computers you are reading this on.
In all this, xianity’s influence wasn’t much. And a whole lot of it was and still is…negative. Xianity has been fighting science and progress for centuries now.
I’m thinking next election I’m going to start a party that takes all of the racist dogwhistles and replaces them with the word ‘brunette’. Think I’ll call it the Fair Australia party. Our slogan will be, “A Fairer Australia, not a big one.”
I’m getting real fucking tired of these god damn racist motherfuckers.
I just had a about Australia.
I have always known that Australia is both a “Continent” and “Country”.
Why?
Why not more than one country on that continent?
I am Canadian.
There may be similar questions.
chigau@18: That is indeed how I was taught, way back in the day, but nowadays the continent is “Oceania” and includes New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and a few other close islands.
@15 Raven
That’s really wrong. The Dark Ages (in northern and central Europe) only lasted until about 1000 AD at the latest, after which we got the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were a tremendous period of economic change and technological advancement, and the medieval Catholic Church played an important role in promoting that.
Kind of fun to think about how many groups King counts as white would find the concept insulting and/or laughable. Certainly the Greeks and Romans. Maybe the early medieval concept of Christendom is close enough that they’d recognize the modern concept of ‘white’?
People, I don’t think King will be impressed by your examples. Expect one big No True Scotsman: anything not white is Not Truely Civilized.
OK, everybody has (correctly) piled on the to the historical inaccuracy of the claim, but there’s another point that’s worth making: if you spend hundreds of years systematically excluding everybody who isn’t a white dude from participating in your conception of civilisation, you don’t then get to turn around and point to the relative lack of contributions from non-white / non-dude people as evidence of their inferiority.
If your golf club doesn’t admit women, you can’t use the fact that all the competitions are won by men as evidence that women are bad at golf.
Which bit of early medieval Christendom? Certainly not Constantinople…
Indeed. Also, the Dark Ages are notable for the lack of any kind of centralised religious authority and (in many places) the resurgence of paganism.
Dunc@23: Not to mention that when an exceptionally brilliant person of the “wrong” sort manages to break into the club and make a major contribution, that contribution tends to not get acknowledged properly. Consider, for example, the amount of credit EE Just gets for his discoveries about cell cytoplasm versus how much Watson and Crick get for their stealing of Franklin’s data on DNA (or how much credit Franklin gets for her work, for that matter.)
Speaking of keeping it classy at the RNC, here’s a side-by-side comparison of Melania Trump’s speech with Michelle Obama’s.
Almost hard to believe how sloppy and undignified Trump’s campaign is.
Raven, #15
While I am uneasy with the term “Western Civilization” (far too nebulous and unspecific, and tends to get used almost exclusively to do down Asian, Native American and African peoples), it would be going altogether too far to claim that christian thought of various kinds has had little impact on it. The reason being that christianity in all its guises is a direct product of the very civilization it sprang from, and cannot be separated off as some kind of abstract Platonic form operating on history from outside it. It both influences and is influenced by the civilization around it. It is a part of that civilization.
Christianity took most of its myths from levantine peoples of the Iron Age and most of its structured philosophical thought from Classical philosophy. It developed in the Roman Empire according to the needs and beliefs of the Romans who adopted it, taking classical models for its iconography and ideas. When Constantine adopted it as his own personal Imperial Cult it took on many aspects of Imperial majesty that it did not have before. During the Middle Ages it adapted further, to meet the needs of European and African communities. It became mystical and proselytising during the age of unification that we tend to call the Dark Ages. It became bureaucratic and invaded people’s public and private lives in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries as the church became established as the clerical and administrative centre of newly centralised kingdoms. After the Black Death it took on increasingly harsh and apocalyptic overtones to reflect the psychology of a devastated Europe, spawning such things as witch hunts, flagellants and the harsh doctrines of Calvin. It became imperialistic and domineering once again during the age of exploration and empire in the Early Modern period.
The notion that there is some fixed, stable thing called “Christianity” is a myth put about by christians who wish to think of themselves as special and favoured and imbued with a timelessness above the flow of history. “Christianity” is just culture, like anything else.
Also, Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Egypt: That Was Long Ago. Nowadays, non-whites contribute nothing to society!
With some notable exceptions, but those are just details, right?
How about those who domesticated much of the food we eat? Rice and soybeans from China. Maize from Mexico. Potatoes from the Andes.
@Brett. 20
You are really wrong. I know there is a lot of revisionist history about how great the middle ages were. And lies from xians about how great the Catholic church was.
The Dark Age is a short hand popular term for a dismal time in our history after the Roman empire fell. I”m not going to summarize 5 books worth of data in one box but things didn’t really get going again until the RCC lost a lot of power (Protestants, remember them), the Renaissance, and especially the Enlightenment.
Our modern civilization owes a lot more to the Enlightenment than the Catholic church. That is why we build space probes rather than hunt down and burn at the stake witches and heretics.
ahcuah @28, Let’s include what we drink.
Nearis Green was a slave in Tennessee in the 1800s. He taught Jack Daniel the art of distilling whiskey. It was only recently that the Jack Daniel’s distillery started acknowledging and embracing this history.
American whiskey is not just a white man’s venture.
In my short lifetime, men have been given credit for work I did several times. My efforts were erased from the picture … mostly when men gave other men hearty credit for my work. Steve King reminds me of those bad times. White men seem to be running on automatic when they fail to give credit to women, to people of color … to anyone but themselves.
One of the best-selling whiskeys in the world owes a debt to a slave, and to that slave’s descendants.
@ Cartomancer
You are saying that xianity didn’t influence Western civilization but that Western civilization influenced xianity.
OK, I’m sure some of that happened.
Xianity is a syncretic religion. A Jewish base with elements of Zoroastrianism thrown in, (Hell, satan via the Greeks), Greek and Roman Paganism and philosophy, and later some European Paganism.
Xianity evolves rapidly.
A lot of scholars date the beginning of the end of the RCC to the Black Death, a huge disaster. The RCC tried to do something about the millions dying and really couldn’t do anything. It took a few centuries and a lot of warfare but the RCC eventually lost their monopoly.
These days the bubonic plague is still around. You can find infected rodents not too far from my house. But it isn’t high on our list of things to worry about. Because, while the RCC couldn’t do much, science can do a lot.
One of the main drivers of our civilization these days is science. Xianity just gets in the way whenever it can.
That is absolutely not how the term “Dark Ages” is used in modern European scholarship, or even moderately well-informed pop history. To the extent that it’s used at all (which is increasingly rarely) it generally refers to the Early Mediaeval period (from the fall of Rome to roughly 1000 CE, although with significant regional variations). It hasn’t been widely used in the way you seem to be using it here since the early 20th century – at least, not in Europe, and not amongst people who know what they’re talking about.
No, I’m saying that if you have to separate the two things out then Christianity was born of “western” civilization, influenced its course and was influenced by it in turn. It’s a feedback loop: Ideas bubble up and take root, influenced by what is going on around them, then lead to new ideas which enrich the pot. It’s the normal and unremarkable process of cultural development that we see in all cultures and civlizations.
More accurately, Christianity is merely a part of “western” civilization (and, in different effects and combinations, of “eastern” and “african” civilization too, because ideas get spread around all over). I don’t see why it deserves taking in isolation – doing so is a sop to those who think there is something special and supra-historical about the religion. It is so deeply wound up in our history of ideas that trying to identify where “christianity” stops and other channels of thought begin is fairly fruitless. Trying to determine where Neoplatonism stops and Christianity begins, for instance, is drawing false boundaries. In many ways modern Christian thought is basically just late antique Neoplatonism fiddled around with a lot – we can try to label some bits of “western” thought as “christian” or “pagan” or “scientific”, but the brains and communities they were floating around in often didn’t make such distinctions, or made them very differently to how we would.
The splitting of the Medieval church into warring factions in the Early Modern period does indeed owe a good deal to the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe – both in the changes that wrought to theology and in the social and economic changes which restructured traditional patterns of lordship and power. It would be wrong to attribute it entirely to that, however, given that even during the high years of medieval plenty and population growth leading up to it there was vocal dissafection within the church over many of its ideas and practices. Dissenters and breakaway factions existed pretty much as soon as the church gained any kind of established temporal presence in society – the Cathars, Oribasians, Amauricians, etc., and even among orthodox catholics there were disputes over the value of poverty, penance, clerical celibacy, relic cult and the like. Hus and Luther were working within a long tradition of tension and dissent.
This isn’t the faculty lounge for a History department. It’s an internet blog thread.
Most Americans, if they’ve even heard the term Dark Ages think of it as some ancient time when life was hard, superstition ruled, and there was no TV.
Rather than quibble with someone who wants to quibble, I use the term as a shorthand for a long period of time when nothing much worthwhile happened. Most people at least know that after the Roman empire fell, there was a long period that wasn’t all great.
The thing about praising “the enlightenment” and decrying the Medieval centuries is that it fits all too neatly into the bigotries and self-aggrandisement of Renaissance and post-Renaissance thought. It does harm to the facts, and denies the fundamental medieval underpinnings that made Renaissance and Enlightenment thought possible. When people like Petrarch and Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton and Rabelais scoffed at medieval thought and medieval achievements, they did so in order to set themselves apart from others and pretend that their genius was superior. Often by aggrandising the ancient world and its thinkers and ignoring anything since. The whole familiar ancient > medieval > modern scheme is premised, implicitly, on the notion that European society lost its way after the decline of the Roman Empire and only found it again when it revived the spirit of Rome.
But in reality the great thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment depended very much on the work their medieval predecessors had done. Galileo’s telescope, for instance, and Kepler’s work on optics, built on the understanding of optics perfected by men such as John Pecham, Witelo of Silesia and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, which itself relied on the work of Alhacen and Al-Kindi in the tenth. In mechanical engineering the whole technology of clockwork was rediscovered and perfected by medieval artisans, taking some cues from Hero of Alexandria but just as much from trial and error. In medicine the Salernitan masters experimented with antiseptic surgery, using alcohol as a sterilising agent. Peter Abelard even developed the basics of modern textual criticism and formal logic – a direct offshoot of theological disputation at the time. Augustine had a version of Descartes’ cogito argument ten centuries beforehand, that medieval thinkers were well acquainted with. Indeed, there is a direct line from scholastic logic to scientific method – we wouldn’t have discovered the necessity of experiment, observation and testing the real world if we hadn’t exhausted the interrogation of ancient knowledge and authoritative texts and found it wanting. The medieval centuries set us up for that.
Most significant of all, though, was the development of the medieval University. The Medieval centuries gave us our model of dedicated scholarly communities that brought together teaching, research and academic patronage – an institution that has an unbroken history from the late tenth century to today. Without their universities many Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers would have been unable to make their great advances and do their great work. Newton, in particular, was very dependent on the patronage of Trinity College Cambridge to support his moody, difficult and uncooperative nature. A lot of people praise the philosophical schools of antiquity, but their ultimate legacy was to get swept away as their members moved on and their patronage dried up. The medieval legacy is still with us – in many ways we’re medievals ourselves.
To draw an analogy with our esteemed host’s discipline, to ignore the foundation that medieval thought gave to the achievements of later civilization is like declaring that all the really important stuff about animals and plants developed when multicellularity developed, and nothing of interest or significance happened before. Getting to the stage where multicellularity was even possible is a fundamental step that needed taking first…
While we are drawing biology analogies, the fall of the Roman empire was like the Chicxulub asteroid strike. A lot of progress was lost. Populations, literacy, and technology actually markedly declined.
Jared Diamond discusses all this in Guns, Germs, and Steel from an ecological and biological perspective. Why do we in the First World have so much when the Third World has so little?
This is all very interesting but I’ve got commitments today so anyone else can toss their 7 cents in.
The decline of the Roman Empire in the West is quite a complex and multi-dimensional thing. Academics make whole careers out of it, and the precise ins and outs are difficult to track with any precision. It’s not my specific field, though I do have a passing familiarity with some of the arguments. Of most interest though, I think, is the way that people ever since have tried to use it to bolster their own agendas.
A particularly egregious example of this that I remember well was during a debate on BBC’s Question Time when an odious right-wing anti-immigration bigot brought up Edward Gibbon’s idea that it was letting in all those barbarian immigrants and their soft, unmanly ways that led to the collapse of Rome and the end of civilization as we knew it. I remember it well because Mary Beard was on that day too, and the look on her face was priceless as a 200 year old piece of Georgian imperialism was bandied about as a fact in a modern political discussion.
Well, a representative responsible for the governance of people in the United States is explicitly promoting the superiority of the white race, but at least we’re ironing out the specifics of the Roman Empire.
Apparently there are things that need to be settled before this whole blatant racism thing can be tackled head-on. #WhitePeopleProblems
@29 Raven
Where’s your proof for this? I linked to two essays written by a man with an actual background in the Medieval Era (he has a graduate degree in Medieval Literature), who in turn provided citations for his essays. Those essays in turn link up with what I’ve read elsewhere on the Middle Ages and technological/economic/social development.
Your follow-up comments aren’t doing much to change that, either. No one who actually knows anything about the Middle Ages could say that “nothing much worthwhile happened”. You need to get out of the simplistic, revisionist idea that the Catholic Church killed progress until the Enlightenment and Science saved the day.
@dunc
It’s honestly not that useful in describing anywhere except the western Roman Empire, and not even all of that. Post-Empire Italy was pretty prosperous until Justinian’s campaigns, the eastern Roman Empire (always the richer and more populous half of it) prospered during the Dark Ages until Islam showed up, and so forth.
@38 cartomancer
Same here. Based off of what I’ve read, I think the best explanation was that the western Roman Empire was simply structurally weak. It had the weaker economic foundation, the longer border, seemingly endemic civil wars, and so forth. If it hadn’t been Germanic war-bands raiding and capturing territories because the Roman forces were (as usual) off fighting more civil wars, it would have been something else not too long after.
@39 tkreacher
Well, the OP was about a racist congressman claiming that non-whites didn’t contribute to western civilization. We’re just ironing out some of the details of said civilization. If you just want to make a “racism is bad people!” comment, no one’s stopping you.
brett @42
Did you just outright dismiss the concerns voiced by (I believe?) a person of colour on a thread about racism, about the direction in which the discussion seems to be going?
@42 rq
No.
brett @44
In which case, I will admit that I am struggling to see the relevance of the on-going discussion to the OP. I’ve seen discussion of the church (and its contributions), as well as the One True Definiton of the Dark Ages, and the economic weakness of the Roman Empire.
Contributions to civilization made by different cultures (esp. people who happen to not be white), not so much. Racism today, not so much. Not since Lynna’s comment @30.
rq @45
Then to bring things back on topic (including a few things mentioned above):
Cities, farming, writing, all the contemporary major world religions, geometry, algebra, the concept of zero, corn, bananas, pasta, rice, tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, tea, coffee, pyramids, paper, the printing press (wait, is that one still being debated?), gun powder, high quality porcelain.
If we count things made by non-whites in European and European descended societies, there’s blood transplants, a ridiculous amount of peanut products, the collected work of Alexandre Dumas, jazz, blues, ragtime, and rock, probably a fair amount of cowboy culture, and liberation theology. Ooh, and the Lone Ranger, probably.
And if we include the way the existence of Americans screwed with European ideas, there’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mormonism, and possibly some interesting interaction with colonial American ideas of democracy.
(Though I’m sure medieval Europe does provide some really interesting topics for a discussion of the influences of the working class, women, and religious minorities on the contemporary West that I’m sure King would also like to pretend didn’t exist if he knew about them.)
@46 arresi
That’s a pretty solid list.
brett #42
I already did make that utterance, angrily and cathartically at #17, and nobody stopped me – so this advice is useless to me as it is self-evident. Thanks for your after-the-fact permission though.
You may have missed it because you had more important things to do, like inform me about your estimations concerning how long the dark ages lasted, and – I don’t know, structural weaknesses in something or other and German war-bands and whatnot.
rq #43
Mixed, for sake of clarity. ;)
rq #45
This was what I was getting at. The discussion wasn’t about what sub-groups have contributed where, it turned into minutia that has nothing to do with that.
But hey, brett, if you want to want to let me know about how Gladiator got the politics of stadium displays wrong, or correct the record on whether or not the leather Maximus wore in the movie was period-correct or not, no one’s stopping you.
tkreacher
Noted, for future reference. :)
Also arresi good list. :)
Sorry for the history geekery, folks, it’s a personal hobby-horse. Point taken.
I tend to come in pretty hot and confrontational, but that can make me seem more like I feel I’m dealing with an “enemy” or something than I actually am.
To clarify, I’m not anti-knowledge, anti-learning, anti-history, or anti-accuracy. If, for example, one of arresi’s helpful list had an example that was mistaken, and someone wanted to clarify and correct the mistake, “actually, in X year C.E., the Caucasian peoples of Whitesville invented socks, other than that though, that’s a good list”.
That’d be great, it’s awesome to be accurate when discussing the topic of which sub-groups might have contributed what, and I’d much rather be right if I’m countering Racist McRaceface when he is talking about how much of a loser some brown skin group of people have been historically.
I wasn’t trying to say that we should be talking, specifically and only, about how big of a racist King is, and let’s all just rant about the nature of racism today.
It just seemed to be veering into a non-related direction, and at length, is all.
arresi @46:
It shouldn’t be; the device was invented by Gutenberg. If you mean woodblock printing, or movable type, then there shouldn’t be debate there either. Both Chinese.
Rob @53
Thanks, movable type was what I couldn’t remember.
Also, brett @47 and rq @50
Thanks. I had a professor ask King’s question once in class, and wasn’t able to answer it. I made a point afterwards of trying to have a ready list.
Can I take a moment to bitch about “Western civilization”? Western civilization apparently includes:
1. pre-Christian Greece and Italy, but not paganism, homosexual sex, or nudity in sports;
2. Judaism, but not (most) Jewish religious laws, taboos, holidays, or the Midrash, Talmud, and related ideas about the relation between scholarship and theology;
3. “Christendom,” but not the Catholic South or African-American theology;
4. the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but not secularism or science (seriously, I have never heard anyone proclaim the cultural importance of calculus, even though that was actually invented in Western Europe);
5. modern Japan, unless business, community, or scale is involved, in which case they’re East Asian; and
6. sometimes Norse paganism, but not the blood sacrifices.
(I think there ought to be some room for correcting historical inaccuracies in a thread at least partially about a really big historical inaccuracy, but, yeah, that went on for a while longer than it should have. Aren’t there open threads around here?)
brett @47
rq @50
Thanks. I had a professor ask King’s question once in class, and wasn’t able to answer it. I made a point afterwards of trying to have a ready list.
Can I take a moment to bitch about “Western civilization”? Western civilization apparently includes: pre-Christian Greece and Italy, but not paganism, homosexual sex, or nudity in sports; Judaism, but not (most) Jewish religious laws, taboos, holidays, or the Midrash, Talmud, and related ideas about the relation between scholarship and theology; “Christendom,” but not the Catholic South or African-American theology; the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but not secularism or science (seriously, I have never heard anyone proclaim the cultural importance of calculus, even though that was actually invented in Western Europe); modern Japan, unless business, community, or scale is involved, in which case they’re East Asian; and sometimes Norse paganism, but not the blood sacrifices.
I’m with tkreacher @ 52 – there ought to be some room for correcting historical inaccuracies in a thread at least partially about a really big historical inaccuracy, but, yeah, that went on for a while. Aren’t there open threads around here?
brett @47
rq @50
Thanks. I had a professor ask King’s question once in class, and wasn’t able to answer it. I made a point afterwards of trying to have a ready list.
Can I take a moment to complain about “Western civilization”? Western civilization apparently includes: pre-Christian Greece and Italy, but not paganism, homosexual sex, or nudity in sports; Judaism, but not (most) Jewish religious laws, taboos, holidays, or the Midrash, Talmud, and related ideas about the relation between scholarship and theology; “Christendom,” but not the Catholic South or African-American theology; the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but not secularism or science (seriously, I have never heard anyone proclaim the cultural importance of calculus, even though that was actually invented in Western Europe); modern Japan, unless business, community, or scale is involved, in which case they’re East Asian; and sometimes Norse paganism, but not the blood sacrifices.
I think it is actually quite relevant to discuss misappropriations and misrepresentations of history in this context. Particularly ones that might otherwise gel with prejudices we tend to hold.
The whole concept of “the Dark Ages” is a construction founded on belittling and demeaning particular groups of people and their contributions to our civilization. As is the well-worn Renaissance rhetoric of a brilliant “enlightenment” picking up classical values and overcoming “medieval” backwardness. These ideas are appealing to a lot of people, because they put us moderns in a privileged position. They are especially appealing to non-native Americans (who have no medieval history of their own), to atheists (who tend to belittle any contributions made by religious people) and to scientists (who tend to frame their own discipline as pre-eminent and distinctively modern). I think it valuable to question these prejudices. They aren’t so very different in kind from the ones our racist Republican is spouting, only in degree.
Indeed, I think we deserve better than to just plug the achievements of non-white people into this distorted narrative. A narrative that, at its heart, privileges and lionises the achievements of white men and particularly of classical writers and modern scientists. A narrative put about by those very people to cover themselves in glory. A narrative that insists that civilization actually is all about glorious golden ages and the titans who live through them, rather than existing on its own terms as a product of all human thought and ingenuity. We need to get away from great men and golden ages and see civlization as a constantly-evolving thing that draws on all kinds of wells for its development.
The fall of Rome in particular is vitally relevant to the topic at hand, because right-wing politicians actually use it to make points about the dangers of immigration on major television programmes (as I noted above). In the old-fashioned, racist narrative it marks the point at which “western civilization” was destroyed by letting too many of the barbarian other into its fold. Just listen to Boris Johnson’s 2006 documentaries on the subject for evidence that it has powerfully affected his views on Brexit and the role of immigration into Britain. Never mind that most of us Europeans are now descended from those “barbarian” immigrants, it stands as an example for modern anti-immigrant feeling to define itself by, and I don’t think that should go unchallenged.
Not that I am, for one moment, accusing anyone here of being anti-immigrant or anything like that. I’m just saying that questioning our inherited picture of history matters because our inherited prejudices aren’t always obvious and can be manipulated.
cartomancer
The use of the “Fall of Rome”narrative in contemporary immigration debates is an excellent point. And I definitely agree that the narrative around the medieval period is severely biased. And those biases do affect our perceptions of non-Western cultures as well: U.S. history textbooks frequently describe the Central and South American civilizations prior to Columbus, but pays relatively little attention to the cultures that actually lived in most of the U.S., presumably partially because they don’t look enough like a “great civilization.” And I know that popular culture ignored the African empires and cities partially because they weren’t in a “golden age” when the Europeans explorers finally went there. If Europeans had arrived a century earlier, they might have been more impressed with African ability.
That said, I don’t think acknowledging how much of the civilization we do have comes from non-whites is just “plugging them in” – Graeco-Roman civilization and their own accomplishments may have been overblown by the Renaissance, but the achievements of ancient Africa, China, and the Americas were undervalued or outright stolen. And calling attention to the inventions and ideas of non-whites in European societies is a necessary step towards understanding how civilizations connect and shape each other.
Pretty sure it wasn’t all great before the Roman empire fell, while it was falling, or just about any time or place except very recently in a few select locations for a tiny group of people. But maybe this is just another misleading thing we shouldn’t quibble about.
I would say that the context here does matter a little bit, although I guess some of it was derailing more than absolutely necessary to make the point (can’t really blame historians, that’s kind of what they do). What I mean here is that this is a blog about atheism (among other things), and you do often find views like raven’s among atheists. They can seem fairly compelling, and they’re not entirely wrong on all counts. If we’re going to place ourselves into this discussion today as atheists (and I guess inheritors/protectors/cheerleaders of whatever the Enlightenment and the modern sciences offer to civilization, but that’s a very dodgy assumption), then it is good to get our story straight and make it accurate. The problem isn’t just those Christians over there, who by the way have been doing it for a thousand years, and you can coherently distinguish that from “non-Christian” (or “non-Abrahamic”) thought in those times and places.
Someone versed in classical or ancient thought (which sometimes nearly exhausted the things there were to study) would often be called a “scholastic” or something similar. That sounds extremely vague to us these days (at least it does to me), but then it meant you were a member of a school — at certain points there were tangible schools with a teacher at a location, but eventually it was regarded more abstractly as a school of thought. If you were going to be getting some kind of formal education, it was at least implicit that your source materials probably traced back to a small and predictable set of sources, one of these ancient schools. This is just to point out how thoroughly indebted these “scholars” were to ancient Greeks and Romans, even in whatever you might call the Dark Ages. It’s not as if people were generally faced with some kind of a dilemma: either reading the Bible or related theological writings or else reading stuff by Greek or Roman pagans, but not both. People who were able to study these things at all almost always did both. And in fact, pagan sources weren’t generally (much less uniformly) more acceptable when it comes to things like race, nationality, gender and so forth.
So, if you were going to suggest that there must have been something in the water, don’t suggest that it was only Christianity. That’s not true. There was a lot of other shit in that water, and it’s not even clear how you could pick apart the Christian-flavored shitty bits from the other shitty bits. And if you’re going to tell me a nice story nowadays about how you have some of that clean Christianity-free water for sale, because that’s been the problem for lo these many years, there’s still a perfectly meaningful question to ask about whether any of that other shit is in there. If you feel like claiming that some group of people was fighting for centuries against “science” or “progress” of whatever type, then you could accurately say that the group consists of basically all people everywhere (which isn’t very satisfying, perhaps, but so it goes). There aren’t just a few bad actors who you can point at and blame for this, who were conspiring inside of a monastery or whatever. That whole civilization that King was praising was in on the act from the beginning, and the questions should be more about how we can change it instead of assuming that it’s something so precious that we have to keep intact at all costs.
Forget history; someone should remove everything currently designed or manufactured in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, etc. from Steve King’s life. That might impair his enjoyment of our advanced American civilization just a tad.
consciousness razor @60
I think there’s some research to suggest that Christianity’s focus on the soul and afterlife and misogyny were attributable to the Greek philosophers. IIRC, the first wasn’t native to Judaic thought or tradition, and the second only became a feature of the early Church as it started to mainstream. People certainly used Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to condemn women for centuries. So, yeah, Christianity wasn’t uniquely bad in those regards.
There was an interview/debate a while back, and I don’t remember most of it, but one of the subjects said something like, “Yes, but you’re a Christian atheist.” Which sounded ridiculous, initially, but in context, the speaker (a Jew?) meant that Christianity was the other guy’s dominant narrative – it described how he thought about religion, what he meant by God, which holidays he knew, even what he regarded as conventional morality and social mores. And I think there’s something important there. Beliefs don’t just come into a society and eradicate everything everyone there previously believed. They interact.
I may come back to the fascinating historical discussion (which I think is relevant, for the reasons cartomancer and consciousness razor give), but there’s another point worth making. While it’s perfactly correct to point out that non-European cultures have been responsible for many innovations that are important to our current way of life, it’s also important to stress that even if some cultures have produced more – even many more – of these innovations than others, this has no implications whatever for the innate cognitive abilities of peoples in those different cultures. This ought to be obvious even to the Steve Kings of this world, since the global centres of innovation, insofar as such a notion is valid at all, have shifted repeatedly – and not because of the migration of Aryan supermen.
arresi@62,
There were medieval times and places where questioning Aristotle put you in danger of a charge of heresy! It’s amusing to reflect on what he would have thought of his work being used to bolster an absurd barbarian superstition (as he would undoubtedly have considered it) such as Christianity.
Not really. There were multiple originations of the use of fibrous plants to make something to write on, but the process of breaking down such plants – or things made from them, such as rags – into their constituent fibres, adding water, then passing the liquid over a screen so it forms a sheet was only, AFAIK, invented once, in China, sometime before 100 BCE. There may possibly have been an independent invention in Mesoamerica, but definite evidence is lacking. Successive technical innovations in China, Central Asia, the Muslim world and Europe made paper a key material (perhaps the key material) of modernity.